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Comment by othermaciej | Hacker News Reader

> Nursing and teaching used to be men's work. Women weren't thought to be capable of it. Too weak. Too sensitive. Too illogical.

Do you have any citations for that? My impression is that nursing and teaching were considered women's work before they even existed as distinct professions. Nursing was originally done by women's religious orders, and was founded in its modern form by a woman, Florence Nightingale. And teaching was open to women in America since at least colonial times.

Better examples might be law and medicine, high-status professions that were once all-male but now are considerably more gender-balanced than software development. I don't know the reason for the disparity, but I doubt it's because software engineers on average act more fratty than lawyers.

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With teaching, there have been laws aimed at preventing men from teaching for well over 100 years now. That's why the vast majority of elementary school teachers are women. In the era of modern American schooling, there has never been a period where women were not dominant.

I suppose you could make an argument that historically most itinerant teachers were probably men, but this really seems like a very different job than what we currently consider teaching.

[citation needed]

Please? I'm curious if this is local to you, or a more widespread thing.

Not sure if it applies to other countries outside America. I don't have a cite offhand unfortunately, you'd have to read some books about the history of education in America.

Could you give an example of one of the laws? This is new to me too

If I remember correctly there were many laws specifying that men were to be paid less than women and were to be subject to other degrading treatment. It's hard to find a good example of an actual law though because until recently virtually all states regulated education at the local level.

Do you remember the name of one of the books? I found some evidence of the opposite happening to attract men to the profession in OK, but I can easily believe that what you described happened in other states. And it's a pretty infuriating idea... To quote Steinem: “there are very few jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other jobs should be open to both sexes.

I found one cite from Gatto, which is probably where I heard it:

"Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of methods was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business. Again, the move was part of a well-conceived strategy: "Experience teaches that these boys, many of whom never had a mother’s affection...need the softening and refining influence which woman alone can give, and we have, wherever practicable, substituted female officers and teachers for those of the other sex."

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/6i.htm

Unfortunately he doesn't cite any of his sources because he wants you to look into the issues for yourselves. Every time I've fact checked him he's always been right or at least close enough, but the problem is with claims like this there aren't even really any hints as to where to look.

Thanks!

Also: "A state report noted the frequency with which parents coming to retrieve their own children from reform school were met by news their children had been given away to others".

I had no idea....

Google Books picks up the source for the quote, at least.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=7irAXGiBBoQC&lpg=RA1-PA8...

Until the 1840s, teachers were primarily men. I trust PBS pretty thoroughly. http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

For sure, the demographics weren't in question, I was more trying to find out whether there were any state-imposed reasons. That article points out a lot of great social causes, though.

I don't know. I just wanted to add at least one actual source to the conversation... Social norms change, though, and this is actually an excellent example of a huge shift.

I don't know about laws, but a the tales from my one friend trying to go into elementary education weren't too pleasant. The system was very clique-ish, and a number of people seemed to not like his style, so one of them made up some ridiculous sexual-harassment-of-children story involving vampires which was conveniently completely retracted the moment after they were done using it as an excuse to kick him out...

My impression is that nursing and teaching were considered women's work before they even existed as distinct professions.

It depends on which kind of teaching. Teaching of children has been seen as a woman's job for a very long time. On the other hand, professors and philosophers were classically men.

Could it be, there's less women in programming because it's just starting to rise as someplace they're needed? Or as something just now becoming 'visible' enough to get their attention?

It could be something that starts out much earlier in life. I got into computers very early. The only person in my class at the time that cared for them was also a male. Even still, the act of programming itself just doesn't draw many people early on - which for the most part is why we currently have programmers. They got interested early.

Lawyers, Doctors - those are things that can be decided late in school. 'Hey, I think i'll go to school for this now'. Programming just doesn't have that draw - or didn't. Perhaps now that it does, we'll see far more females in the programming workforce in 4 years time.

At the expense of sounding non-PC, I have noticed that the vast number of females who I have worked with as programmers are foreign-born (I'm in the U.S.), mostly from India. Usually, I get the feeling that they did get into programming later on (probably were pushed down the path by someone when they went to university). I'm not going to try to analyze what this means but its simply an observation.

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