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Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

Please note that images of computers from this era nearly always have women at the "terminal". Women are the ones who invented programming. Spread the word. We need more women in our field.

See for example https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356 and https://doi.org/10.7275/yen8-qn18

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In this case, they were the 'Wrens' of the Women's Royal Naval Service[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Royal_Naval_Service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, the very first programmer in the world ever, was a woman as well.

She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.

And she was one of the first to make a program for it.

Maybe the data entry bit was seen as more of a secretarial role, rather than an engineering one?

There is a long history of involvement of women in these sort of roles, for various reasons. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

The voice of the Star Trek onboard computers, Majel Barrett, was romantically involved with the executive producer, Gene Roddenberry, and she was also able to land roles as supporting characters throughout her lifetime.

We need more people in the field. Nothing more Nothing less.

Good links, thank you!

> We need more women in our field.

Why?

OK, I’ll take the question at face value: programmers build systems on computers that interface with the real world and hence real users. If you want to build systems that work well for users then you need to understand the problems those users have. Having a wide spread of life experience in the industry will lead to a greater chance that a greater spread of users will have their problems solved by digital systems.

Sounds contrived to me but I'll give the benefit of the doubt. Is there any evidence that women have more trouble with computer programs or are less well served compared to men? Even if so, wouldn't that require more female product owners etc rather than more programmers?

Things do come up sometimes but it's a question of do you need exact 50:50 representation or is it enough to ensure there's a voice for each sex. danah boyd pointed out to VR researchers she was working with that their product was "sexist" because it made assumptions about vision that were far more true for males than females. But she used the word sexist in a narrow way to just point out that vision fact, not to make a moral judgement or imply any intention. It's worth noting that she was able to point this out on her own. She didn't need the team she was working with to be 50% female for her to have this insight and share it with everyone else.

VR/AR/XR is a very good example. Meta’s headsets and most 3rd party straps still default to a top strap that runs along the center of the head front to back. For any woman that wears their hair in a ponytail or bun this is a no-go.

That design makes it really hard to demo product to 50+% of the population. I always seek out replacement straps that have an extra front strap instead of a center strap for this reason. And still very few men who work in the industry are aware of this despite that I’ve been working in AR/VR for a decade.

This might seem like a product failure, but in a software company there are far more programmers than product managers. It would only take a couple females writing software for the headset all day to point out how uncomfortable it is.

Sorry but a) men can wear pony tails and b) women don't have to wear their hair in pony tails. Are motorcycle helmets and other safety gear bad because they don't allow pony tails? Should they compromise on the strap design just to allow one particular hairstyle?

Female specific stuff is a thing and yeah you definitely need to design clothing for women (with several different shapes), but your argument is stretching and just looking for a problem to justify the wanting more female programmer thing.

Business analyst, project manager, product manager, UI/UX designer... those are all roles that do what you're describing. Doesn't hurt of the programmers to have a hand in things too but usability and functionality really aren't their responsibility on most projects beyond the trivial. If any of those roles are mainly one sex, then that might be an issue.

Two non-egalitarian reasons might be:

* The kind of teams that are hostile to female programmers are usually hostile about lots of other things too, and hence are less pleasant places to work.

* Female programmers tend to be better communicators than male programmers. While all the “true wizards” I have known have been male, you need wizardry about 1% of the time, but you need to communicate about 100% of the time.

My own take is if something is that valuable, it should be owned by everybody.

To flip the question around: why is it OK to have industries (any industry, really) dominated by men?

Yeah, it's unfair to women that men get to do all the plumbing, mining, construction, warfare, etc. demand equality!

It is OK because caring is loving. From those who can, for those who need. If a profession demands masculine traits (consider underground mining) then it should be performed by those who can make the most of it. If we insist on having under performing people on those positions based on some ideology then all will suffer . When someone dies we will have to face the reality that the cure could have been here now if the local mining facility had produced more steel, to make one more car, to get that researcher to the lab in time, to produce the cure. Everything has consequences, and it is logical that we should do our best.

Sure, some industries have some natural gendered 'preferences'. But a lot are historical. Women have only been in the workforce for 100 odd years, and there is decreasing desire/need to be having babies all of the time.

And in some professions, the gender divide is more of a self-perpetuating cycle (there are examples of this for both sexes), based on the historical workforce, rather than being inherently suited to one sex.

And to flip that around again, why is it OK to have the majority of college admissions going to women? Especially in some fields women dominate, e.g. 95% of veterinary students are women. Is that OK and if so, why is the opposite a problem?

Given that men and women are very different, if people are allowed to or even incentivised to do what they are good at and/or want to do then of course you will end up with industries being more or less dominated by either gender. The only way you won't get that is by not allowing people to do what they're good at because of their genitalia which I think is very much not ok. Or perhaps if men and women weren't very different, which they obviously are.

> Women are the ones who invented programming.

Hmm?

Specifically Ada Lovelace described what we’d now call computer programs in her own language while assisting in the creation of adding machines.

She’s widely regarded as the first programmer.

Sure.

The statement quoted above, however, is childish.

The statement that "women invented programming" is as meaningless as "men invented mathematics". It is blind to all the contributions of everyone that preceded and entire field.

Precisely.

The redditization of HN: activism vs critical thinking.

Exactly. Notice how the two comments calling out the childish comment, one simply asking why and one questioning the claim, were downvoted. "We need more women in the field" really means "we want more women in the field" and they refuse to reflect on why they want this. I assume it must be some kind of guilt that's been drummed in.

I mean, an argument could be made that more diverse life experiences could lead to more diverse approaches to solving problems.

So if that’s true, and I think it is, then it’d be a good thing to get more <insert underrepresented group> working in <some field>

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