Also interesting:
> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.
> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.
My life experience corroborates this.
When I was in school, girls were taught to type, and boys weren't. Because of that, many of the girls from my school went into computing, while the boys went to more "manly" pursuits. It's also why Catholic nuns were over-represented in early computing.
Would you mind expanding on that?
Catholic nuns have done much for the business world that is overlooked.
From memory, so no citations:
The first female CEOs were Catholic nuns — in the early 1900's, a time when women in the American workplace was uncommon, Catholic nuns founded over 800 hospitals in the United States. They also ran schools, colleges, and universities.
The concept of just-in-time delivery was invented by nuns running those hospitals.
The first health insurance company was founded in Missouri by nuns to care for railroad workers.
There are others. I once ran across a list of them on the intarwebs, but these are the ones that stuck with me.
https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html
I suspect that shifting narrative may tell a chapter of the story of how women were gradually pushed out of our industry.
Although the programmers might have looked down on the operators as grunts, these people were in the privileged position of actually getting to interact with the machine directly, which is something.
You're pretty much right on re their exodus. Thompson's book, which I mentioned in my earlier comment, has a chapter called 'The ENIAC Girls Vanish'.
My source is my own family history and it makes me annoyed at the anachronistic assumptions and framework that people shoehorn historical tidbits into when discussing this topic.
By the way, how can you have 50% in the 60s and then a peak at 37% later?
Dad - a history major turned COBOL programmer and later, project manager - found his way into his prior company (and then stayed for 32 years) by this route.
He met Mom there too - also not uncommon for the time - who was a math major who decided that teaching wasn't the right fit for her.
This sounds really weird to modern ears but it's literally true. Computer was a job before it was a machine.
An interesting statistic would be the gender ratio for people who published papers.
> pascal
>
> The syntax diagnostics from the compiler made by Sue Graham's group at
> Berkeley were the mmost helpful I have ever seen--and they were generated
> automatically. At a syntax error the compiler would suggest a token that
> could be inserted that would allow parsing to proceed further. No attempt
> was made to explain what was wrong. The compiler taught me Pascal in
> an evening, with no manual at hand.