A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)
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computer.org
I'm dying to know how you did WFH in the 1960s though? That's well before the pc/modem generation ?? I'm tempted to say it was probably still the punch card era ... Did they punch the code onto cards at home, and mail the stacks to the client ?
As I recall they had a machine that took the “scantron” cards and spit out punched ones.
And I don’t remember if they had it or I just read about it later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save your bacon.
i've only ever seen it for multiple-choice questions
Hundreds of women familiar with assembly programming couldn't have appeared of thin air to go mentally execute their code and punch it into cards.
I guess it was a possibility, but then it's a prime example of capitalism fixing/exploiting the pay gap.
A company specifically created to hire those women was a brilliant idea.
however, shirley did not found her company 'freelance programmers' in 01975
she founded it in 01959
the ensuing 20 years were among the most successful years in history for feminism in the usa and uk, marked by, among other things, rapidly growing female participation in the labor force
Most people were poor, and married, and with children, so that would make sense if the real issue was underrepresentation in some upper class jobs.
also, if you had a baby, usually you got fired because you couldn't come to work for months or even years (unless you could afford a nanny), and then you had to start your career again from the beginning at a new job
underrepresentation in upper-class jobs was a real issue, but far from the only one
It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
The main difference is the time between feedback on your code. Back then, you'd only know if there was an error in your code when it failed to run. Now we get it almost instantaneously. But that's not how it always was.
Assembly programmers would then turn the graphs into assembly using the best technique at the time, at moments having to use NOPs to cool down the ram.
For these people the source of truth was the graphs and the actual assembly was throwaway.
Can you explain how, exactly, one compares the ease of assembly to the ease of formal logic, such that one can then make a definitive and sweeping statement about that comparison?
At the risk of an analogy, I would describe assembly programming as memory-intensive, and math as compute-intensive.
The bureaux was a third party, I think their clients didn't have a computer either but I don't know.
I can barely comprehend a build-test-compile cycle that involved standing in line to use a machine. Sending them through the postal service is mind boggling. I don’t think anywhere near this many neurodivergent people could have worked in IT back then. It would have been too much.
You couldn’t redraw the “screen”, just reprint the command line every time you hit backspace. Which is also why CTRL-U and CTRL-W are commands that date back to teletype machines. Much quicker and cheaper to drop the entire input or a word and try again.
SO + Wikipedia seem to think it was the ASR-33, which was originally 1963. I had this notion that it was about 5 years before that. But it's clear the ASR-32 does not have a CTRL or a SHIFT key, and I'm not sure who they could have possibly stolen the idea from.
Reading a little more reminded me of another fact: the ASR33 was the first commercial use of the ASCII character format, which was developed in parallel.
So you would need to write out your program manually. You'd need to explain in clear english what you were doing and why. Then you'd transcribe into machine language (or an intermediary if you were using something fancy like assembly) you can see part of the process here: http://ict1301.co.uk/13010310.htm
Then you'd put them onto card or tape, but that might be done by someone else. Typist were a specialised and often exclusively feminine profession, often seen as something not done by "programmers".
byt the mid 60s though, it was much more common to have programmers type their own shit.
Then once thats done, you'd deliver the media (card desk or paper tape, later on other things) to the operator, who would run the programme and return the results. You'd stack your programmes in queues. (hence where we get that name from)
It was definitely suffering, and I found that thesis interesting, but I don’t think I ever agreed with it. It was a mismanagement problem not a workflow one.
Back then you'd program in punch cards, so if you have the punch-card equipment you could do this near anywhere. So there wasn't a big difference between being at home or the office. It also allowed managers to hire low-wage women easier.
It wasn't later that IT became a more profitable and less niche field that these women were pushed out and replaced with men. Programming stopped being 'pink collar' due to this dynamic.
As far as modems go, we didnt really see that get big until the 1980s with speeds like 1200-2400 baud being groundbreakingly fast compared to 300 baud. You could receive or send text almost as fast as you could read it or type it, so it was not that different than using a green screen terminal at work or at university.
Later, more 'always on' was possible. In the US, the phone system was setup in a way that local calls, defined by geographic rings based on switching stations, were 0 cents a minute after the initial first minute. So that allowed things like BBS culture to thrive.
https://pnc.st/s/business-books/f3cc494478a544f6/let-it-go-b...
The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (UK) explains as you go in that says unless there's a sign, you can play with anything you see. There's clearly an expert for each machine, so they are set up with who has games, word processors, educational software, a banking back-office (??), typewriters... so much more exciting. The star exhibit is the megaprocessor https://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html - which has Tetris hooked up.
Shirley founded, with a capital of £6, the software company Freelance Programmers, (later F International, then Xansa, since acquired in 2001 by Steria and now part of the Sopra Steria Group).
Tangentially, this part brought up an early thought that I had: tapping into a qualified workforce that for some reason got removed from work standard work opportunities. One such large group the one mentioned (at the time in the UK, probably less applicable now).
Another one that I usually think about is all the people with high levels of manufacturing expertise that got laid off in the US in the past decades, living in smaller towns. Would it be possible to tap into their knowledge remotely?
I would think these days you’d be looking for the automation people as well.
Basically merchants realized there was a huge workforce outside the cities, families where wives and children had time left. So they purchased and place the worktools and resources with the individual families to later buy back the products they made and resell it in the markets. This was called the putting-out system if you want to look into it more.
Then, one day, the woman suddenly worked much faster and everything went much easier. At the same time, the man had a much harder time and customers were weirdly stubborn and obstructive. Turns out they were accidentally mailing under each other's name: the woman used the man's name, making customers much more willing to accept her expertise, while the man used the woman's name, making customers question everything he said.
There's a lot of that kind of subtle sexism in our society that goes way deeper than mere equal rights. How can you possibly control customers taking you seriously or not based on your name? Should all women (and possibly people with non-western names, who can run into similar issues) work under fake names?
Some people have such a low opinion of women in tech they invent entire fake AI avatars and legends [0] rather than deal with the real thing [1].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/backlash-over-fa...
I don't think that person cared one way or another about women, they were just taking advantage of the environment.
They would have faked male speakers had it benefitted them.
(not condoning, just noting my perception)
> Hanselman confirmed that he was "duped" by seeing the bill including at least one fake female speaker. He also confirmed that speakers like him have rules for participating in conferences, including only joining inclusive speaker lineups.
You raise a good, fair objection.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "low opinion". I don't know these chaps and what their opinion is.
"Quotas" and suchlike certainly do those of us that advocate for diversity - but confront reality - a great disservice.
> Still scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation was not simply a low opinion of women.
What I think happened (and maybe watch our video, please because Mercy and Helen say things a little bit different - and why pay attention to my words, written by a man, when you can see and hear what the women actually have to say):
> but the organizers couldn't find enough to meet that quota.
Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find enough". No way, they could have "found enough". There's no shortage of smart, confident women who have plenty to say about working in digital tech. I've been in that situation myself as a conference organiser and had to work extra hard to convince them that they would be taken seriously and given equal voice - and could say what they want.
I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find were women who would say the things they wanted.
Agreed. Plus you don't have to pay sockpuppets.
He was making them "cancel" their talk, but he had then met the "women quota" so all good.
Honestly it's the affirmative action culture that led to this.
People will take advantage of things like that.
Like a man that gets last in weight lifting amongst their male peers, "transitions", then blows out the #1 spot amongst women.
do people seriously think people transition to win at sports?
But yes, it's an incredibly petty thing to do, hard to imagine, similar to creating fake women speakers.
And no, hormone therapy does not "normalize" you with women.
Your bone structure and many other factors are at play.
Hormone therapy doesn't magically reverse these things.
You can literally look at the guy and see the difference between the women he's taking advantage of.
she was also in the ballpark with the other competitors, not the sort of far and away difference that you make it out to be.
He sits squarely within the male range and is a huge outlier from the women competitors.
It depends at lot on what the definition of "inclusive" Hanselman and other speakers were using. There are indeed situations where people are expected to have female participation that's well above their rate of participation.
This tracks well with what women in tech have told me: they're constantly bombarded with requests for them to speak. But they're quite reluctant because they feel (often correctly) that they're primarily being invited on account of inclusivity quotas like Hanselman's.
Incidentally, this kind of thing is easy to test, and indeed such studies have been done - I lent my name & image to such a study when I was a student, that was testing racial bias in resume applications.
Liz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK history and promptly tanked the economy in spectacular fashion! She was beaten by an iceberg lettuce [0]
The next female MP who is aiming for the PM role has an enormous uphill battle against them and it could be decades before "the old boys club" vote for a woman.
I can't even begin to fathom how difficult it was for "Steve" to battle against the odds.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/iceberg-let...
Theresa May never happened?
Liz Truss was _definitely_ not forgettable.
Maggie fucked UKs middle and lower class so spectacularly that she is actually remembered.
That's less than 1%. So much for “profit-sharing and company co-ownership”. I don't think the author knows what those words mean...