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Comment by Practicality | Hacker News Reader

Nothing that went from female to male?

Seems to be a few as other comments have pointed out. But the female labour-force participation rate at the start of the dataset would make it difficult for individual job categories to switch from majority female to male over this particular time span.

>Between 1950 and 2015, there were 82 occupations out of 459 that flipped from male to female and/or female to male. Out of the 82, 72 shifted from male to female majority. There were 28 occupations that shifted from majority female to male.

Programmers and computer operators did, but I can't find it in the page.

"Computer" used to be a person crunching numbers using slide rules and mechanical calculators and it was an overwhelmingly female profession. When machines appeared, the operators were predominantly the same personnel that were doing it by hand earlier.

Of the software related occupations it lists, they don't seem to go before the 1970's. This is much too late to see that trend.

They have "Software Developers, Applications and Systems Software" and "Computer Programmers." The latter goes back to 1970. However, I'm really not sure if there's supposed to be a difference between the two.

"Computer Programmers" is there but looks like it has always been dominated by men.

Does the data set go all the way to the 50s for that profession?

There isn't a lot written about that time. So my understanding could be incorrect. But as far as I know, back in the 40s/50s, programmer meant something different and very specific than what people today might mean. Basically, a programmer would have all the algorithms and pseudocode written and chosen by someone else (a man), and your job as programmer was to translate (for pseudocode) or transcribe (when provided more direct instructions) that into the computer.

Even this was not easy though - programmers may have had to debug the pseudocode or a broken computer (not nearly as reliable as our modern ones). Once it was revealed it wasn't a straightforward process, men took over. My understanding is that this happened relatively quickly - in the 50s or 60s.

But, still, it was a job most people on here probably wouldn't care for.

If anyone has any good books on this subject, I would love some recommendations.

It's listed as "Computer Scientists and Systems Analysts/Network systems Analysts/Web Developers" and their dataset starts in 1970.

Their dataset shows it always being a male field - in fact, in 1970, it's even more male than now in their dataset. It shows a rise of women from '70 to '90, and then flat until today.

Since the launch of personal computers (the Altair in '71) was supposed to be the catalyst of the change of programming into a male field, I'm suprised to see the data directly contradicting that.

Perhaps it reflects a difference in job titles - "computer scientists" vs "programmers" if programming (the women's work) was titled separately because it was considered a more menial job.

The usual story (as told in Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over") has the change earlier than that. He says in the late 1940s to early 1950s lots of women were hired for "coding" positions, which at the time was seen as a a fairly unskilled, clerical work. In the 1950s, the division between high-level "programmers" and route "coders" disappeared, leaving just programmer-coders who did both, and as a result there was quite a few female programmers. Then in the 1960s the computer industry grew dramatically, but at the same time the image of what a programmer was, and what kind of characteristics made you a good programmer, also shifted a lot, and by the end of the 1960s it had become a very male field.

The personal computer revolution is usually mentioned in connection with a different trend. Throughout the 70s the proportion of female computer science majors was steadily climbing, then somewhere around 1984 this trend broke [1]. It's often said that this has something to do with video games becoming popular toys.

[1] https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2008/11/declining-number-of-wome...

From click the random button for a while, a lot food food-related jobs have become more male. Chefs and Cooks for example.

Tour and Travel Guides is one of them.

I basically went to the circles thing in the middle and started moving my mouse around till I found one that I thought might have been female dominated in the past, then I checked it in the box below.

Would be nice to get the data though.

I was wondering the same thing. "Also the Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders" seems to be more in the female to male category and not fluctuating category.

They have a selection of ones fluctuating.

I'd be surprised if you would find any job typically female since 50s other than perhaps being a housekeeper and child care.

> I'd be surprised if you would find any job typically female since 50s other than perhaps being a housekeeper and child care.

All still more than 70% female:

Elementary school teacher

Flight attendant

Registered nurses, also vocational nurses

Wait Staff

Occupational Therapists

Social workers and mental health counselors are overwhelmingly female (and white.)

Look for jobs in the service industry. Many of them used to be nearly 100% female and are now 50-50

The text says there were a few but they're not called out.

Gaming Services Workers

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