My granny is a programmer
blog.progopedia.com
blog.progopedia.com
In practice, I have found that there are women who are as good as men when it comes to programming. I strongly believe that women don't have any inherent disadvantage. It is just social conditioning.
Unfortunately once such a pattern is established it's hard to break. I myself find the lack of diversity in the field to be off putting. I can't imagine what it'd be like for females.
You’re probably thinking of tractors and harvesters.
The text below says, roughly: "Let's fight for the betterment of socialistic Polish villages".
Sometimes I don't know if feminists are really serious or just trollin'...
You're right of course in that it's hard to see a woman on a tractor, but what I'm saying is that 50 years of propaganda can't pass without any consequences, even if it was widely recognized as a propaganda and it was actively opposed by many. I think that these efforts actually did something for women, even if only a little. They - the communists - even did something for racial equality: they offered stipends for people from African countries (of course those aligned with communists only) and it was quite normal (I'm being told, please don't blame if that's wrong!) to see a man or a woman with different skin color in the university.
Anyway, while communists did many bad things, they at least sometimes tried to do something good. Someone better educated than me should say how those efforts fared - I suppose they were not that successful, because as you said, it's really hard to find a woman on a tractor :) - but it's worth noting, I think, that they were made.
Well, this was slightly sarcastic. I wouldn't hang this picture on my wall, but it was clearly intended to look good like all the other pictures showing people happily running around with hammers or sickles and building better socialist future :)
As for whether encouraging women to pick up technical or scientific jobs (when it works) does any good, I'm not sure. I'm under impression that lower number of women in IT and CS is mostly caused by the female part of "I've no idea what I'm doing, I kinda landed here by accident" crowd going somewhere else. Those who are serious get through regardless of sex and the rest, well, isn't serious.
Not a tractor, but my aunt was operating an industrial crane in the '80s in communist Romania.
From a business perspective, I have to wonder how the U.S. economy withstood the end of the war. The troops returned, flooding the market with labor and at the same time, much of what was produced during the war had no market in peace-time.
At the same time 99% of the party leaders, managers, directors etc were male, even at regional level. There were still trades where woman were rare (woman on tractor was rare, casue not many woman wanted to do that for a living, woman as a bank director were rare just because). But no problems with getting to the university (incidentaly - you had much better chance to get to university if you were child of industrial worker of farmer, than if your parents were "inteligencja").
Stereotypes about math, programming and gender are also different between countries. Being good at math is cool in Poland, for example, even in primary school. There are some stereotypes about woman similar to that in USA, but nothing on such scale. From my experience around 10% programmers are female here.
- Are you married?
- Yes
- Do you have kids?
- No
- Thank you for comingNo proper company will ask those questions, let alone even hint at them. If they do, there will be a dozen employment layers willing to take on your case for free.
It is especially true in the context of both the Soviet Union and modern day Russia.
You couldn't do this 50 years ago and you can't today.
During WW2 in Russia, the Soviets had female snipers and female fighter aces. Why shouldn't they have females in a new, blurry position of a computer programmer - a position so new and so alien to most people that no stereotypes could have evolved by then?
I wouldn't call it gender equality, when it's apparently limited to a certain field (IT) and when comparing then with now. I'm not a historian or a cultural expert, but I do know two things:
* The majority of software developers in the early days were women. Programming was seen as clergy work, administration, and the existing administrators (then mostly women) were simply transferred to work with computers.
* There are percentually much more women working in the IT industry in eastern Europe than in western Europe or the US. I'm not sure if that percentage switched much over time. I don't even know how many men work in IT in eastern Europe; for all I know it's a women-dominated field (thus, no gender equality either, although I prefer a term indicating equal gender distribution, which is rare in pretty much every professional field)
At the other discussion above, about strong, working women, this was very much true, both in reality and in propaganda posters, during WW2 in the western world / the US; since the men were off to fight the war, the women had to do the work, keep the US industry going, build weapons, etcetera. Then the men returned and took over those jobs again, or something.
You probably mean "clerical"?