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1984 – When women stopped coding

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Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#81

Post by chipsy »

purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

People are faced with any number of ways to distract themselves electronically now. That makes it hard to enforce the environment of necessity that builds traditional skills.

On the other hand, when they do show an interest in something - and you will have to be very patient about figuring out what that is - there is probably an angle to it that involves automation, and thus computing.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#82

Post by timje1 »

userium wrote: post #19
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Also, after getting girls interested in programming, one of the problems is how to keep them in tech. Currently, over 40% of women leave tech mid-career, which is more than double the quit rate for men ( https://keepwomen.com/info/aboutus ).

Programming is an industry where taking a 3-4 year gap is career suicide, because of the constantly shifting practices and technologies.

Some women in tech notice this and move away before raising a family crashes their career. Some don't notice this and are forced to shift careers when re-entering the workforce. Both of these outcomes result in a high attrition rate for women programmers. I have no clear solution for this dilemma.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#83

Post by ghaff »

yourapostasy wrote: post #57
jessaustin wrote: post #17

The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers... And these... were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.

That sentiment might be jumping the gun. I was just a kid playing around with a DEC PDP-11 when the TRS-80/Apple ][/Commodore Amiga wave of personal computers hit homes (I wasn't exposed to the earlier, Homebrew Computer Club-era, MITS Altair/Apple I/Heathkit H8 wave of personal computers). I clearly recall IT staffing at the company where the PDP-11 came from heavily staffed by women. However, even the daughters of…

My memory of the BBS crowd in the 1980s was that it was something of a mix but definitely skewed male. As someone else said, that's probably the natural outgrown of interest in ham radio, phone phreaking, electronics kits, etc. All of which it's probably fair to say skewed male.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#84

Post by ricksplat »

lordnacho wrote: post #47
skoczymroczny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean CONFIG.SYS :)

Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory). So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.

My one abiding memory of this situation was `dwcfgmg.sys` (Dos and Windows Configuration Manager?) which was the DOS driver for ISA plug n' play devices. I was at that nexus between the "old" world of MS-DOS games where you had to program IRQ and DMA settings for your sound card, and the "new" world of graphical environments and plug n' play.

So as you say, even with 8MB in XMS (or sometimes EMS, depending on the game I think, using EMM 386), the 640k boundary was an issue and I too had the joys of paring down my `autoexec.bat` and `config.sys`

But no `dwcfgmg.sys` and my "plug n' play" soundcard wouldn't work. It was a small driver, but the games of the day seemed to demand the entire 640k at startup or they just wouldn't work :(

So often it was no sound, or no game at all. Oh what I would've given to trade that for manual soundcard configuration.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#85

Post by ekianjo »

wernercd wrote: post #60
krylon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers. The first thing I would like them to do is include some form of programming tools with Windows. On a Mac[1], you have Python, Perl, and Ruby available on a default installation, and you get XCode for free from the App Store. A fresh installation of Windows, OTOH, is a barren wasteland in comparison, and the…

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is considered a top-notch programming environment... and it's free. It would be the perfect place to put something with built in programming hooks into Minecraft. And... there is already too many people putting too much garbage on devices that people don't need... last thing we need is being loaded down with crap - whether Python, perl or Visual Studios - on a default install of W…

> Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is considered a top-notch programming environment... and it's free.

Free but closed-source. Kids should also learn the value and power of Freedom.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#86

Post by red_admiral »

golergka wrote: post #5

Transcript or tl;dr available? I assume it has to do with computers becoming a mass-market commodity and marketing strategies involving "traditional" gender roles.

Yes. Last paragraph of the page, link after Update:

-> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#87

Post by scbrg »

anjanb wrote: post #55

A lot of indian women are taking to coding/programming career. Currently, the estimate of number of women programmers in india is about 1,00,000. They are expected to grow to 2,00,00 in less than 10 years.

Not to be nitpicky, but you probably want to review how you typed those numbers. The second is smaller than the first, and the commas are not grouping the zeroes in groups of three. I suppose you mean either 10^5 or 10^6, but I'm not sure which.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#88

Post by rimantas »

Ygg2 wrote: post #4
slazaro wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what would these technologies have to do with the decline of women in CS?

Probably nothing. More likely marketing computer as boy/nerd toy is what caused a shift.

I cannot stand this argument, it holds no water. Or rather as much water as the famous FSM graph linking number of pirates to global warming.

I was interested in computers since early teens, without even seeing one in person, just reading in magazines. I've got a real opportunity to spend some time with them only in university, and the same applies to my classmates. So no one was given computer as a gift/toy, no one saw any ads for them. Guess who got interested in programming and who did not.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#89

Post by ekianjo »

Crito wrote: post #9
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

> Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession

more kids than ever have access to computing devices (tablets and smartphones) but very few actually know how to do anything with them at all. I don't see that future you are talking about.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#90

Post by darkr »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #40
jessaustin wrote: post #17

The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers... And these... were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.

The hate towards marketing that is present on HN is almost comical at times. My experience is that, the more you study how marketing works, the more you realize marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that. Sure, big companies like Coca Cola have more sophisticated techniques to make their brands appealing, but still, if you look at Coca Cola's marketing, what they sell is "happiness", which…

I think you've totally missed the point why people hate marketing. It's not because of a lack of understanding on it's mechanics.

> From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them. Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.

Marketing is absolutely about the manufacture of desire. Though above you make the connection between Coca-cola and the harmless association of this beverage to "happiness", this is over-simplifying things somewhat. The psychology of the brand, upon which modern consumer society is dependent, and which marketing ruthlessly exploits, is based around the construction of a self solely through conspicuous acts of consumption rather than through human experiences, relationships with friends and family, or other pursuits traditionally considered to be more laudable.

Though arguably it is required in keeping the wheels of capitalism spinning (and by proxy food in our bellies); in reality, marketing is the process of co-opting, subverting, and ultimately extinguishing joy and the human experience.

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