6 ms·

Making programming masculine [pdf]

33 points by MartinMond 17y ago

spudlyo 17y ago
Title is disingenuous. I don't believe since Ava Lovelace that programming was ever female dominated. Even when the referenced Cosmo article was published, it was estimated that one in nine programmers were female. Even if reliable observers suggest that it was closer to 30 or even 50 percent, that's still not female dominated. Having said that, I've really enjoyed what I've so far read of this essay.
- scott_s 17y ago
  Sadly there are no numbers, but I had the impression that the all of the "programmers" for ENIAC were women - hired for a job that the machine designers didn't anticipate would be so intellectually rigorous.
  - spudlyo 17y ago
    I hadn't quite read that far in the essay before I made my comment. This is why it's good to read the entire thing before opening your mouth ;)
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  The title doesn't imply that programming was ever female dominated.
  - spudlyo 17y ago
    Title was edited, it previously did just that.
    - MartinMond 17y ago
      I submitted the original title. I choose the wording because of the following sentence in the conclusion that hit home for me: "a field that started out feminized was only gradually – and fitfully – made masculine."
pg 17y ago
The author may not realize this, but in the 1960s the word "programmer" did not have the meaning it does now. Software development was done by two different types of people working together: "systems analysts" who designed it, and "programmers" who translated their designs into code. What the systems analyst produced was very precise; it was pretty much a program written in a higher-level language than was then available. The programmer's job was to translate this program into Fortran or Cobol. So it's not only the female programmers of the 1960s who have disappeared, but the male ones as well. The word "programmer" still exists, but the job it described in the 1960s has mostly gone away. The female programmers weren't replaced by men, but by compilers.
- scott_s 17y ago
  My grandfather worked on a UNIVAC I that the Navy owned in the early '50s. We still have the manuals from it (binders of them - they are amazing). While looking through them on Thanksgiving, I found a reference to "automatic programming" in a marketing brochure. I knew it didn't mean what the term would imply now (to me, programs generated through some machine learning process). My best guess was that it referred to the compiler which would generate machine instructions from the assembly instructions. So I think the idea that "programming" was the lowest-level act feasible to instruct the machine what to do predated even the '60s. edit: I should have read the paper more carefully. The author directly addresses pg's points on page 10 by referencing the exact document I just did. His distinction is between "coders" and "programmers."
  - lmkg 17y ago
    If I recall, FORTRAN was originally described by IBM as an automatic code-generation program, not as a programming language. Probably because languages didn't exist at the time, and (as usual) no one had any idea what they had just created. It's actually kinda trippy to think of it this way, but they basically designed the compiler first and the language spec came about as a documentation of its function, rather than the other way around.
    - enf 17y ago
Tichy 17y ago
I don't think the cooking analogy is bad or sexist. Cooking is about the only daily activity that comes to mind where people follow a set of written instructions. As such it simply seems to be THE best analogy for explaining programming, no matter if told to a man or a woman. (I am male and I do cook on a regular basis). The only time I used it so far was when I explained programming to a man (not that many people actually want to know what programming is). If you know a better analogy, I would be interested to hear it. Another one that I would use to prove that everybody can program: giving directions on the street. It's basically programming an agent to reach a destination, even with loops ("while the park is on the right..."). Cooking still is better, because of the written instructions.
- scott_s 17y ago
  Indeed I think it is the best analogy, and I have an entire spiel involving how to bake billions of cupcakes with multiple ovens in multiple houses that covers most of the important concepts in high performance computing.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Sounds like fun, readable anywhere?
dkarl 17y ago
The ENIAC women would simply “set-up” the machine to perform these pre-determined plans: that this work would be turn out to dicult and to require radically innovative thinking was completely unanticipated. Underestimation of a task seems to be key in allowing women to succeed. Not only does it fool the gatekeepers, it also fools the women themselves. Put a mop bucket full of water in a typical woman's hand, and she'll lug it around as if it's nothing [EDIT: assuming she's into that kind of thing.] Hand her a dumbbell the same weight, and she'll wilt and clutch at it with her other hand. Take her backpacking in the mountains, and she'll prove herself ten times as strong as she would allow herself to be under a squat bar. Same thing in computing -- female office workers who can do wizardly things with spreadsheets and accounting systems often don't see themselves as having any aptitude for computing or programming. They see the IT help grunt who fixes their email login as being naturally much more gifted than them at "computer stuff." If they knew that what they were doing was basically computer programming, far fewer of them would develop any skill at it.
tjic 17y ago
I'm amused by the fact that it says "Draft copy - please do not circulate" ... and we're all reading it.
- scott_s 17y ago
  I noticed that too, but the author explicitly links to it from his papers section.
blacktastic 17y ago
This is a refreshing article. On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry. I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution. I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen). Sigh.
genderfree 17y ago
This is a refreshing article. On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry. I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution. I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen). Sigh.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Yes, the comments essentially discounting women programmers of the 1960s are, uh, infuriating. Further, I believe the women retained a good representation into the 1980s. In many ways I think it was de-skilling of programming itself that broke the trend. Essentially, being a programmer is no longer a career with a future, seriously. It's more like bike messengering than accounting - they work you to death, you get the cachet of industry excitement and then you get thrown away.
  - dkarl 17y ago
    It isn't really true that programming is "de-skilled." Entry-level programming may require nothing more than cleverness and knowledge of a language, but most programming jobs have an element of engineering to them. Not only that, programmers in many jobs have surprising latitude to design user interfaces, information architectures, and other elements that really "should" be left to experts, but which are left to programmers by the same mechanism -- underestimation of the task and underestimation of the influence of individual performance -- that created opportunities for women to program in the first place. Especially at a small startup, "mere" programmers are left to decide for themselves things that aren't considered vital enough for the "leaders" to pay attention to. And you know some of those things will end up being more vital than anyone expected. I think it would be more accurate to say that programming has been "de-institutionalized." By and large, programmers learn their craft outside of formal schools and training programs. In fact, it's very hard to get into programming through formal education (see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157) without also following the now-traditional way of hobby programming as well. So the selection process for becoming a programmer is not one that confers prestige. Being a Stanford graduate confers prestige. Being a better and more desired programmer than a Stanford CS graduate confers no prestige whatsoever except in the eyes of other programmers. People in fields where degrees are important, and where colleges are the gatekeepers, are seen as more well-rounded and more generally intelligent than people in fields where long private pursuit is more important than a degree. The fact that programming is within the grasp of any kid whose parents buy him a computer diminishes it in society's eyes. I think it also diminishes the career in women's eyes. The university-controlled career path in, say, chemistry, provides a built-in work-life balance and a shared experience with people in other fields. In programming, the coding virtuosity acquired by hours and hours of practice is overvalued and is often confused, especially by other programmers, with a programmer's overall ability. Yet this time is not officially recognized by educators and professionals. It is not discussed or accommodated. Musicians and athletes are expected to spend long hours practicing, but CS programs have no concept of programming "practice" in the sense of hours spent repetitively honing a skill. Programmers must sacrifice other parts of their lives in order to acquire this practice, and most who enter the field are happy to do so. Women feel like they can't compete unless they make the same sacrifices, and naturally, they don't like a field with a built-in bias against people who aren't obsessive. (In programming, that bias is obvious from the start. In academic research science, the bias emerges in graduate school and in the slog for tenure. Elizabeth Blackburn, who just won a Nobel Prize in medicine, said, "But many women, at the stage when they have done their training really want to think about family . . . and they just are very daunted by the career structure. Not by the science, in which they are doing really well." Blackburn's point is as valid in programming as it is in science: obsessiveness and exclusive dedication may be helpful and may be a common element in mythologies about great scientists, but it is far from a requirement for making outstanding contributions, and we lose a lot of talent by filtering out (intentionally or unintentionally) people who don't want to dedicate the whole of their being to their career.) In the time since I made the post linked above, I've been thinking about how to ameliorate this bias towards obsessiveness and the resulting distortion and loss of talent. I'm encouraged by the hours of repetitive practice that are taken for granted in music and athletics. I think programming could be made much more friendly to women by simply recognizing the importance of "practicing" programming in the same way that musicians practice. It is understood that a significant amount of a musician's time and effort must be dedicated to practice, and that this practice time must be balanced against instruction and theoretical study. Music buildings are full of practice rooms. The hours that a budding programmer spends coding should be recognized and labeled as practice. The time dedicated to it should be acknowledged. Computer science professors -- who certainly know better -- should stop pretending that their classroom curriculum is sufficient to produce skilled graduates. If the time spent practicing programming is acknowledged and accommodated the same way musical practice is, I think women (and, not insignificantly, men as well) will see software as profession where one can excel and also have a reasonable, balanced life.

33 points by MartinMond 17y ago

Title is disingenuous. I don't believe since Ava Lovelace that programming was ever female dominated. Even when the referenced Cosmo article was published, it was estimated that one in nine programmers were female. Even if reliable observers suggest that it was closer to 30 or even 50 percent, that's still not female dominated. Having said that, I've really enjoyed what I've so far read of this essay.

scott_s 17y ago
Sadly there are no numbers, but I had the impression that the all of the "programmers" for ENIAC were women - hired for a job that the machine designers didn't anticipate would be so intellectually rigorous.
- spudlyo 17y ago
  I hadn't quite read that far in the essay before I made my comment. This is why it's good to read the entire thing before opening your mouth ;)
joe_the_user 17y ago
The title doesn't imply that programming was ever female dominated.
- spudlyo 17y ago
  Title was edited, it previously did just that.
  - MartinMond 17y ago
    I submitted the original title. I choose the wording because of the following sentence in the conclusion that hit home for me: "a field that started out feminized was only gradually – and fitfully – made masculine."

pg 17y ago

The author may not realize this, but in the 1960s the word "programmer" did not have the meaning it does now. Software development was done by two different types of people working together: "systems analysts" who designed it, and "programmers" who translated their designs into code. What the systems analyst produced was very precise; it was pretty much a program written in a higher-level language than was then available. The programmer's job was to translate this program into Fortran or Cobol. So it's not only the female programmers of the 1960s who have disappeared, but the male ones as well. The word "programmer" still exists, but the job it described in the 1960s has mostly gone away. The female programmers weren't replaced by men, but by compilers.

scott_s 17y ago
My grandfather worked on a UNIVAC I that the Navy owned in the early '50s. We still have the manuals from it (binders of them - they are amazing). While looking through them on Thanksgiving, I found a reference to "automatic programming" in a marketing brochure. I knew it didn't mean what the term would imply now (to me, programs generated through some machine learning process). My best guess was that it referred to the compiler which would generate machine instructions from the assembly instructions. So I think the idea that "programming" was the lowest-level act feasible to instruct the machine what to do predated even the '60s. edit: I should have read the paper more carefully. The author directly addresses pg's points on page 10 by referencing the exact document I just did. His distinction is between "coders" and "programmers."
- lmkg 17y ago
  If I recall, FORTRAN was originally described by IBM as an automatic code-generation program, not as a programming language. Probably because languages didn't exist at the time, and (as usual) no one had any idea what they had just created. It's actually kinda trippy to think of it this way, but they basically designed the compiler first and the language spec came about as a documentation of its function, rather than the other way around.
  - enf 17y ago

Tichy 17y ago

I don't think the cooking analogy is bad or sexist. Cooking is about the only daily activity that comes to mind where people follow a set of written instructions. As such it simply seems to be THE best analogy for explaining programming, no matter if told to a man or a woman. (I am male and I do cook on a regular basis). The only time I used it so far was when I explained programming to a man (not that many people actually want to know what programming is). If you know a better analogy, I would be interested to hear it. Another one that I would use to prove that everybody can program: giving directions on the street. It's basically programming an agent to reach a destination, even with loops ("while the park is on the right..."). Cooking still is better, because of the written instructions.

scott_s 17y ago
Indeed I think it is the best analogy, and I have an entire spiel involving how to bake billions of cupcakes with multiple ovens in multiple houses that covers most of the important concepts in high performance computing.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Sounds like fun, readable anywhere?

dkarl 17y ago

The ENIAC women would simply “set-up” the machine to perform these pre-determined plans: that this work would be turn out to dicult and to require radically innovative thinking was completely unanticipated. Underestimation of a task seems to be key in allowing women to succeed. Not only does it fool the gatekeepers, it also fools the women themselves. Put a mop bucket full of water in a typical woman's hand, and she'll lug it around as if it's nothing [EDIT: assuming she's into that kind of thing.] Hand her a dumbbell the same weight, and she'll wilt and clutch at it with her other hand. Take her backpacking in the mountains, and she'll prove herself ten times as strong as she would allow herself to be under a squat bar. Same thing in computing -- female office workers who can do wizardly things with spreadsheets and accounting systems often don't see themselves as having any aptitude for computing or programming. They see the IT help grunt who fixes their email login as being naturally much more gifted than them at "computer stuff." If they knew that what they were doing was basically computer programming, far fewer of them would develop any skill at it.

tjic 17y ago

I'm amused by the fact that it says "Draft copy - please do not circulate" ... and we're all reading it.

scott_s 17y ago
I noticed that too, but the author explicitly links to it from his papers section.

blacktastic 17y ago

This is a refreshing article. On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry. I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution. I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen). Sigh.

genderfree 17y ago

joe_the_user 17y ago
Yes, the comments essentially discounting women programmers of the 1960s are, uh, infuriating. Further, I believe the women retained a good representation into the 1980s. In many ways I think it was de-skilling of programming itself that broke the trend. Essentially, being a programmer is no longer a career with a future, seriously. It's more like bike messengering than accounting - they work you to death, you get the cachet of industry excitement and then you get thrown away.
- dkarl 17y ago
  It isn't really true that programming is "de-skilled." Entry-level programming may require nothing more than cleverness and knowledge of a language, but most programming jobs have an element of engineering to them. Not only that, programmers in many jobs have surprising latitude to design user interfaces, information architectures, and other elements that really "should" be left to experts, but which are left to programmers by the same mechanism -- underestimation of the task and underestimation of the influence of individual performance -- that created opportunities for women to program in the first place. Especially at a small startup, "mere" programmers are left to decide for themselves things that aren't considered vital enough for the "leaders" to pay attention to. And you know some of those things will end up being more vital than anyone expected. I think it would be more accurate to say that programming has been "de-institutionalized." By and large, programmers learn their craft outside of formal schools and training programs. In fact, it's very hard to get into programming through formal education (see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157) without also following the now-traditional way of hobby programming as well. So the selection process for becoming a programmer is not one that confers prestige. Being a Stanford graduate confers prestige. Being a better and more desired programmer than a Stanford CS graduate confers no prestige whatsoever except in the eyes of other programmers. People in fields where degrees are important, and where colleges are the gatekeepers, are seen as more well-rounded and more generally intelligent than people in fields where long private pursuit is more important than a degree. The fact that programming is within the grasp of any kid whose parents buy him a computer diminishes it in society's eyes. I think it also diminishes the career in women's eyes. The university-controlled career path in, say, chemistry, provides a built-in work-life balance and a shared experience with people in other fields. In programming, the coding virtuosity acquired by hours and hours of practice is overvalued and is often confused, especially by other programmers, with a programmer's overall ability. Yet this time is not officially recognized by educators and professionals. It is not discussed or accommodated. Musicians and athletes are expected to spend long hours practicing, but CS programs have no concept of programming "practice" in the sense of hours spent repetitively honing a skill. Programmers must sacrifice other parts of their lives in order to acquire this practice, and most who enter the field are happy to do so. Women feel like they can't compete unless they make the same sacrifices, and naturally, they don't like a field with a built-in bias against people who aren't obsessive. (In programming, that bias is obvious from the start. In academic research science, the bias emerges in graduate school and in the slog for tenure. Elizabeth Blackburn, who just won a Nobel Prize in medicine, said, "But many women, at the stage when they have done their training really want to think about family . . . and they just are very daunted by the career structure. Not by the science, in which they are doing really well." Blackburn's point is as valid in programming as it is in science: obsessiveness and exclusive dedication may be helpful and may be a common element in mythologies about great scientists, but it is far from a requirement for making outstanding contributions, and we lose a lot of talent by filtering out (intentionally or unintentionally) people who don't want to dedicate the whole of their being to their career.) In the time since I made the post linked above, I've been thinking about how to ameliorate this bias towards obsessiveness and the resulting distortion and loss of talent. I'm encouraged by the hours of repetitive practice that are taken for granted in music and athletics. I think programming could be made much more friendly to women by simply recognizing the importance of "practicing" programming in the same way that musicians practice. It is understood that a significant amount of a musician's time and effort must be dedicated to practice, and that this practice time must be balanced against instruction and theoretical study. Music buildings are full of practice rooms. The hours that a budding programmer spends coding should be recognized and labeled as practice. The time dedicated to it should be acknowledged. Computer science professors -- who certainly know better -- should stop pretending that their classroom curriculum is sufficient to produce skilled graduates. If the time spent practicing programming is acknowledged and accommodated the same way musical practice is, I think women (and, not insignificantly, men as well) will see software as profession where one can excel and also have a reasonable, balanced life.