Making programming masculine [pdf]
sas.upenn.edu
sas.upenn.edu
Underestimation of a task seems to be key in allowing women to succeed. Not only does it fool the gatekeepers, it also fools the women themselves. Put a mop bucket full of water in a typical woman's hand, and she'll lug it around as if it's nothing [EDIT: assuming she's into that kind of thing.] Hand her a dumbbell the same weight, and she'll wilt and clutch at it with her other hand. Take her backpacking in the mountains, and she'll prove herself ten times as strong as she would allow herself to be under a squat bar. Same thing in computing -- female office workers who can do wizardly things with spreadsheets and accounting systems often don't see themselves as having any aptitude for computing or programming. They see the IT help grunt who fixes their email login as being naturally much more gifted than them at "computer stuff." If they knew that what they were doing was basically computer programming, far fewer of them would develop any skill at it.
So it's not only the female programmers of the 1960s who have disappeared, but the male ones as well. The word "programmer" still exists, but the job it described in the 1960s has mostly gone away. The female programmers weren't replaced by men, but by compilers.
I knew it didn't mean what the term would imply now (to me, programs generated through some machine learning process). My best guess was that it referred to the compiler which would generate machine instructions from the assembly instructions. So I think the idea that "programming" was the lowest-level act feasible to instruct the machine what to do predated even the '60s.
edit: I should have read the paper more carefully. The author directly addresses pg's points on page 10 by referencing the exact document I just did. His distinction is between "coders" and "programmers."
They did realize, though, that they had created a language as well as a compiler: "It has two components: the FORTRAN language, in which programs are written, and the translator or executive routine for the 704 which effects the translation of FORTRAN language programs into 704 programs."
I wonder what terms today will be similarly affected in the future. Driver? Pilot? Soldier (though I hope not)?
The author's thesis, if I understand correctly, is that there was some sort of new discrimination that drove women out of the industry. I'm more inclined to think that there was never any particular shortage of discrimination.
On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and "programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects of programming, not just data entry.
I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution.
I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or won't be seen).
Sigh.
Further, I believe the women retained a good representation into the 1980s.
In many ways I think it was de-skilling of programming itself that broke the trend. Essentially, being a programmer is no longer a career with a future, seriously. It's more like bike messengering than accounting - they work you to death, you get the cachet of industry excitement and then you get thrown away.
I think it would be more accurate to say that programming has been "de-institutionalized." By and large, programmers learn their craft outside of formal schools and training programs. In fact, it's very hard to get into programming through formal education (see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157) without also following the now-traditional way of hobby programming as well. So the selection process for becoming a programmer is not one that confers prestige. Being a Stanford graduate confers prestige. Being a better and more desired programmer than a Stanford CS graduate confers no prestige whatsoever except in the eyes of other programmers.
People in fields where degrees are important, and where colleges are the gatekeepers, are seen as more well-rounded and more generally intelligent than people in fields where long private pursuit is more important than a degree. The fact that programming is within the grasp of any kid whose parents buy him a computer diminishes it in society's eyes.
I think it also diminishes the career in women's eyes. The university-controlled career path in, say, chemistry, provides a built-in work-life balance and a shared experience with people in other fields. In programming, the coding virtuosity acquired by hours and hours of practice is overvalued and is often confused, especially by other programmers, with a programmer's overall ability. Yet this time is not officially recognized by educators and professionals. It is not discussed or accommodated. Musicians and athletes are expected to spend long hours practicing, but CS programs have no concept of programming "practice" in the sense of hours spent repetitively honing a skill. Programmers must sacrifice other parts of their lives in order to acquire this practice, and most who enter the field are happy to do so. Women feel like they can't compete unless they make the same sacrifices, and naturally, they don't like a field with a built-in bias against people who aren't obsessive.
(In programming, that bias is obvious from the start. In academic research science, the bias emerges in graduate school and in the slog for tenure. Elizabeth Blackburn, who just won a Nobel Prize in medicine, said, "But many women, at the stage when they have done their training really want to think about family . . . and they just are very daunted by the career structure. Not by the science, in which they are doing really well." Blackburn's point is as valid in programming as it is in science: obsessiveness and exclusive dedication may be helpful and may be a common element in mythologies about great scientists, but it is far from a requirement for making outstanding contributions, and we lose a lot of talent by filtering out (intentionally or unintentionally) people who don't want to dedicate the whole of their being to their career.)
In the time since I made the post linked above, I've been thinking about how to ameliorate this bias towards obsessiveness and the resulting distortion and loss of talent. I'm encouraged by the hours of repetitive practice that are taken for granted in music and athletics. I think programming could be made much more friendly to women by simply recognizing the importance of "practicing" programming in the same way that musicians practice. It is understood that a significant amount of a musician's time and effort must be dedicated to practice, and that this practice time must be balanced against instruction and theoretical study. Music buildings are full of practice rooms. The hours that a budding programmer spends coding should be recognized and labeled as practice. The time dedicated to it should be acknowledged. Computer science professors -- who certainly know better -- should stop pretending that their classroom curriculum is sufficient to produce skilled graduates.
If the time spent practicing programming is acknowledged and accommodated the same way musical practice is, I think women (and, not insignificantly, men as well) will see software as profession where one can excel and also have a reasonable, balanced life.
I appreciate your general narrative of the processes involved here. I'm a bit skeptical of the "spin" you are putting on the events, however. Indeed, you give a good description of the end of the traditions of "reserved contemplation" that originally evolved in the intellectual professions in Europe over the last few centuries. A process of continuous competition can indeed foster some skills but I skeptical that all intellectual endeavors should be organized in a fashion akin to try-outs for the professional sports (the news is full of sad human cost as well as the cheaping involved in high-level athletics - and the news seldom even mentions the many more "loser" would-be athletes who get nothing after several years of college/minor league basketball/football/etc).
But that's all that I can see. What else has been said here that "pooh-pooh's" female contributions?
The examples I cited aren't made up; they come from personal experience. Of course, when dealing directly with somebody I don't use the (admittedly complainy) tone I did in my post. I'm more subtle and try to be more sensitive. But my observations are simply, unfortunately, observably true. They're no different from the academic studies that have established many ways in which providing social context can hurt women's performance on tests. Nor are they different from the observation that many men require lots of social permission and support before they can reveal intimate emotions to other men. It's a general problem of people self-limiting because better performance would violate their identity and threaten their place in society.
If you know a better analogy, I would be interested to hear it.
Another one that I would use to prove that everybody can program: giving directions on the street. It's basically programming an agent to reach a destination, even with loops ("while the park is on the right..."). Cooking still is better, because of the written instructions.