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Comment by fortyrod | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there used to be a lot more women in computing. In my first job out of college (late 80's), I worked in a group of software developers with 12 women and two men. It was not considered odd.

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Here is a book on this topic - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality - “How Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women.”

One of Britain’s first contract software companies was founded by Steve Shirley after she was pushed out of her job when she got married (which was normal at the time). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley

That is a basic feminism that in a patriarchal society as soon as a profession becomes more prestige and/or well paid it also becomes more male dominated.

Not true. There are more and more female physicians and the trend is that females will progressively take over that profession, percentage wise.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-doctors-better-...

Which doesn't dispute what the parent said: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over...

They said that high paying jobs are sought after by men. Doctors are highly paid and women are taking over that job. Sounds like the opposite of what was claimed.

That is purely a self inflicted problem. There is a reason why this happens and both women and men are equally to blame.

I recall that as well. I think part of the reason was that programming was far less technical then. There were a lot of programming teams where it was "you do the balance screen, and you do the deposit screen, and you do the help screen, etc". I can think of quite a few episodes of (usually) women coming up to me and asking for me to peel off small tasks for them to work on. These days that just doesn't fly as much.

I do recall plenty of sharp women, but they tended to do math, EE, physical sciences, or even CS proper (i.e., math). Not really any advanced programmers, though. Seems understandable--programming is a rather tedious and solitary activity. Maybe a bit like music composition. I wouldn't do it myself if I wasn't driven by it (and from a very young age, with absolutely no assistance from anyone around me).

It's because it used to be considered "womens work", similar to clerical work. Then companies did research and found that the best programmers were usually introverts, so they started advertising and pushing to get more men into the field because women tended to be more social, or would want to leave school/work to start a family. So it shifted and became "mens work", and women naturally assumed it wasn't for them because there weren't many people saying that anyone can do it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/women-onc...

Women were not pushed out of CS or discouraged. Just go look at the evolution of degrees by gender and pay close attention to the absolute, not relative numbers.

What happened is that as personal computing took off in the 80s, men's interest in the field soared permanently while women temporarily showed interest and then dropped off again. The same happened with dotcom.

The article you linked is a giant exercise in selling the same tired old narrative, even as it debunks itself. They even spell it out: when Grace Hopper "invented the compiler" it was actually what we'd call a linker today, and the work was in fact mostly clerical and rote because there were no abstractions to compile.

As soon as tooling for that came around, that changed, and we started architecting something we would now consider code. Which men appeared to enjoy more.

I have a much more convincing argument though. 15% of CS degrees are given to women, a number that has remained mostly flat for two decades (but only because men dropping out of college during that time, otherwise it'd be lower). Half the top 25 programming languages on stack overflow's survey were created in that time.

None of them have female creators. Not one. Where are all those genius female programming language designers we keep hearing about? If women are just as capable, are they just too lazy then? Or is creating a good programming language and making it successful such a stubborn gamble of both abstraction skill and confidence that women fall out of the distribution?

Oh no it must be because people tell them they can't do it. Nevermind that gender orthodoxy has sung only one song for the last 40 years, while being amply funded, and they all prefer to go study third rate sociology instead of getting a real STEM degree...

The explanation I've seen a lot is that once men realized computers could be used for more than trivial math they took over the field. It's obviously more nuanced but I do think it's mostly out of sexism, which is why organizations like Girls Who Code are so valuable.

I wonder if anyone has ever surveyed women programmers from days of yore, and found out why their sons became programmers and their daughters didn't.*

It might be more productive than sharing prejudices and assumptions.

*I could describe what I'm aware of first hand, but that would only be "anecdotal evidence"

NPR had an excellent piece on this a while back. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

tldr: home computers were gendered male (because video games) and cs 101 curriculums started presupposing extensive computer exposure.

I've heard that argument, but I'm not convinced by it. I think the shift to being male-dominated was well underway by then. The Algol-60 committee was all male, for example.

You can't deny the drop in women entering the field. The touchy feely "oh it's man's field, something something society" explanation isn't really supported by data (or by other similar fields). I'd say the shift in education is the biggest factor in why we see so few women in CS today. For sure a myriad of other shifts were pushing women out 5 decades ago, but it's telling how absolute the demographic shift has been despite not seeing the same shift in other white collar professions.

Yes, I agree that the number of women entering the field has continued to drop as the field has continued to gain in prestige. My friend Ann, who wrote an operating system in assembly which for several years provided the bulk of the revenue for the cloud computing startup where she worked, has explained that when she got started with programming, it was because IBM was trying to convince its customers that computer programming was so easy that even women could do it. In an environment that sexist and in that particular way, it was inevitable that the dawning recognition of the intellectual challenge of programming would be accompanied by women being excluded from the field by unjustified prejudice.

I don't think law and medicine have a similar stereotype of being purely for geniuses (which fortunately is starting to soften for software), and certainly haven't newly acquired it since the 1960s. Fields that do have such a stereotype, such as math, physics, aeronautical engineering (“rocket science”), and medical subspecialties such as neurosurgery, continue to have very few women. You can readily verify this; one book that goes into some depth about the mechanisms of exclusion is my friend Linley’s Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie.

I have no idea where you're from that computer science has a "stereotype for geniuses". And I'd also go so far as to say computer programming still isn't a high prestige position. My best friend's mother still asks if "I'm still doing IT", this article was written in 2011 talking about how bad for your career calling yourself a programmer is[0]. .

What this industry does benefit from is exposure and general tool knowledge, which, what do you know, is easiest to get when you're a bored teenager with too much time. The idea of the "missing semester[1]" is so prevalent mit put a whole thing together. In the states at least, we've built a self fulfilling system that excludes highly qualified people for no good reason. There's nothing natural about this state of affairs, and imo, nothing good about it.

[0]https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... [1]https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

Without taking a position on the rest, it seems like madness to expect a novice to walk into CS101 at 18 and become a master programmer. It's like learning to play a musical instrument or learn a foreign language. If you're not already well into by 18, you're never going to be really great at it and certainly won't catch those that started early.

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