When Women Stopped Coding
Whit
Posts: 4,191
Great story here on NPR about women's heavy involvement in the early days of computing and how it all changed. The story "When Women Stopped Coding" was by Steve Henn and aired on October 21, 2014. I have to admit hearing the details of this really makes me very sad. I hope this is changing some now. As a father of a daughter, I hope she knows and is being taught that she can do whatever she wants to!
Programmers Betty Jean Jennings (left) and Fran Bilas (right) operate ENIAC's main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
Programmers Betty Jean Jennings (left) and Fran Bilas (right) operate ENIAC's main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
640 x 422 - 220K
Comments
You mean to tell me that companies would ignore 50% of possible customers ? Not likely.
Do you really think that the reason little girls don't play with toy guns is because the companies don't market to them ?
Companies are smart, they don't market toy guns to girls because girls don't play with toy guns.
Believe it or not...Boys and girls ARE different.
Bean
Now she is 32 years old and uses Apple computers to do retail package labeling for a major farming industry.
Edit: Once I started looking at the Grace Hopper stuff - I posted this on my blog
I posted earlier that I had been reading The Innovators. Maybe I am the only one, but I did not know about the history of women in early computing - REALLY important contributions. I didn't know where Adafruit, or "Lady Ada got their names, for instance. I don't know how we went from their heavy involvement and recruitment for this work to the great decline about the time home computing became available, but it did happen. This graphic is from the same NPR story.
Granted, men and women are different, but these early women seem to have seen possibilities in computing that others couldn't or didn't see. Why not have all the best minds working to solve problems? And why not "market" the engineering/science fields in a way that appeals to everyone? Seems like that is what Parallax, Raspberry Pi and many others are up to! I am all for it.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
What a great woman. She invented a lot of the things we daily use as programmer. Sad that you cant find much of her talks on youtube. Maybe some Super-8 tapes left somewhere...
And Bean is right - Boys and Girls ARE different. Thanks God (sorry Whit) it is so.
My oldest sister was also a programmer (here it starts...no female form for it). She was able to quit doing it for a living at age of 50. Sort of early retirement. But she also claimed that the faster and faster development cycles of frameworks, Development-Tools and Hardware will make it impossible to write long-lasting software you can be proud of decades later.
And she is right. Besides them Big-Irons in Banks, Insurances and Government still running COBOL every software is changing so fast that you spend way more time in migrating system then in developing them.
I am living from programming since a couple of decades now. Nothing else. Just writing code for various company's and projects. Small ones and big ones. Employed or Contractor. Agile and test-driven or just coding flowcharts. Been there, did it. Over the last 30+ years things changed a lot in the working environments of software development.
When Grace Hopper started working on computer programming and the idea of 'programming languages' and 'compilers' everything was new and exciting.
When my sister started working as programmer, ALGOL was the new kid around. It was a new evolving industry.
To date myself - the first one I could lay hands on was a new(!) Wang 2000 - I started earning money with COBOL/370, while still exploring the TRS-80 at home for fun.
At that time I had a couple of female coworkers. We discussed a lot about different coding styles. Female programmers attack problems from a different angle as male programmers do.
But - sadly - the number of female programmers in my different jobs went down to 1% already in the early 1990's.
Why?
As @Bean said - Boys and Girls ARE different.
usually the Girls are smarter on the long run.
Time to learn new profession.
Enjoy!
Mike
No. INDIVIDUALS are smart. Companies are mindless collections of policies and beauracracy. Companies are the epitomy of stupid. One smart individual make an entire company SEEM smart, but No. Companies are as smart as any employees' bad decision.
I tried to get my son interested to. He wasn't. I think all parents should encourage their kids with anything they have an interest in. I only hope I had some kind of influence with them.
I seem to recall that the entire computational might of the US military is being run by a woman. I just can't remember her name.
In any event, viva la difference. I'd hate to live in a world where every person had a male ego. 50% is bad enough.
My parents pretty much allowed me to pursue an interest in anything I wanted to do. I cooked, I sewed, I knitted along with all the boyish things. They said I could do anything, but I suspect that if I began to play with dolls they would have put a stop to it. Parents really want children to fit in easily and to prosper.
Learning to make candy was a lot of fun. The same with making breads. Sewing machines provide a lot of mechanical skills. And even knitting requires maths for planning and execution.
In the robot classes, we had 8/16 female (adults), and 1/14 female (elementary school). It seems one girl in the adult class always finished first, and the girl in the kids class finished before most of the rest, for an given activity. But that might have been due to instructor bias, favoring the most interested female (due to discussions such as this). In the kids class one particular boy was clearly sharper than the entire rest of the class. That was probably due to more boys in the first place.
There were a couple in my technical school when we were learning BASIC and assembler using teletypes connected to a remote mainframe. For whatever reason the girls always came out top of the group over us guys.
There were a few at university. For whatever reason they always came out top of the group over us guys.
I did actually work work with some back in the 1980's and early 90's. For whatever reason they...well you get the picture.
Haven't seen any in the workplace since. Well, perhaps one. She was doing software testing in Sweden.
Given how well things were going for the make/female ratio, what on earth happened?
Oh yeah, I recently met a female programmer socially. The first one in two decades I guess. She is nearly retired but still writing COBOL for some government department.
This actually makes some amount of sense if you believe that women are inclined to be more relational than men, and this sort of gender split has been observed in other fields as well.
A lot of software design is about abstractions. Isolate a problem, wrap it up in an API. Code to the API.
In turn your code is a problem that is wrapped up in an API and others code to the API.
It's API's all the way down...abstraction after abstraction.
I've never heard it put the other way around. The user is is a problem out there, in the same way as a file system or network interface. Let's just wrap an API around the user and code to that.
Job done:)
I think you have hit on a whole new software design paradigm.
Enjoy!
Mike