One of the stars of comptuing, Grace Hopper, rarely mentions her sex.
She talks of inspiring young people, her talks are technical.
I think we are too quick to get wrapped up in identity politics.
How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
11–20 of 258 posts
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#12I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong. We now live in…
There is a lot wrong here, but what bothers me right this minute is the idea that computer programming has "changed beyond recognition" between 1950 and 1980 and that is the cause of the gender imbalance we see today. For sure, a lot of progress was made in the field during that time span. But did the work materially change? I don't think that's the case at all, we simply saw huge steps made in the quality of the tooling and the machines; they didn't fundamentally transform into different things. The tools improved a great deal and allowed the same amount of people to accomplish more work in the same amount of time, progress that continues to this day (we can complain about Electron until we're hoarse, but it does make it easier to get an application out on every device and one person could conceivably so just that).
This is just more painful gymnastics and contortions trying to find another reason for the gender imbalance when the actual cause is obvious and well documented: one gender is working to keep the other out. Damore's memo is an example of this: entirely lacking in applicable science and with a basis grounded almost entirely in the man's existing biases.
Talk to some of the people of another gender currently in the field and just listen to what they are saying. You'll hear about educators with axes to grind, encouraging them to pursue another field. You'll hear about coworkers and employers who suspect their work is not their own. You'll hear about job interviews where no answers are correct. And you'll come to Hacker News and read posts like these, from people in the field, insisting that there is no problem.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#13I don't understand this whole thing. Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included. These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone. To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one, including women, wanted to have anything to do with them. The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance, management and st…
>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
+1 - that's how I remember it too!
I asked the following 12 days ago [0]:
>One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum:
>If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech?
>...
I didn't get any replies though ...
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#14There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige. Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general? It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong," when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those tendencies to be accurate, at least to some degree.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#15I have always wondered: People often point to graphs showing a massive decline in the percentage of women in CS in the 80's. But has anyone seen a graph of the absolute number, not percentages? If 1 million women were coding, then 100 billion men started coding, those 1M women would still be coders. So there wasn't necessarily a decline. Or maybe there was, and the numbers will reflect that. I am interested in the ac…
This may be what you're looking for: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:
* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average
* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average
* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%
* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#16> They found some predictable ones: a love of solving puzzles, for example. But the only “striking characteristic” that defined successful male programmers was “their disinterest in people.” A subsequent study -- one that was overlooked in subsequent years -- found this to be true of female programmers as well.
Isn't this trait much more prevalent among males though? Could explain why we saw women flock to more social fields when the barriers were removed.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#17There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige. Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
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Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#18There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige. Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
When do you think programming began to have high prestige? I didn't think programming in the 80s or 90s was a particularly prestigous or high status job, salaries back then kind of reflect that too
It was pretty prestigious in the 90's and seems to remain so today. At parties where I'm required to mix with other adults from varying backgrounds (i.e. a child's birthday party), they are almost universally impressed that I am in software development. As a child, people did seem impressed (in the 80's) that my father was a developer and we were one of the few families in town that had a proper computer (not an Atari 2600 or an Intellivison).
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#19Even if the author's premise that women were "crowded out" of programming 40 years ago is true, that does not imply that “innate dispositional differences” between sexes don't influence one's tendency towards pursuing certain fields.
The author suggests that the current stereotypical portrait of a geeky socially awkward neckbearded male engineer was socially engineered, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's idiotic conspiracy nonsense. Geeky reclusive men tend to pursue computer programming because dealing with a machine doesn't involve dealing with a human, not due to society's marketing of computer engineers as geeks.
The author is clearly not a computer programmer (professor of history apparently), nor someone capable of basic logic. If you're going to cash in on the diversity scandal for views, at least make a coherent argument.
(Also this post is a dupe, I submitted the same post before this and this is a copy and paste of my comment on the original thread)
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#20There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige. Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general? It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong," when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those tendencies to be accurate, at lea…
James Damore asserted that women are less aggressive than men because of mostly biological factors which is ridiculous if one has ever at all paid attention to the social signals given to women.
Also, why the fuck would we ever stand for our industry to be organized along hierarchies of dominance and aggression? What exactly is the argument here?