Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggyb | Hacker News Reader

What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.

There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business.

Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history.

As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened.

[0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality

>Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history.

That's largely bullshit.

The position of 'programmer' today would be that of a systems architect from 1960. The position of 'programmer' of 1960 is the linker/assembler program of today. The jobs where women used to be a majority of the staff were simply automated away.

Before you cry sexism the position of CNC programmer, a largely male dominated profession, has suffered from the same. With the job going from being a hugely skilled profession in the 1960s to being something you press a button in a cam package, with the pay dropping correspondingly from the 60s to today.

That’s all based on the potentially dangerous assumption that the majority of women were working in now obsolete jobs. Your post also implies that those same women weren’t qualified to work other jobs even after their old jobs were retired.

I would also say that the assumption isn’t entirely correct based on the percentage of CS graduates that were female around that time compared to today. Maybe these early women in tech could transfer to other positions but got rejected on application because of biases among employers?

Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code, mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation (I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like.

If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.

> If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s

I agree with your points, but I wonder if looking at CS won’t reveal the scope or timing of the problem. Based on my own experience entering the workforce mid-90s, it was only sometime in the 90s when the majority of software developers had CS coursework. When I started near a majority had physics, math, engineering and other backgrounds, with their computing experience being industrial.

Agreed, when I was a kid I met a programmer who used to be a computer. She was older than my dad, and he considered her an expert in his 30s. Punch cards were the rage.

Since then, I've met 2 women who worked directly at Bell Labs (with LeCun) in the 90s, both of whom I would consider experts in AI (and the present tools of DL), even though they are now retired. They started studying CS in the 70s.

The real boom happened in the 80-90s when it wasn't a respected field and educated women went into Medicine, Law, Marketing... It's only in the last 15-20 years that programming has been considered a "real" major. Before that most programmers had an education in something else.

    If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS
    courses, you will find it actually declined since 
    the 70s

It apparently peaked at 1984: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer...

> in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only.

I've seen this repeated a lot without, as far as I can see, any credible evidence that (a) this was actually the case and (b) that the causality worked the way indicated.

To me, it's at best a classic "wet roads cause rain" fallacy that doesn't make sense at any level.

1. Companies are dollar driven

This idea that companies would forego a massive market in order to...I don't know, "keep the girls out of computers" just doesn't make any sense. Even typing these words is weird, the idea is just so utterly ludicrous.

And the idea that it might have been just oversight also doesn't wash. At least one company would have at some point asked the question, tried it out and made a killing.

2. Nobody wanted to keep girls out

Heck, I grew up in the 80s, and the very last thing on the mind of any of us computer nerds was "oh my god, we need to keep the girls away from this stuff". We would have given almost anything to get more girls interested. They just weren't.

3. The effects of marketing are vastly overstated

Us computer nerds did not want computers because they were "marketed towards" us. We wanted computers because we really wanted computers. In fact, I had no awareness of computers until exposed to Apple IIs in summer camp, first a little BASIC and then shape tables. Oh boy, shape tables! And yes, the computers were open to anyone who wanted.

In fact, we got an Apple, despite all the marketing material I remember being the Tandy catalogs. They even had a 68K based model at that time!

4. The ads were gender neutral

Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with mom+dad+girl+boy.

To the degree there's something to the PCs became a thing mostly with teenage boys, which discouraged others from getting involved with computers at a later age... And I think there probably is. You need look no further than skeptical comments here about hiring someone who didn't have a "passion" for computers from a young age. Or college curricula with entry-level courses that clearly assume prior familiarity with computers. But it's probably more of a connection between PCs and gaming.

Which means that dynamic should be changing again as PCs are far less relevant as a gamer platform. Though arguably the environment is established and is hard to change as a result.

> Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with mom+dad+girl+boy.

Hoo boy, are you naive. I still have computer mags from the 1980s (and maybe I have a pack-rat problem, but that's not important now).

A awful lot of the hardware ads had buxom nubile while female models, sometimes draped over the machine, sometimes with a sultry expression (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?), often with caked-on hooker makeup. The software ads almost always had some young white man with an IBM-approved white shirt and pocket protector.

Ads in popular computer mags in the 1980s were definitely target-marketed towards white male hetero people. To claim the advertizing was ineffective and such people "just wanted" the devices is disingenuous at best.

> why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?

Backup tape systems are sexy, man. That woman is a real geek!

> (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?),

Hmm...and young boys are the target market for backup tape systems?

Maybe I should have been more specific: the context was home computers, not the professional systems. I thought that much was obvious.

And even there, do you seriously think that the motivation for those ads was "oh, we must make sure that women don't enter the profession" or was it more "we know that 95+% of our target audience is male" and so they used the same sort of tactics that were used to sell cars and auto tuning products[1]?

Again: wet roads do not cause rain.

[1] https://www.autobild.de/bilder/die-goldenen-jahre-von-d-w-83...

Men took their jobs. At the time, programming wasn't held in such high esteem by the general populace since it wasn't far removed from the menial busy work of shuffling around card stacks and tape reels. When it became more lucrative, the demographics shifted.

Not only that, but everyone's got some fashion sense here, while still dressing professionally. Today, there'd be nothing but grey and beige. The office is also colorful and better-decorated than most these days.

It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.

Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?

Moon?

My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.

Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.

That may be true, but I missed out on wild sex, drugs, rock and roll. And woodstock. :-)

Did you link to the right graph? That one shows most of the 60s still safer than the 00s.

It's the rate of change from good to bad that's scary. Crime doubled in 10 years!

Lead in the air we breath. Coincides pretty much with muscle cars. Once they removed lead from gasoline, muscle cars withered for a few decades.

Indoor smoking.

Rampant discrimination, against ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ.

The "good ole days" generally aren't as good as we remember them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role.

Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture.

So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those.

Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe.

I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment.

We get the weird situation we see today.

I have a book from a minicomputer company I worked for in the late eighties and nineties. A Year in Development. Basically documentation of projects and people in 1984 or 85. Showed it to a friend of mine and her first reaction was Wow, so many women.

What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.

I don't know what slideshow you're looking at, but the vast majority of the pictures I see are women.

http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...

The real horror is how that page hijacks keypresses and touch gestures. It's unusable with Javascript on.

We are agreeing. To expand:

What happened to all the women in tech fields? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers (who are modern additions to organizations) salivate, because current workplaces do not look like this slideshow.

I've spent most of my career in Telecom, this is how my experience in telecom is, AT&T got into equal opportunity early, and the notion stayed with the company past divestiture.

The GP may have been saying, "What happened [recently] to all the women [that they're not around any more]?"

"What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate."

The OP meant, if you were to do a slideshow now, there would probably be considerably fewer women now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com