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Comment by newswriter99 | Hacker News Reader

The headline "Two programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory" would have done a lot more to further the right of women to be in the STEM fields.

Pointing out they're female only further makes it look like most women are too incompetent to do math or science.

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That's not my impression at all. To me, it deepens their accomplishment by acknowledging the headwinds faced by women in tech.

Your proposed headline would be a fine lead-in to an article solely about a research accomplishment, but this is also an article about two people making inroads towards better gender representation in STEM fields.

The tech industry bends over backwards to get women involved. Putting them on a pedestal only worsens the divide rather than closing it.

a) there are efforts to get women involved in the tech industry, but there is still a lot of discrimination b) the article describes programmers from the 1960's

Weren’t many of the programmers in the 50s and 60s women? The gender divide didn’t start to get really bad until late 80s, from what I understand.

A 'computer' was a predominantly female job role until.. I don't know, but some time post-war when we got bored of saying 'automatic computer' to describe the increasingly dominant method of computation.

Until the invention of the phrase "software engineer", is my theory.

Being a computer is different from being a software engineer or coder/programmer. Even when women were computers, they generally weren't the coders/programmers - this task was usually up to mathematicians or other subject matter experts who were generally men.

Women computers were replaced by software definable processors, not by software engineers.

I don’t think this is accurate.

The mathematicians/engineers were more like architects, and the women programmers weren’t merely compilers or input technicians. They actually wrote code, though this was also considered a drudge task back then (a view that was corrected later). Also, proximity to the hardware allowed many to grow out of their original job descriptions.

I'm still fairly new to the industry so I realize I'm likely missing historical context, but the only discrimination I've seen has been against men and in favor of women.

In my experience you learn much more about discrimination in tech by having open minded conversations than by seeing it firsthand. Much of it is subtle and happens out of view from others.

encouragement != being put on a pedestal.

Special treatment != Encouragement.

Can you please point me in the direction of this special treatment because I've never received any. I would love to fly through a FAANG interview because I'm a woman.

I'm not even being facetious, where is all this special treatment? Clearly I'm missing out.

The amount of "let's help women/minorities specifically" programs and scholarships are numerous, but this one caught my eye a few months ago.

> I'm going to give 40 women $9000 stipends to cover their living expenses while they take Lambda School's programming course.[0]

[0] http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/women-learn-to-program-t...

I already have my degree (in CS).

btw shout out to Jessica Livingston! Amazing program.

Take a few minutes to create a gmail with a female sounding username or even an HN handle that clearly belongs to a woman. Send 10 emails or comment here for a few days and see how differently you’re treated.

Look even at the disrespectful comments Jessica got in response to that announcement. How often, if ever, have you seen those sort of comments on HN directed towards male partners at YC?

I’m not even saying this facetiously. I wish more men in tech had the courage to see what it’s like to be a woman in tech. I think it would do everyone a lot of good.

As a counterpoint, I find that when introducing people to coding, mentioning Grace Hopper's role in the development of compiled languages does a lot to break down the perception of it being a job for boys.

Not being associated with COBOL is hardly a bad thing...

I've been trying to pinpoint when programming transitioned from being considered "pink collar" work to "white collar" work in the general population. My parents were born in the 40s and I was born in the 80s, and when I went to college in the early 2000s they were still under the impression that programming was akin to secretarial work. (I didn't pursue computer science for other reasons as out-sourcing anxiety was at its head then, not because of their weirdly mistaken impression).

Remember that in the rise of the computers, the only thing akin to typing on a keyboard was typewriter work... which was given to secretaries...

Programming was never pink collar. When women were 'programming' mainframes and big analog computers back in the day, they were just punching in programs that were written by mostly men.

Basically they were doing a rote process like women commonly did with telephone switch boards, but operating on computer signals instead of voice signals.

If a modern day programmer gets carpal tunnel, and they buy a typist so they can just dictate code to the person - no one would consider the typist a programmer unless he or she also happened to have those skills - not simply becaues they type in code.

When my parents were working for GE, the engineers/scientists were men (like my dad), and their assistants who programmed for them were commonly women (like my mom), but they were no more "just typists" than programmers are today. Pay for someone experienced was around $50-60K adjusted for inflation, which I think tells you they weren't the equivalent of Google or Amazon "software engineers", but they were the equivalent of someone making that salary for some random business in flyover country today. Lots of people make that kind of money today doing the work that businesses like Google outsource because it's not exciting enough for their in-house talent that makes six figures.

Ok, but that doesn't mean that programming was pink collar, or generally associated with women at that point.

Well, anecdotally, the reason my mom ended up as a programmer is because she had an admission/scholarship to study engineering in college revoked because she was a woman - they didn't technically exclude women, but they told her they already had one in the department and didn't need any more. So she got a degree in math (this was before computer science was a thing) and ended up working for engineers, taking their problems and turning them into code.

Now I can't say how common this was without statistics, but you can see it paints a picture of how discrimination in one area could potentially affect another in a systematic way.

It could well be (and I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it) that reduced discrimination in areas that require both technical and soft skills have caused an exodus of women from mere coding, because it's both more lucrative and enjoyable for many of them.

No this is great, because "two programmers" most would automatically assume are men. Maybe once shit has been sorted out and its not some fantastic amazing thing that women are in tech and it becomes more normal we won't have to state "women programmers" but until then, I'm down for this.

My problem with 'women programmers' is it sounds weird and is probably ungrammatical(female is both a noun and an adjective - women is just a noun, and it is used as an adjective in the title), not that they specify the sex of people they are writing about when their sex had a big effect on what they could contribute.

And maybe it would be good if some people who jumped to 'two men programmers' (doesn't that sound weird?) automatically instead read the article and found out they were women?

Ok so your beef is with the grammar, cool. "two programmers who identify as female" there ya go

It goes from grammatically awkward to semantically awkward. I think OP/GP's point is that it's very odd that we go through hoops to avoid the clearest articulation of the point: "two female programmers".

Perhaps we could just say 'two female programmers'

People assume that a "programmer" is male because if he weren't, "woman programmer" would likely have been used. The meaning of a word is determined by its use. If we want "programmer" to include women, we have to use it for women.

Except that it doesn't. Really interesting article too.

Yes, I expect it was very interesting indeed - I mean, who programmed these women and how did they even do that? And what did programming the women have to do with chaos theory, was chaos theory part of that process?! That sounds like some weird offshoot of MK Ultra.

Or did they mean "two female programmers", because that sounds like a much less interesting story.

edit: in case downvoters didn't get it, "woman" is a noun and when you use a noun in place of an adjective it can be written after the following noun and "of"; "defense department" and "department of defense" are basically the same meaning in English. Computer programmer is a programmer of computers. If you still don't get it, consider how strange "two men programmers" would sound.

It's really odd but for some in intersectionality circles, "female" is a pejorative. Best I can tell it has something to do with reducing women to being objects of reproduction. No idea if that was the motivation for the clumsy headline but people who are opposed to the word "female" do exist.

What makes you think that? Note that your claim is not a subjective claim about how you feel when you see the headline, but an objective claim about how other people will react to the headline. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that removing the mention that the programmers were women from the headline would make the headline more encouraging for women interested in STEM fields?

I don't have any evidence either way for this specific claim, but there is no shortage of studies that show that how groups are represented in media have a strong affect on how people think about those groups.

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