How many of them are just doing it for money since salaries are high right now? How many of them actually would do it if it paid 50k instead of a 100k?
Not to discourage the female of the species from having fun hacking away like the rest of us do ... but you do make a good point.
Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sexist industry? Give me a fsck'ing break! All of their perceived sexism is in their own minds.
Plenty of old school programmers were not "outcast nerds" at all, but people who happened to stumble on the subject. The whole nerd thing is something that happened mainly at certain universities and then when computing become more popular in high-schools. Women have far more than men been interested in things that doesn't mean money. Just that if you're a book, arts, craft and/or music nerd it doesn't count. By the way, when did computers ever not bring financial incentives? Back when mostly women did it maybe...
> Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds?
Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession.
But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession.
I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.
Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)?
> There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.
- 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.
- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.
In the early days doing basic arithmetic to count up data was woman’s work because it was a low skill job that only required a person to sit down and know basic 4th grade math.
Female programmers where just people who would rewire the computers do to arithmetic that the mathematicians "programmed". They did not write the algorithms nor did they know anything more than the basics of "this plug does this". their job was taking a work sheet and making the machine do what the work sheet instructed them to do.
as computers automated this the female "programmers" where no longer needed to do this low skill job
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Two_wome...
You're extrapolating from a few select examples.
ASCC and many other computer precede ENIAC, and their programming was absolutely not a "women's work".
The history of practical computing is really labour intensive. The mass of the work has been done in counting paychecks of megacorps, census, taxes, and weather simulations. Unfortunately I have no statistics that would say that women did most of the jobs there but based on historical precedence it sounds plausible to me.
Programming as a field has historically two or three subcultures - the corporate, the academic (and finally, the personal).
The academic branch is where the new stuff has been imagined. The corporate branch is where the work that added value to society in form of financial income happened. Think of huge accounting machines, and extrapolate from that to modern computing. Taxes, census etc.
The corporate branch had several tasks that were labour intensive. Usually this labour intensive part was reserved for women (they are more keen on details on average or other such rationalization). Also, historically, women did not get paid as much as men so more labour for the same amount of money...
Women were also extensively hired as data entry clerks.
In the age of the mainframe, a typical division of labour was that the software designer wrote the program on paper with pencil, and then the data entry clerk encoded it into the computer (using punch cards or later terminals).
The integrated software designer / data entry thing probably originated in the universities and other research setings (i.e. Knuth typing his Tex from his notebook the the terminal at his Uni. and so on).
> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work".
Every time this comes up, someone points out that "programming" was mostly data entry at that time, and that there is a suspicious correlation between the decline in female programmers and the movement of data entry from programmers to administrators.
I can't seem to find hard data either way, though. So make of that what you will.
Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years.
Admittedly this is mainly in a corporate environment, but most of the women I started with tended not to come back when they started their family. I think with more family friendly hours and policies such as remote and flex working this may also change.
To say that "they are only doing it for the cash" is unlikely, as from what I have seen that drive tends to run in men more so than women. cf: all the "web developers" in the first tech boom who did not know shit from clay and vanished as quickly as they came in the bust.
> Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years.
That's backed up by the data. There was an NPR piece [1] with graphs of what proportion of people taking various other degrees and Computer Science were women. They were increasing in lockstep until the 80s, but then after that CS just kept falling and falling, even (to my surprise) into the 2000s.
How many of the people pursuing any career would do it if it weren't for the salary?
(If it bothers you that salaries play a role in how people choose their majors, advocate for an economic system that allows people to pursue their ideal passions without financial worry, whether those passions are in computer science or poetry or "underwater basket weaving" or what have you. Until such a system is in place, though, it's only reasonable that people, in deciding how they'd like the rest of their life to play out, go where the opportunities are...)
I think it's the same with finance, right? Lots of people follow the money --whether it be finance, CS, law, med-school.
Personally I think it's BS for people to tell you to "follow your passion" and also am critical of the "we need people who are passionate about x". Most people work as a way to make a living.
The first thing that came to my mind, is that many girls that are interested in this stuff may now feel more comfortable than ever to enroll in Computer Science, as the issue of sexism is being tackled and talked about a lot.
This is exactly what I think every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS." If you're only doing it for the money, you're probably doing it wrong. Studying CS for 3 years does not a programmer/hacker make; staying up coding all night or while other kids are playing outside, for years, is what it takes.
Do we say this kind of crap to Lawyers? Doctors? Engineers? (scratch the last one i'm sure we do say this kind of crap to them)
Why must programming be such a soul sucking life encompassing thing? It doesn't matter if you're a woman or man, this stupid mindset that somehow the only way to be a programmer is to be a stereotype needs to be launched into the sun and forevermore forgotten.
Just today I met a girl that was in her last year for aerospace engineering. She didn't look like any nerd you might think. She just looked normal. Great fun to talk to as well.
Maybe when us nerds stop thinking of ourselves as some sort of promised race of super humans we can move past some of this nonsense.
Tomp, the person you responded to, wrote two sentences. You responded to their second sentence, but the first sentence provides the whole context.
Tomp said they think this way every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS". This relates to the whole "the tech industry is sexist" non-sense some radical feminist spew out ... speaking of which, out of the following two which do you think is vital to address (psychologically) first?
- stop attributing the "promised race of super humans" self-perception
- stop attributing the "successful tech men are sexists" projection
Which is causing more strife than the other? Lookup 'github horvath', donglegate ... why even elevatorgate.
> She didn't look like any nerd you might think. She just looked normal. Great fun to talk to as well.
Looks like you're projecting your own ideas and complexes to what I said. Guess what - I look normal as well! But still, my interest in computing goes deeper than finishing class assignments and longer than 3 years.
Most lawyers and doctors don't build stuff. Those that do (do new medical research, or write new laws), I sincerely hope and expect that their knowledge and understanding of their profession goes way beyond an average coprofessional's.
Bad code causes real harm to everyone else on your team, so coders have more incentive to worry about the skill of their coworkers than other professions do. You don't need to be nerdy for that, just good, but the two are correlated because you gain skill if you willingly spend all of your free time on technical stuff.
As for workload, lawyers and doctors tend to be overworked and honestly that's really not okay for doctors, as it leads to dangerous mistakes. My cousin is a lawyer and she always seems to be working, but she's also great at what she does. Another cousin of mine is becoming a doctor and residency is quite a gauntlet for her to run. But those are other issues.
> Bad code causes real harm to everyone else on your team, so coders have more incentive to worry about the skill of their coworkers than other professions do.
There isn't anything unique that bad code inflicts on your co-workers that isn't analogous to the problems faced by most people who have to deal with incompetent coworkers.
You can miss your deadlines due to dealing with it. When you're on call and you get pulled in to clean up someone else's problem. Bad design patterns cause lots of unnecessary duplication of work.
Yes, you can find other jobs where a mistake brings down the whole team, but it's rarely the kind of mistake that can persist in the codebase for years on end simply because there's no budget to refactor.
Now, you might point out that managers can, in fact, cause even more problems than that, but I don't think you'll find many people who want to work for a bad boss, either and I bet you or someone you know knows people who have left otherwise good jobs because of their boss.
Medicine and big-firm law are life encompassing things. Less true of engineering. But for the future doctors, usually pre-med and definitely medical school and being a doctor forces this on you, and for the big firm lawyers, the same.
Right but we're not telling people you can't be a doctor because you didn't sleep and breathe medicine before you went to college.
Least the doctors I have met all seemed to think of it as a job not a lifestyle.
It is that fundamental point I'm slightly annoyed with. Big firm law is also a bit of a clique, a lawyer friend of mine and the lawyers I know of all seem to love law, but aren't of this weird mindset that only the self chosen few are worthy of the endeavor.
I would like to see nerd elitism and nerd bashing both stop.
Some people claim that to be a programmer you need to have a certain personality or hobbies, and this is wrong.
But nerd elitism is also a reaction to having been excluded, ridiculed and sometimes bullied. That doesn't make it right, but it also means that bashing nerds and nerd culture, as is all to common amongst progressives, is both unfair and counterproductive.
What I would like to see more people saying is that it's ok that many people in tech have certain hobbies or personality traits in common, but that a person doesn't have to have these things to work in tech.
They were tinkerers, though. You've got the MIT model railroad kids, all the people that fooled around with scrap electronics, the radioheads, some gearheads.
I have no references to back this up, but I think it would make an interesting longitudinal study, or if you were somewhat cruel, a twin study: are children that spend most of their play time building with Legos or Kinex or erector sets significantly more likely to end up as engineers and computer programmers?
These things don't pay though. People care about diversity only where it pays.
If comp sci. was still seen as a thing for nerds with skin issues that don't get a lot of money you can bet there would be no "diversity" thing going on.
There should be no such thing. Instead of trying to bend ethics I'd rather make sure any one, from any skin color, gender, place of birth, etc. can do anything they want. THAT would be diversity.
The truth is that today what you can do with your life depends a LOT more on your place of birth than your skin color or gender.
A job at McKinsey or Goldman pays far more (risk-adjusted, 7-10 years out of school) than a CS degree does - you can verify that easily. If you're optimizing for money, CS is not the answer (unless you're leveraging it to get a job on Wall Street).
