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In the Eastern Bloc countries nobody bothered to market computers, for many reasons including closed off markets and economical disasters. They also valued gend

In the Eastern Bloc countries nobody bothered to market computers, for many reasons including closed off markets and economical disasters. They also valued gender equality a lot. But the end result was absolute the same - massive male domination in everything computer-related. So i's not marketing.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
Could it be the operating systems or the UI? There are fewer choices nowadays you know. At least one person I know completely lost interest in the field because of the switch from DOS to Win 3.1.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  GUI lived alongside with keyboard-based text UIs for most of 90-s here. Actually it was women who stick to Norton Commander lookalikes for many years. I still don't think it made any gender-balance difference.
pXMzR2A 12y ago
> So i[t]'s not marketing. The article seems to agree, since the underlying reason is attributed to institutionalized sexism in the mainstream culture.
byEngineer 12y ago
Grew up with Atari 800xl in 1980s in communistic Poland and confirm the same. It is quite obvious what happened but first what I really don't like about the article: Object ovation of women. You have "agents" who decide for themselves -- men -- and objects who need to be told/encouraged or have stuff explained as otherwise they will apparently not understand why they should study CS. Or have mammography ( when was the last time you seen an ad explaining men to have prostate checked? ), participate in politics, etc? You don't tell agents what to do. Agents take action by the definition of being an agent. Objects on the other hand need to be told. Feminism is objectifying women this way. And explanation of why not these many women are in the CS percentage wise today as in 1984? Easy. As CS became very popular instead of being highly scientific niche subordinate to mathematics department, it just became as any other engineering department - overflown with men. Btw, I studied English language for my Masters. Hihhly recommended : male/female ratio 1 to 7. 😉 And no, there are no articles encouraging men to take foreign languages as their University Major. As we are not objectifying them as feminists are objectifying women. We know that advising agents would be inappropriate. But if you want to spend 4 or 5 years with chicks around you -- go study foreign language. And you can still pick up programming after partying with them for five years 😉
maddening 12y ago
I talked with some of my female friend who were studying CS, and asked them why they many of them gave up on programming and moved on to management or so other non-technical position. The answer was that programming was boring and exhausting. From what I understand being code monkey who spends 40 hours a week debugging, writing crap code and checking tests with the most repetitive and non-creative manner doesn't gave them as much sense of an achievement as it gives to some men. Hell, I have doing that kind of job and only push on due to money and fact that 95% jobs in the area looks exactly like that. (And the rest 5% requires you tho know right people.) I would say that there is relatively little of masochist women who would want to debug that race condition hell in C++/Java. There you have to endure a lot of frustration before reaching a (short) moment of satisfaction. On the other hand in some Rails startups that I know, where effect of your work was immediate and one didn't felt that she was hitting the wall all the time there was a lot more of girl programmers - about a half of the team. But there are very few of such startups in my neighborhood. All in all I've got more men around. TL;DL - women are less of a masochist when it comes to frustrating jobs.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago

Could it be the operating systems or the UI? There are fewer choices nowadays you know. At least one person I know completely lost interest in the field because of the switch from DOS to Win 3.1.

guard-of-terra 12y ago
GUI lived alongside with keyboard-based text UIs for most of 90-s here. Actually it was women who stick to Norton Commander lookalikes for many years. I still don't think it made any gender-balance difference.

pXMzR2A 12y ago

> So i[t]'s not marketing. The article seems to agree, since the underlying reason is attributed to institutionalized sexism in the mainstream culture.

byEngineer 12y ago

Grew up with Atari 800xl in 1980s in communistic Poland and confirm the same. It is quite obvious what happened but first what I really don't like about the article: Object ovation of women. You have "agents" who decide for themselves -- men -- and objects who need to be told/encouraged or have stuff explained as otherwise they will apparently not understand why they should study CS. Or have mammography ( when was the last time you seen an ad explaining men to have prostate checked? ), participate in politics, etc? You don't tell agents what to do. Agents take action by the definition of being an agent. Objects on the other hand need to be told. Feminism is objectifying women this way. And explanation of why not these many women are in the CS percentage wise today as in 1984? Easy. As CS became very popular instead of being highly scientific niche subordinate to mathematics department, it just became as any other engineering department - overflown with men. Btw, I studied English language for my Masters. Hihhly recommended : male/female ratio 1 to 7. 😉 And no, there are no articles encouraging men to take foreign languages as their University Major. As we are not objectifying them as feminists are objectifying women. We know that advising agents would be inappropriate. But if you want to spend 4 or 5 years with chicks around you -- go study foreign language. And you can still pick up programming after partying with them for five years 😉

maddening 12y ago

I talked with some of my female friend who were studying CS, and asked them why they many of them gave up on programming and moved on to management or so other non-technical position. The answer was that programming was boring and exhausting. From what I understand being code monkey who spends 40 hours a week debugging, writing crap code and checking tests with the most repetitive and non-creative manner doesn't gave them as much sense of an achievement as it gives to some men. Hell, I have doing that kind of job and only push on due to money and fact that 95% jobs in the area looks exactly like that. (And the rest 5% requires you tho know right people.) I would say that there is relatively little of masochist women who would want to debug that race condition hell in C++/Java. There you have to endure a lot of frustration before reaching a (short) moment of satisfaction. On the other hand in some Rails startups that I know, where effect of your work was immediate and one didn't felt that she was hitting the wall all the time there was a lot more of girl programmers - about a half of the team. But there are very few of such startups in my neighborhood. All in all I've got more men around. TL;DL - women are less of a masochist when it comes to frustrating jobs.