The First Women in Tech Didn’t Leave, Men Pushed Them Out
wsj.com
wsj.com
EDIT: As far as I know - people like Grace Hopper never got out (also US vs UK and Private vs Government and/or Military jobs, as examples, confound that stats)
At https://youtu.be/WTLJ7saIV3o?t=2198 you can see the advertisement "This typist can control your invoicing, stock records and sales statistics all at once ... electronically, but not without help from Susie her computer."
Hicks then says that ad copy goes on to describe the types of programming this typist will be doing, "but she's still just a typist, not a programmer."
I therefore believe the proponents argument isn't that they themselves conflate the two, but that (British) computing in the 1960s did the conflation.
As for Adm. Hopper, yes, certainly some women stayed in the field. But then there's pictures like https://youtu.be/WTLJ7saIV3o?t=999 where a woman in her 20s or 30s has a "retirement" party, because she's getting married, so has to leave the workforce - which could be compulsory or coerced.
Then once it was realized that programming was more than a clerical task, women were more and more forced out because it was expected that women were going to leave once they got married.
My formative adult years, at the beginning of my career, were spent in Japan, where every female was expected to get married and get out by the age of 28-or-so.
I have no opinion or comment on whether that is good or bad for the Japanese men and women in their own society.
But after that, I got to the US, and most of the women that I met in "my ranks" of career maturity were definitely very capable - and in it for the long haul. Which is to say: I've never seen the winnowing process up-close-and-personal.
I'm guessing that something happens between the ages of 20 and 35? Or maybe less women join in the US in the first place? I don't know. But I think that if we are going to explore what's going on - we're going to have to go upstream of what most of these types of pieces are looking at...
> Then once it was realized that programming was more than a clerical task, women were more and more forced out because it was expected that women were going to leave once they got married.
That's very interesting if it is true. I'll have to dig into this a bit.
EDIT: I am a male, if that wasn't obvious.
The 1980s was the peak time for women entering professional software development, at least as measured by the percentage of women vs. men receiving a BS in computer science. It was 37% in 1984/1985, says https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/it-careers/wom... , while in 2010 it was 18%.
Those women who graduated in 1985 at 22 are about 55 years old now. This puts them as slightly older than you, but close enough that they would still be part of "your ranks."
I point this out because if you base things on your experience then you should realize that your experience comes from working with an unusual cohort.
As you say, there is a US/UK difference. The speaker I pointed to said that the differences in gender expectations were stronger in the UK than in the US, and that part of those expectations was rooted in imperialism.
> your experience comes from working with an unusual cohort.
How so? I mean - you've got me pegged, but why is it unusual?
> that part of those expectations was rooted in imperialism.
Does that follow?
Or are you asking me why the 1980s was different than the 10 years before and after? For that I can only at best conjecture.
Traditionally, mathematically inclined women studied mathematics, with thoughts to being a math teacher. Grace Hopper got her PhD in math and taught mathematics at Vasser, for example. Katherine G. Johnson, of "Hidden Figures" fame, first started as a teacher before becoming a research mathematician.
Traditionally, businessmen had women working as secretaries, and it was the women who learned to type. Two of the many exceptions include newspaper writers and army clerks, but in general typing was feminizing.
That's why many of the first women in computing came from a math background, and did the typing=programming work.
(Going back to your original comment, it really was seen that programming was little different than typing. Do you remember Simonyi's meta-programming concept, which he tried to implement at Microsoft? Wikipedia quotes Cringely "the metaprogrammer was the designer, decision maker, and communication controller in a software development group.... individual progammers were allowed to make no design decisions about the project. All they did was write the code as described by the metaprogrammer.... A programmer with a problem or a question would take it to the metaprogrammer, who could come up with an answer or transfer the question to another programmer..." This sort of programmer is little more than a typist, and I think in the 1970s many people thought that an analyst could figure out the grand plan, drawn up with architecture-like flow charts, at which point it became little more than a typing project to convert it into software.)
The 1960s and 1970s was the big struggle for woman's rights; in the workplace, in the home, and in general. By the 1980s it was socially acceptable for women to have a career. (As compared to going to college to get an M.R.S. degree - an old phrase I didn't learn until about 10 years ago.)
But still in an era when using a keyboard was generally considered secretarial work, and hence woman's work, so not as attractive to men.
It was also just at the start of the microcomputer era, so men and women graduating with a CS degree in 1985 were unlikely to have used a computer at all before going to college.
While those in later years may have had an Apple ][ or TRS-80 while still kids. And unfortunately, those microcomputers fit into all sorts of cultural biases. As one example, girls are supposed to be social, while it's okay for boys to be in their computers for hours.
Honestly though, there's a lot on that topic, and I can't begin to do it justice. I just wanted to explain enough so you might get a sense that your cohort might not be representative.
As for "imperialism", I didn't really understand Hicks' argument from interview I linked to. I assume I would need to read the book to understand.
Hmmm. Thank you. I will think on this and do some research on this.
How so?
While I've read a few papers on the topic, this is not a subject I know well enough to even remember what those papers were. Instead, I can point you do a Google Scholar search, for "gender stereotype microcomputer".
The first with a free PDF link is http://education.msu.edu/cepse/mqm/documents/MQMPrelimArticl... . It has a two page review of the literature, with more examples.
I used "microcomputer" in the search, which will mostly return hits from the 1980s and 1990s. That paper was from 1997. A search for "gender differences computer programming", limited to the last few years, found https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4323745/ from 2015:
"However, it is clear from a large body of scientific research that there are significant social barriers to women’s entry into computer science and engineering that preclude women from being able to make a truly “free” choice (Ceci et al., 2009). Here we analyze those barriers and what can be done about them."
When I got engaged, I didn't really talk about it -- they had stopped replacing engineers who left the company and I knew they were going through a rough patch, financially, and it seemed like it would be a bad thing to bring up. The cat was out of the bag when I requested vacation for a honeymoon. The next calendar month, I was let go (they did it so that I would get insurance through the rest of the month). The HR person (the only other woman in the company) actually said "Now you have more time to plan your wedding" and "You still have your husband's salary"
Maybe she didn't realize what she said was questionable, maybe she figured they were giving me a good severance package so it didn't matter (not like I could turn around and sue them), but it was still upsetting.
My husband is a social worker who only makes $40k/year, and we live in a city with a high cost of living. So, not a great consolation. Fortunately, in addition to severance, my direct manager was apologetic and gave me a great review, and I was able to find a new job with a 40% raise within two weeks -- even while "planning my wedding"! (Also, the old company's doing fine now, judging from LinkedIn)
But yes, women often do get winnowed out, even today. At my company, we had to decide who to let go in a remote office and one of my co-workers made the comment "so and so has a family to support." I talked to him about it later and he acknowledged that I made a good point, and he hadn't thought about it like that.
But that's the thing -- when managers are trying to "do the right thing" they can often be reluctant to let go of men who they perceive as breadwinners, and women are sometimes seen as making "extra income" for their families. They may view married women as needing the job less than a single woman or a married man. It may or may not even a conscious thing, and it may happen with less frequency today, but it's still occasionally a problem.
On another note: It's also a problem (IMO, a larger one) that women tend to drop out of the workforce on their own accord during the ages of 20-35, when they have children. My husband and I are trying for a family so I'm currently facing this issue, and my husband plans to quit his job and stay home with the kids while I go back after maternity leave.
I admit, it would be a lot easier if we could just go with the social flow and the genders were reversed here. People would automatically know that I was the male breadwinner, I'd have a wife at home like most other men with families in the company, I wouldn't have to take three months of for biological reasons. But I LOVE my career, and it is what it is. We'll figure it out, but I understand why a lot of women don't want to, or may be dissuaded from putting themselves in that situation early in their careers/relationships altogether.
At the same time, because most kids were socially raised in communal kindergartens, loneliness and extreme introversion was less of an issue, since most acquired some social skills at an early age. I never thought women are expected to stay at home, until I learned about that in a US college.
Is it really necessary to dig out some skeletons and create some controversy where there is none.
I also don't understand what controversy you think is being created. We all knew that women were forced out of the field in the 1960s and 1970s, so that isn't controversial, and we know that the percentage of women in the computing industry is still not back to what it use to be.
I didn't, however, know the details of why that happened. Hicks' recent talk for the Computer History Museum helped me understand just how strong the cultural reasons were in that era against women having managerial positions over men in that era, and how the presumption that women would leave once getting marriage collided with the increasing professionalization of the field to help get women kicked out.
Even if times are great for women now, surely it's important to know some of the history of when it wasn't great? As an analogy, in school we learned about poor working and food safety conditions at the start of the Progressive Era, in order to understand the impact of muckrackers like Ida M. Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, and legal actions like the split-up of Standard Oil and creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act. If we don't know how things were, we don't understand why anti-trust and food protections laws are still on the books.
That said, the WSJ article is pay-walled. The introduction makes me think it's to do with Hick's new book "Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing".
It might instead cover something else, and I'm simply out of the loop.
Quoting an analysis from the past, saying situation is still the same in top tech companies and implying that current situation is due to "men pushing women out" . He even quotes an internal google memo that says " women overall are biologically less suited to programming" as an example of men today bent on pushing women out. Hope you see the controversy part.
Surely you can see this article is not purely historical curiosity and not at all like an article about history of food safety conditions.
This is not due to "an analysis from the past" but to a recent analysis of the past. Hicks' book just came out.
What do you mean by "still the same"? Hicks describes situations in the 1960s and 1970s which don't exist now, like women being forced out the company if they get married, having babies in secret so they don't get fired, and managers refusing to structure things so that men work under women.
Clearly that's not "still the same" in modern work environments, and Mims isn't trying to say those conditions are the same. It seems he's saying that there's still a problem with sexism in the computer industry. I don't think that's controversial, and it's not incompatible with your statement that it's the best time to be a women in this industry.
The most controversial point seems to be the statement that "simply educating more women and minorities to be engineers won’t solve the problem" - an argument that the new historical study supports.
What is the skeleton that should not be dug up?
Thats precisely what is controversial. Infact, 'sexism in the computer industry' is one the most controversial topic on HN. Why do you think this article getting flipped between flagged/unflagged status if its not controversial.
I agree that its still a problem, controversial part is this, sexists are a problem not "men".
> an argument that the new historical study supports.
But you say this "Mims isn't trying to say those conditions are the same." if conditions aren't they same how does the study support it?
You are saying variables for the experiment aren't the same but experiment will yield the same results regardless.
What is the non-controversial topic you think was raised/created by this piece, which it should not have done?
If I understand your last comment, you would be happier with the title "The First Women in Tech Didn't Leave, Sexist Men Pushed Them Out"?
That somehow seems worse.
Saying "Sexists" or "Sexist People" would be less correct, as sexist women - and certainly there were many - didn't have the managerial power to do the pushing in the British computing field during the 1960s and 1970s.
Why?
> What is the non-controversial topic you think was raised/created by this piece, which it should not have done?
I think I already addressed this with my last comment. Saying historical context is still true and implying solutions won't work because of something that happened decades ago.
> simply educating more women and minorities to be engineers won’t solve the problem - an argument that the new historical study supports.
> Mims isn't trying to say those conditions are the same.
Don't those statements contradict each other?
I really don't care to discuss it any more. I found the underlying historical research quite interesting and insightful. While your original comment, even after I finally was able to read the article, made it sound like you objected to the "digging up of skeletons" that Hicks did.
I think it's instead that you disagree with the shallow interpretation that some WSJ commenter made. shrug. Okay, great. I still think it's worthwhile to dig up skeletons.
> Don't those statements contradict each other?
No. "It's the best time ever to be a Native American", because (for example) the US government no longer forces them to send their children to Indian schools where they aren't allowed to speak their language. But it's still not great to be a Native American compared to other peoples, for a large number of metrics.
ok i understand. thanks for engaging.