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Zikes

> Gender inequality has permeated the technology and computer science fields since their earliest beginnings.

It's true. The earliest "computers" were overwhelmingly women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computi...

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Those were secretarial jobs and not equivalent to today's computer programmers, like Ada Lovelace.

Those were secretarial jobs because the men designing the hardware thought that was the hard stuff, and that designing software was basically secretarial work. When they discovered that designing software was hard, they forced the women out. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

It's a common pattern throughout history and one that really annoys me. People argue that the pay gap isn't real because men choose more highly-valued positions, but the reality is that positions favoured by women are inherently considered low-value. If some type of "women's work" somehow starts to become respectable or starts to pay better, it stops being "women's work" and the women are pushed out. If women start entering a respectable field and the field becomes "women's work", it stops being respectable. You can see it with the salaries of doctors in Russia, and the narrowing definition of what is considered "hard science" or STEM as women enter these fields in the US. It has very little to do with how difficult or important the work is.

I'm curious, what used to be considered a "hard science" that is now no longer considered so due to (or corralated with) the influx of women into that field?

There might be confusion about causality here. Generally women find more success in a field that's not jammed full of highly competitive men who push anyone weaker out of the way. Where they move on to some other target, the playing field becomes more fair.

Your theory sounds more plausible to me. I'm male and find an all-male environment incredibly competitive, toxic and tiring to myself. It's very hard to get reasonable discussions and almost always degenerates into competition.

So I can imagine that you just bail if you aren't conditioned to put up with that kind of crap.

In the short term that may be true, but over a timespan of decades or generations, social attitudes about the roles of women more generally are more important. It is only very recently that the kind of constraints you mention are influential—previous generations would simply see women (or men) excluded from various domains.

So how does this explain low-valued male work like construction and garbage disposal?

Construction and garbage workers may have lower status, but these are generally good-paying bluecollar jobs. Construction in particular has a wide range of skill levels.

No, it's because back then programming was largely secretarial and clerical and involved many manual tasks repeated over and over to set up the programs. It was very different from what is done today.

> many manual tasks repeated over and over to set up the programs

In some ways, not much different to today

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