Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

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Here the articles points to childhood experiences with hardware, commodore 64s, etc. However, i think this is absolutely nonsense. Now, many people go into college with little idea of what they want to do. Perhaps this is a result of the expansion of college from building a unique skilled career path, to simply being expected.

When talking about demographics and college degrees, i think popular culture is certainly relevant. We are talking about high school and college freshmen discovering themselves. Thus, i'd like to point out that 1984 is the same year the film Revenge of the Nerds came out.

Thus, i'll throw out the hypothesis that, since 80's popular culture was a very regressive era in terms of anti-intellectualism, desire to enter STEM probably took a serious hit at the time in general, much more so with women. That is not to say that previous generations were much better, but gone were the days where the space race inspired tons of kids to pursue STEM education regardless of gender.

The graph of overall CS enrollment backs up your comment that there was a decline in STEM degrees in the 80s.

Interestingly the next peak of CS degrees hits in 2002-3. While the obvious explanation of the dot-com boom fits, I would say students graduating at this time were considerably affected by the 1980s home computing culture and that early experiences with a C64 or other computer could have been positive, not negative, influences on their choice to study CS.

(The reason I say this being that I graduated with a CS degree in 2003, so am squarely in that camp, and the dot-com boom had no bearing on that decision - by the time I had picked my A-level subjects and applied to university, the dot-com craziness was not in full swing, though I was in the UK. However, growing up in the C64/BBC Micro/ZX Spectrum era was definitely a big factor in my ensuing nerdiness.)

As someone who grew up in the 1980s, I think the pop-culture argument could go both ways, as the nerds got their revenge, and there were also movies such as War Games (1983) and many other portrayals of genius computer hackers. 'It's hip to be square', as the song went.

More importantly, the PC industry crashed in 1984 as did the video game industry. To some extent, it was all perceived as as a pop-culture fad akin to disco and it retreated into the underground. There was also a general cultural shift within the computing world from mainframe systems to UNIX/DOS/C, and I suspect that may have had a greater effect on women's CS enrollment than anyone has identified.

Look, as is the case with nearly all of pop culture tropes, we could argue the details ad nauseum, but i hardly think that the nerds of the eighties were positive role models. Even if they were, they were far from anywhere close to those of Houston mission control.

In War Games, our protagonist is the one tech savvy kid who "gets it" while all the other technology experts are villains who put the world in peril because they are bumbling fools.

In Revenge, the nerds were still rejects who, against all odds, won a talent show. One of them, in the process, literally stalks and eventually rapes his unrequited love interest, though, for the sake of a happy ending, she ended up "liking it." Talk about a huge marketing disaster for making CS attractive to women.

With Houston, the term "rocket science" became synonymous with extreme intelligence. The entire country was lining up to buy those "heroes" beers. Astronaut was something akin to Fireman for children hopes and dreams. There has never been a CS moonshot for all to see, as the last war hero we know of was Alan Turing, who's accomplishments remained classified long after his public humiliation and death.

This is all to say, for better or worse, that CS, STEM, and intellectualism in general, were not lionized. Indeed the opposite was the case.

Yes, and that disturbing plot line was present in a number of other contemporary movies, so I acknowledge your point. How much of direct line you could draw to CS in particular is debatable though, especially as it was hardly the glamour degree at the time, versus say aerospace. Were there similar drop-offs in women enrolling in other engineering degrees? (Honest question, I don't know. But there were only about 4 women in my introductory physics class, so the intake funnel was clearly broken.)

I do think the author's premise that PC culture was seen as a "boys club" (or solitary macho hackers, as they perhaps saw themselves) is a simpler and more direct explanation. Which is to say I'd rather point at the actual nerds rather than the movie portrayals.

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