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NPR: '80s ads are responsible for the lack of women coders

• VLM 12y ago
  google image search for "computer science unemployment" find a graph from creativeclass.com, numerically integrate the negative unemployment rate, there's your graph of women in CS. Every downsized CS grad leads to permanent decline in female enrollment, as near as I can see. Men are stupid and keep signing up no matter how bad the market is, but women permanently stop signing up every time unemployment spikes. Looks like a big spike coming our way soon, will be interesting to see in a couple years if there's a corresponding big permanent decline of female programmers. That's one way to experimentally test the theoretical model...
  • pjc50 12y ago
    Does this apply to other professional job markets?
    • gmarx 12y ago
      I read an article/opinion piece a few years ago that posited the reason there are fewer female scientists is because scientist is, on average, a bad choice for a career. The author claimed that contrary to popular opinion, this was just a case of women making more rational choices.
• Torgo 12y ago
  A while back I went back and watched a bunch of commodore 64 commercials from my childhood on Youtube and was surprised to see that they almost all included girls. If that was an outlier, that's too bad.