Comment by alleyshack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alleyshack | Hacker News Reader

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I would argue that men are not "simply" more interested in computers than women. Computing was originally a female-dominated field[1]. However, as computing became more and more important and presigious a field, more men entered it, kicking off the "glass escalator" phenomenon[2] and eventually pushing women out almost entirely.

Nowadays, girls are socially discouraged from showing interest in STEM[3], and women who make it past all that to go into STEM fields are still strongly discriminated against[4].

You're right that the article isn't clear about what it means by "computing skill". However, its foundational conclusion - that simple tests show no difference in basic computer literacy but do show significant confidence differences - is unsurprising and reflects what women have anecdotally reported as their experience for years.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator

[3] https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/

[4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90548817/why-so-many-women-in-te...

There is a paradox that with increasing gender equality, fewer women get into STEM. That indicates that women are in general not so interested in STEM if they have a choice.

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

> However, as computing became more and more important and presigious a field, more men entered it

Anecdotally, almost all of the male programmers I know (and I know many) entered the field because they thought technology was cool, out of interest in the field or they enjoy the problem solving challenge. Almost all of them tinkered with computers and programming in their own time before entering the field and many still do outside of their jobs (not to improve their job prospects, but because they find it fun or interesting or intellectually stimulating). Incidentally, almost all of the (far fewer) female programmers I know entered the field for the same reason.

My conclusion, perhaps wrongly, is that more males are interested in computing than females.

The major shift occured during the 1960 compared to 1940. What kind of prestige occurred in computing during that time that elevated the status of programmers?

The period when computing was originally a female-dominated field is quite known for something else. It was the world war 2. Men was sent to the front line and there existed a major lack of labor resource. Ballistics calculations and cryptography was very labor intensive, and unsurprising a lot of those position were then held by women.

Comparing the job market during the second world war with a few decades later does not make much sense. Still I am interesting in hearing what kind of prestige was given to programmers that supposedly triggered this change in the job market.

Most of these examples only explain why there's a difference at all but not why it's so severe. If anything most of the 4th example could just as easily be explained by a mix of interactions with female coworkers being higher risk for male employees (limiting equally charismatic women's ability to network by comparison) and the reality that if you spend a decade giving money to gendered industry initiatives people are going to attribute that gender's success to those initiatives and not merit (don't ask for tokens if you don't want people to assume you're a token).

> Computing was originally a female dominated field

From allyshack's source:

> sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand

Yea thats not computer programming or electrical engineering so please don't conflate that with modern computing.

> as computing became a more prestigious field more men entered it

No, as men invented electronic computers the armies of female laborers were replaced with a smaller number of overwhelmingly male engineers and programmers.

> Girls are socially discouraged from showing interest in stem

And now we get to the patriarchy arguments. No; women have much easier and more personally fulfilling life options than sitting behind a computer screen all day, and so they chose not to.

All of these feminist arguments have been made and rebutted hundreds of times here on hackernews and anywhere else that allows critical discussion of feminism so it gets very tiresome after a while and should probably fall under flamebait at this point.

Programming was female dominated in 1967. IBM hired the first generation of programmers based on aptitude tests because there weren't really any university CS degrees yet.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-the-compu...

Does anybody know how successful this aptitude test was in hiring women? The (sponsored by IBM) article mentions that 349 companies hired 20,000 women based on this test, but they do not mention how many programmers in total were hired based on this test.

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