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Comment by zappo2938 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think in the male dominated world of engineering in the middle part of the 20th century that they considering programming to not be a serious discipline in engineering lead to women being hired in positions they would not have if programming carried higher prestige? If so what does this tell us about the contributions made by women like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers? The issue of men dominating software engineering today isn't about talent or potential, but likely grounded in sexism. If you consider hiring women you double your potential labor pool.

(If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?)

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Yes, it was considered to be something like secretarial work. It took a long time for there to be a real appreciation for what programming was going to be like.

The contributions of Hamilton and Hopper during that era suggests to me that when things are new, they are undervalued, and that undervalued professions and undervalued people have a way of finding each other and doing great things.

Absolutely they considered programming to be not as serious. There's a great book called Digital Apollo by David Mindell[1] that talks about the creation of the Apollo Guidance Computer.

One of the stories is of a male manager who, after being put in charge of a team of software developers, asks his wife not to tell any of their friends he was managing a software team.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spacefli...

Actually, it was his wife who asked him (as a joke).

I think the primary reason may have been that before the advent of stored-program digital computers, vast arrays of people with mechanical calculators were used for computational tasks. When the first digital computers came, the job was still sufficiently easy that the skills were easily transferable - the first electronic digital machines were glorified calculators. Everyone thought that making programs would be trivial so "clerical" people were used. Only when the complexity of software started increasing the scale of the problem became apparent, and a new field was born. And the newly-trained young people who came into a booming field came with a different demographics. The job description changed significantly, it's not (only!) that the same job was suddenly usurped by male applicants.

> (If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?)

Generally, any comment or story on HN that suggests the presence of sexism in the world of software gets downvoted/flagged. Your account is almost a year old so I'm surprised you didn't know this. :)

During the same period in time that women dominated the programming profession, men dominated the teacher profession. Now those two professions has switched places.

Should we just say that all the sexist women went to the teacher profession and pushed out the men, and all the sexist men went to the programming profession and pushed out the women? One thing seem for sure, only recruiting from half the population seem to cause a problem for both the teacher and programming profession.

You know it might be that being a good programmer is not necessarily moored to sex.

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