Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kaytaro | Hacker News Reader

My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect, but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's job" so maybe that's it.

View on HN

I worked at an investment bank in the 1990s. Their programming staff (and IT staff in general) was roughly half female. I think it's more common in companies where IT is a supporting function and not the core business. By contrast, the tech companies I've worked at have all been almost entirely male.

From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.

The change came about when it became possible to have your own computer (VIC-20, Spectrum, etc). This put computers into the hands of teenagers. Relatively few female teenagers wanted to spend all their waking hours hacking assembler. This meant that the intake to CS undergrad programs became dominated by young men who had been programming for 10 years already. The women who did take CS were now at a large disadvantage in terms of experience.

It started a little earlier than that, but yes.

Not that it's germane to gender-balance of 'greyhairs', but COBOL was invented by a woman, Grace Hopper, after all. I'm not sure I can think of a new mainstream language initially authored by a female these days.

I've read that IBM offered training programs to secretaries, so it was a good career path. And there was a stereotype that typing = woman's work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com