An 80s Girl Talks About Computers: A Reminiscence

The author's experience strongly echoes my mother's experience getting a chemistry masters in the 1960s. One of her professors outright told her at the beginning of the semester that she would not do well in the sciences because she was a woman. That semester she actually tutored a group of men who were in the class, and all of those men received higher grades than her (she got a C-). These men told my mother they would help her fight the professor to get the grade she deserved, but she let it go.

A few years later, my mother met other women who had the same professor and had the same stories to tell about him. One of those women told my mother, "Because no one is fighting him, he thinks he can just keep doing it." For the next forty years, my mother never passed up another fight, excelled in the sciences, and is a respected professor of nursing today in her 70s giving talks around the globe.

When I attended the same university in the 90s, I told some friends about my mother's experience. They laughed and said it couldn't be the same guy, but their professor of chemistry announced on the first day that women were inherently incapable of doing well in his class. I'm thankful that today such a statement would get recorded, go viral online, and force dinosaurs like that into early retirement.

Her key point is about her advanced math teacher. "My trig teacher was a legend among the college-bound kids in my school. He’d been there forever. He was generous and big-hearted [...] The other thing he liked to tell us, though, was that girls shouldn’t bother taking math, because we were just going to be housewives anyway. It wasn’t just every once in a while, either; he said it at the beginning of the year, he tossed it into lectures occasionally, he said it when he handed back failed tests."

I've heard this from a number of other women: an influential, well respected person promoted a divisive opinion among teens for a long time. The effect was subtle and perhaps unintentional, but pervasive; young women decided they were not smart enough or strong enough to work in the field they wanted.

This illustrates to me how important it is to send the right message to kids. Subtle divisiveness is dangerous among kids and teens.

I hazard a guess that the author is somewhat atypical for an 80s girl. She certainly seemed to be comfortable with a lot of activities that would draw scorn and condemnation from the popular kids in the 80s. Not giving in to peer pressure is very hard for teenagers. I don't know for certain, but I suspect it's even harder for girls than boys. Boys seem more willing to go it alone if they have to.

This is mostly from my own life experience as a computer nerd during the late 80s and early 90s. You get shunned by anybody even remotely popular. This is really tough during middle school since you become bully bait but perseverance pays off in the end. In some ways I had it easier since I lived in a neighborhood that had no kids my age (or within 3 year of my age), so being a loner and an outcast wasn't a new situation.

A good read. Not sure about the conclusion.

My memory of that time in the UK was that being "into" computers marked you as a greasy-haired "Anorak" (maybe that translates to "Dirty Mac", in American. I suppose the slur is based on stereotyping computer enthusiasts who would often peruse computer magazines at the newsagent, rather like some other "enthusiasts" who might be browsing other, usually graphic, magazines, possibly wearing a "Mac").

Though the term is "Nerd", now, and it's become possibly respectable, in those times, especially in high school, it really wasn't cool at at all, and seemed to attract more derision that being into StartTrek or even D&D.

I don't think the majority of girls wanted to be seen dead in such circles, though not because of "bro" culture, far from it. girls were more than welcome.

Possibly things have changed now, I don't know, but I'll note also that back then there didn't seem to be much discussion of gender ratios in either industry or in education.

I don't know if that's because of heightened general awareness now, or simply that anything IT has become even more lucrative, and (probably as a result) much cooler. What is the gender ratio in coal mining?

I graduated high school in 1984, and I can't remember one girl in junior high or high school that was interested in computers in any way, although both of the areas with computers that were set up in classrooms were put there by female teachers. I don't know if the lack of interest was due to teachers like the author had (although we had no computer-related classes in high school), if it was a social thing, or if there just wasn't interest there to begin with. I was heads-down learning to program and soaking up information - I wasn't attuned to others around me. I didn't understand why everyone else wasn't this passionate about it. Obviously, social interaction wasn't my strong suit going through school.

I had access to TRS-80 Level I's, and Apple ][e's. My parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I purchased an assembler cartridge and was off to the races. I look back fondly as that fog of ignorance slowly lifted and I realized what these incredible machines could do.

I remember maybe two or three women in my computer science classes in college. That changed when I got my first job (in a university setting, where I'm still employed). Developers here are roughly 60/40 male/female. System admins and networking personnel skew wildly male.

I found this an interesting read. The higher level math teacher in my high school was a woman and she also taught the nascent "computer" class (which was BASIC programming on Teletypes that dialed in at 110 Baud to a mainframe)

I found myself in friendly competition with women in both Algebra II and Calculus. Our high school produced a number of women engineers and computer science majors as well.

Is that correlation ? causation? Or is it just modelling? I don't know. I watched my kids grow up and saw that they took cues about what they were expected to be able to do from the environment around them. I don't think there is much debate that people try to live up to the expectations put on them by people they look up to.

So to the extent that her message is "We should mindfully decide to have expectations that anyone, regardless of gender, can excel in STEM." I really can't see any harm in that.

> The other thing he liked to tell us, though, was that girls shouldn’t bother taking math, because we were just going to be housewives anyway.

This, this this. US society took a socially conservative swing in the 80s as peak women's lib began erroding.

To be honest, whilst I don't want to take anything away from the author's story, and I accept that different social expectations would've played a big part, I'd suspect that the main difference was because of gaming culture.

Perhaps some have forgotten, but the gateway drug for many people getting into computers was games, especially in the 80s. Gaming culture at the time was heavily skewed towards boys and young men. I'm sure there were plenty of girls and women who played games too, but on average it seemed to be more of a male activity. Current gaming culture is much more diverse, so don't get things twisted, I'm talking about how things were back then. I think if you can explain the major influences on the gamer diversity landscape back then you can mostly explain the computing diversity landscape right now.

That’s a very interesting hypothesis. It needs a little expansion to address the reported “suddenly in 1984” aspect. I wonder if, around that time, there was a change in many colleges that required more advanced math (or some other topic) where HS teacher biases are stronger (or more impactful). Very neat read.

>I listened to (and played) jazz, often the kind inspired by Lord of the Rings

I want to know more about this part.

This articles touches on an interesting subject, whether female-targeted advertising and gender-based 'cultural' events are really the best way to recruit more women - or the lack of which is why the divide exists in the first place.

There's always this implied assumption, such as in the Planet Money podcast she referenced, that the cause of the problem is obvious and known. But if it was that simple we would have likely made a lot more progress with the issue by now.

Doesn't speak to gender bias, but just plain access to computers was a big factor in the 80's. Non technical parents might be hard to talk into the expense. Among my largish circle of friends, only 2 of us had home computers. And, if your high school had a nice system with various development environments (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc), you had options even those with home computers didn't.

Is it bothering anyone else that the article itself has no apostrophe in the title, and the HN post added one in the wrong place?

From about 1983 onwards, home computers were commonplace in the UK. This was mainly the Sinclair Spectrum (a device that, perhaps, caused a mini industrial revolution in the UK by teaching a generation how to code (and how to hack hardware)), with a smattering of Acorns, BBC Micros (also an Acorn, really) and Commodore 64s.

I learned Z80 assembler and built some add-on boards on a Spectrum and never looked back.

This article makes it even more interesting that math majors have risen in terms of female distribution at the same time CS has dropped.

The author discusses how people saying "math isn't for girls" was part of why she didn't go into a computational field.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion in the comments here of how women are discouraged from entering tech by the assertion and defense of the notion that "women are biologically unsuited for software development".

Nothing about computers back then was social. There was no social component. Programs done by yourself, at a keypunch. Output read by yourself. Hard to study in groups. You can't really have a debate about the sign bit.

Pre-wed majors were social.. Comp sci was not