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How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

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Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#21

Post by tnone »

Luckily programming or computing hasn't changed at all since the 50s and 60s, so we can effortlessly assume that what people said about it then still applies perfectly to today's distributed, abstract, always-on landscape.

Even more, we can use the view from the 50s and 60s, a time which was not sexist at all, to explain why today is more sexist than ever.

Women outnumber men in colleges. Women have an easier time getting jobs. Single, childless women outearn men in that category.

Women just aren't choosing STEM. And apparently the solution is to tell them loudly how horrible the people they'd get to work with are. Who are some bizarre amalgam of a Goldman Sachs elevator and the cast of Big Bang Theory. Which you can effortlessly get a flood of coverage about, even though you're supposedly oppressed and are fighting the status quo.

Go away old media, go away tech feminists, go away white knights. If people stopped seeing women as victims, you'd lose your meal ticket, your power fetish and your moral superiority.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#22

Post by naturalgradient »

k__ wrote: post #7

I 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…

This is an aspect that has always been bugging me as well. There is this implied notion that for men, it was ok or even encouraged to be nerdy and spend all their spare time in front of a screen.

In my experience, committing to this lifestyle meant being socially crowded out. Some people were unpopular to begin with and sort of found refuge in the computer world out of necessity, some of us accepted being unpopular/uncool because we did not care.

One possible explanation, but potentially an offensive one, and only based on personal experience: fewer women were willing to make this sacrifice, at least in school. Interestingly, this was not because boys would be unwelcoming but because other women would judge them harshly for stepping out.

On a related anecdote, I frequently observed girls in school downplaying their math abilities in front of their friends - not because men judged them, but because they did not want to stand out in front of their friends.

I suppose the interesting question is why they felt this way, and I would not wager to answer it. I just think the theory 'men are not letting women into tech' simply does not hold up in the formative school years.

Only very recently (since the social network movie) there has been this glorification of tech in combination with the startup lifestyle.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#24

Post by lumberjack »

When do we start looking at articles like this as misandry? The author is seriously implying there was some sort of conspiracy that all men partook in, with the intent to exclude women from software development. Are you fucking kidding me? This shit has gone too far.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#25

Post by peoplewindow »

Ugh. So basically when programming was unskilled and considered one step up from being a secretary, women did that and men built the machines themselves.

As software became a larger and larger component of the machines, and more and more complex, it became dominated by men. This, we learn, is because men made it more rigorous and scientific as part of some bizarre sexist plot.

Or maybe the nature of programming today is pretty different to how it was in the immediate post-war years, and the kinds of jobs women can get changed too.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#27

Post by purpleostrich »

delhanty wrote: post #13
k__ wrote: post #7

I 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 ... [0] https://new…

I just replied. We exist.

In my case, I did not get exposed to programming or computers until I was 24 yrs. old, though chance employment.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#28

Post by cmiles74 »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #14
danharaj wrote: post #6

There'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…

There are no studies that backup Damore. He cherry picked bits and pieces he liked to tell a story that isn't supported by the sources he quoted.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#29

Post by mdorazio »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #3

I 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 has been my question as well, and few people want to consider it. The best data I've been able to find on actual gender split over that period only goes through 1996 [1] - just when the dotcom bubble was getting going. However, if you look at total CS degrees (look under "The third surge" in [2]) it at least seems pretty obvious what happened. Right around 1980 the number of CS degree students exploded, with men consistently outnumbering women about 2 to 1. Then around 1985 the absolute number gap started widening rapidly and never got better.

We should definitely consider that women may have been discouraged from entering CS degree programs more than they were in the 70s, but at least in statistical terms, it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women interested in the field. Also see [3] since the new CS men had to come at the expense of other majors, and it's interesting to look at what they chose not to pursue (note: the stats are complicated by the fact that women represent an increasingly large overall percentage of college students over the same time period). Men seem to have declined as a % of graduates over the 80s-90s period most strongly in non-CS Engineering, physical sciences, and biology. This paints a really interesting picture since it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance issue over the same period.

[1] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/project...

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...

[3] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/supporting...

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#30

Post by Edmond »

k__ wrote: post #7

I 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…

The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact. For instance I have worked with a lot of Indian immigrants who are programmers and I don't find the correlation between social awkwardness and the people doing programming.

While programming might be appealing to socially awkward western/American men , I don't think one should go from that to concluding that they're the only people innately drawn to it.

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