Wolf Wohlwend
Joshua MensahIt's wild how computer programming went from exclusively women's work to "we're not sexist we just don't think women are interested in it" in like 40 years
Patrick Vanhoucke@jpkmensah It’s not wild. It's typically how men behave. In the beginning, programming was a repititive ‘thing’ men didn't deign to do. Now programming is something you can derive status from. That's the sad truth.
levampyre@librarianbe @jpkmensah It was also an indoors, sitting on a desk job, not physically hard labour under the sun in the open fields. Our notion of "labour" has changed in modern times, now including desk jobs. I wish it would change to also include "care and education jobs". The sector could really benefit from better wages and more investment (by powerful men).
Galadriel@librarianbe @jpkmensah sad but true.
Henrik@jpkmensah and the majority that held the work title of computer was women. IBM credited some female mainframe operators as models in a ad-campaign
Carly Sagan@jpkmensah what’s worse is that men can get software engineer jobs without a degree at all but women have to have a graduate degree to get any tech work whatsoever
Grassroots Joe@carlysagan @jpkmensah
I worked with dozens of women at Shared Medical Systems (health care IT) 1984-89, women at a 100 person IT consultancy, 1989-91, taught systems analysis & design to women when I had my own co., 1991-2003, worked w. women at ING's annuity insurance division, 2003-2012, & more after returning to SMS, then a division of Siemens, in 2012 & Cerner Corp after its purchase of the division in 2015 until 2019.
The great majority had BA or BS degrees.
None ...
I worked with dozens of women at Shared Medical Systems (health care IT) 1984-89, women at a 100 person IT consultancy, 1989-91, taught systems analysis & design to women when I had my own co., 1991-2003, worked w. women at ING's annuity insurance division, 2003-2012, & more after returning to SMS, then a division of Siemens, in 2012 & Cerner Corp after its purchase of the division in 2015 until 2019.
The great majority had BA or BS degrees.
None ...
@carlysagan @jpkmensah
of this is to say that women had an easy time at any of these places, are not at a significant disadvantage trying to get into STEM fields nor discriminated against in the pay they receive. To the contrary, I witnessed rather egregious pay discrimination on several occasions.
of this is to say that women had an easy time at any of these places, are not at a significant disadvantage trying to get into STEM fields nor discriminated against in the pay they receive. To the contrary, I witnessed rather egregious pay discrimination on several occasions.
@joeinwynnewood @jpkmensah ok, well health care and insurance isn’t exactly heavy tech, I’d expect more women there. In physics, aerospace, and algorithm dev (my areas), I’ve almost always been the only woman. It’s not bc there aren’t female job candidates. It’s that they’re only interviewed/hired if they have ivy league graduate degrees. So women have to be saddled with student loan debt to get into tech & men don’t. Pretty fucked. Not paying my loans explicitly bc of this.
@carlysagan @jpkmensah
Please be careful about extrapolating personal experience in a limited area across a broader spectrum.
And I would contest your statement regarding health care IT. It is quite complex across multiple domains.
Please be careful about extrapolating personal experience in a limited area across a broader spectrum.
And I would contest your statement regarding health care IT. It is quite complex across multiple domains.
Klaus Pforr
Clifton Royston@jpkmensah
More like 50 years now IME, but yeah. When I started in programming in my teens, the first team I worked for had 2 women on it, one of them a black grandmother.
More like 50 years now IME, but yeah. When I started in programming in my teens, the first team I worked for had 2 women on it, one of them a black grandmother.
Barry Schwartz 🫖@jpkmensah And one funny thing about that is my wife was a computer programmer and her women friends were computer programmers and now it’s bullies even I as a man computer programmer can’t deal with.
Tato@jpkmensah it's one of the rare examples i can think of that went in this direction, tbh. usually "women's work" remains a stain on a field lowering its perceived value and status.
@jpkmensah i guess the value of programming was too clear and too high for the typical pattern to maintain
Tonya Canning@Tato @jpkmensah
It strikes me that it's when tasks become less labour-intensive that men waltz in and take over
It strikes me that it's when tasks become less labour-intensive that men waltz in and take over
teledyn 𓂀Pure coincidence the industry migration from solutions-oriented to maximal-profit motives occurs in this same time frame.
Gates taught us two things: people don't want working software, they want software NOW, and where there's a want, there's extortion money to be made.
Add to that how the girls in John Nash's lab didn't behave according to his Game Theory market model, so their data was excluded from publication.
Are girls 'uninterested'? Or just smarter… 😅
Pamela Ehn@teledyn @jpkmensah I remember being ridiculed for using a Mac, and I’m like, why do I have to spend all this time telling a box what to do when a Mac will just do it? This observation is more relevant to the 90s than today.
Incorrigible Maker for HARRIS@jpkmensah
Programming was initially arcane & very difficult to grasp & maintain concentration while getting it into workable form. It quit being "women's work" when it got easy enough for men to understand
Programming was initially arcane & very difficult to grasp & maintain concentration while getting it into workable form. It quit being "women's work" when it got easy enough for men to understand
Elizabeth@jpkmensah yes, right when all the money and opportunity got there. An interesting reversal happened for bank tellers who used to be male and well-paid.
Rob Landley@jpkmensah Any time a field gets lucrative, men push out women. Here's the famous 1983 MIT paper on that purge happening in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf
(See also @sarahtaber 's thread on "egg money" and https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch".)
JoJaSciPo
David@jpkmensah Also countries like India and China don't have this "problem" of women not liking to program.
David W. Jones@jpkmensah
Male habit: When there's no status for doing something, and you can't make money doing it, they won't do it. Brewing beer used to be women's work, you know, until men discovered you could make money at it!
@deirdresm
Male habit: When there's no status for doing something, and you can't make money doing it, they won't do it. Brewing beer used to be women's work, you know, until men discovered you could make money at it!
@deirdresm
Juliefaithmcmurrayart@jpkmensah I do know a lot of programmers, most of them are men.
AngryYukkuri@jpkmensah happens every time men decide a profession is getting too prestigious and rewarding to let women do it.
@jpkmensah as a woman dev, I'm grateful every day for the women who came before me. I hope that more girls and women hear the stories of others in the field (current and past) and see it as a career that isn't only for men. I love making space at the table for anyone who wants to be there.
Mazal 
Josiah Mannion@mazal @jpkmensah It's like there's a... I don't know, pattern to this, or something.
Clive Weeks@jpkmensah
I worked in IT for 25 years in Australia and there was always a pretty even split been genders where I worked - though the very senior management was more male. I was in banking (mostly male team management at that time), retail & customer relations, so nothing really cutting edge…
I worked in IT for 25 years in Australia and there was always a pretty even split been genders where I worked - though the very senior management was more male. I was in banking (mostly male team management at that time), retail & customer relations, so nothing really cutting edge…
estherderbySome people see a tie in the shift to the advent of PCs in the home in the early 80s. Boys got computers to play with. Girls didn't. By the time young women enrolled in their first comp sci class in college, they were "behind." Even if they were brilliant at math or brilliant generally.
Prolly not the only thing, but probably one of the influences.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
@jpkmensah Now that I'm thinking about it... I recall seeing an article about a shift in hiring criteria for programmers. Empathy became a dis-qualifier. Don't have the citation at the moment.
Stephen Drennan@jpkmensah Can you expand on the actual dates of the 40 year period you’re talking about please, Josh?
Joanna Link@jpkmensah I think it was even quicker than that, it seems to have switched from the early 60s to the early 80s
RanaldClouston@jpkmensah Just dropping this into the thread in case anyone hasn't read it: 'When Computers Were Women' by Jennifer S. Light is worth a read: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356
seismographix@jpkmensah Sometimes it is a problem, when the environment is telling you, what you should be interested in. Especially when this environment prefers presentation over content and is populated by people manipulating each other for the personal gain.
cmeier@jpkmensah My Dad, a physicist, began his career in the 1950s writing programs to chase particles around accelerators. I remember him commenting in the 1970s on how many of his colleagues were women and wondering why this newish field seemed to attract women. He thought it was because it was such a new field that society had not yet assigned gender roles and so it offered opportunities unavailable to smart women in other fields. But now that it is obvious how much money can be made programming..
AlexisDyslexic@jpkmensah same thing happened to Women & beer. I know it sounds silly but these industries are both supper lurcative. And Men keep getting away with it. The concept of a 'witch'; a woman with a cat, pointy hat & a couldren, were all of midieval merchants. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-beer-industry-until-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/
Geoff 🏴
Dgomn@jpkmensah here’s a podcast discussing what happened with that: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?i=1000589306248
Cheryl Platz 
@jpkmensah It may just be me, but I feel like I see this pattern frequently: women / NB migrate to new spaces because they are marginalized, make a success of it, and then the marginalizers storm in to take all the gains away. I observed this in the smart speaker market, too: you'd be surprised at just how many of the critical early pioneers across Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and beyond were women you've never heard from. #technology #uxdesign
Jeff ♨️ Darcy@jpkmensah My mother in law and (now deceased) father in law met as programmers at Mitre in the 60s. It always amazed me that they could talk openly about how she was probably the more skilled of the two but he got a better title, office, and paycheck explicitly because he was male ... and there was no rancor at all that I could tell. No recognition that anything was wrong with it.
Dr. Kamella Tate@jpkmensah See also brewing; cooking; sewing/tailoring; must be others . . . Why can't it be housework and childcare????
JohnMashey
JohnMashey (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Strongly recommended: Mar Hicks @[email protected], Programmed Inequality: https://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Inequality-Discarded-Technologists-Computing/dp/0262535181 Mar gave a great talk on this at #ComputerHistoryMuseum a few years ago. It especially resonated with my (PhD mathematical programming) British wife.
Adara Astin@jpkmensah Every field does as soon as it involves prestige or money. Like clockwork.
@jpkmensah The same men would rush to clean houses and raise babies claiming women "just aren't interested" if you could convince them they could get rich quick doing it.
Lynn Grant@jpkmensah In the mainframe arena, women have been working productively in IT for at least the last 45 years (roughly the length of my career). My understanding is that things may be different in the West coast brogrammer culture.
Red Faster@jpkmensah Same reasons there aren't more female bricklayers.
Emerging technologies reduce the burden of physical labor and costs can be cut by hiring women and children cheaper.
Once there is a demand for increased productivity then the low effort opportunities are found elsewhere.
Investors and child labor move onto the next big thing but only after some really hungry people built the framework.
Men get stuck doing inhuman labor faster for fear that regulators will shut them down.
Madison@jpkmensah This is like every new field ever. It starts as "women's work" until men realize it's important and profitable, then suddenly it pays more and women are excluded. Screenwriting is a big one, too.
Daniel Albuschat@jpkmensah I think the world would be a better place if computer stuff was still mostly done by women. 🫣
Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!)@jpkmensah my grandmother was a computer programmer back in the 50s when it was still "women's work"; she worked on an IBM 650...
Dan Ciruli@jpkmensah What's wild to me is that it didn't take 40 years. It took 20 years max. In the late 60s, Margaret Hamilton was writing all of the Apollo code. By the late 80s, the field was very, very male dominated.
Phyllis Lamken@jpkmensah that is basically every female profession when it starts paying well.
Naomi@jpkmensah I wonder how much of it's down to personal computing's wholesale adoption by stock market traders, during the time markets were booming in the Reagan/Thatcher years, and home to all those toxic, coked-up douche-bros.
There's certainly a long lineage of grifters and get-rich-quick-schemers among men involved in IT since then.
And in the 90s I saw a lot of those kinds of attitudes from the teachers, and several students, when I chose Computer Studies at high school, with the intent of programming games, only to be repeatedly told that 'computers are for business'.
Iris van Rooij 💭@jpkmensah It was not an accident; it was by design https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535182/programmed-inequality/
Tin 
@5ciFiGirl Why would anyone think that women are incapable or not interested in programming (or math, or science)? Have any of these people ever seen a sewing machine? Our grandmothers were freaking *engineers*.
Sci-Fi GirlWhen they think that something is beneath them, they leave it to us. (Never noticing, or denying, just how much skill is required).
But once it becomes interesting to them, they get possessive! 🙄
Hein Ragas@jpkmensah Men only got into computers after the women had made it easy for them to do so.
Leia@jpkmensah It's almost as if we had the explanation of the gender pay gap back to front all along...
"Software development is but one example of an occupation whose gender composition completely changed over the course of decades. Teaching also experienced a turnover in the gender of its staff, but the direction of the trend was reversed, with women replacing men as educators. And when they did, the salaries and status of the profession dropped sharply.". https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/what-programmings-past-reveals-about-todays-gender-pay-gap/498797/
