Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdix | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of the "early days of CS" narrative. Could it be that there were lots of women working with computers because it was seen as "secretarial" work. In other words, was it just bosses placing their female employees in computer-related roles as companies added those positions? If so, could it be that that "dropoff" in the 80s could be just reflective of the demographics of people who were choosing that profession. i.e. Once "computers" became a career that you could pursue, as opposed to being placed in, it attracted more men than women, possibly because men are more attracted to that type of work.

View on HN

My mother's college roommate went to work for NASA and worked on the Apollo projects starting in the 50s. Programming at that time was all women, and it was definitely seen as menial work. The literal astrophysicists and computer scientists were doing the "real" work, and the women were "just punching cards."

That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems.

But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving.

My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place.

You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine.

But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around.

The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.

No one is saying programming with Punch cards isn't programming. They are saying that transcribing paper into punchcards and running them through the computer isn't programming, any more than typing in code is programming. Someone who writes code that they or others put into the machine, is programming

Sure, but the scientists at NASA didn't write code. They wrote down the computations that needed to be carried out and the women who punched the cards had to turn them into programs. And as we all know, transfering a formula to code and making it run efficiently is not trivial, even if you're working with a language "well suited" for the task like FORTRAN (which I'm going to bet was on the punched cards the OP's friend was editing).

I know that initially, part of the reason was that only women knew how to type.

In fact, it was almost embarrassing for a man if he knew how to type since that was women's work.

So I'm sure that played a role once keyboard came into the picture.

Before that, when it was mostly punchcards, women were manual "computers" that did the calculations. So it seems reasonable that computers were considered women's work and thus that drive the trend.

Whether women were more or less suited to the job wouldn't seem to be relevant at the time.

> more or less suited

I would say "more or less preferred" is a more relevant and less acerbic metric to consider.

I think James Damore's main thesis (or one of his main theses) was that men had more of a natural and biologically driven preference to work with things/machines. So if women were placed in these positions, it detracts from the narrative that "something mysterious happened in the 80s that caused women to flee the computer industry".

Doesn't your narrative just confirm then that "working with computers" has always been related to social norms? Women were placed there and performed as well as any later man(hence many notable women in early computer science).

When ceos started realizing the potential social and economic power of the magic typing box it was no longer socially taboo for men to operate them. Of course, no self respecting business elite man would use one, only dirty hippie social rejects.

That's what makes the whole thing extra sad. For the longest time silicon valley types had to deal with being social outcasts in the business world. Rather than learn from that to be more inclusive they just took up the mantle of the business elite they replaced and perpetuated the same system of prejudice. In fact now that I think about it part of excluding women from the profession might have been an attempt at self preservation. Early tech people knew they were already looked down upon, if they didn't amp up the sexism to make it clear they were real men they would look even weaker to their east coast elite superiors.

> Doesn't your narrative just confirm then that "working with computers" has always been related to social norms?

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. It doesn't matter how well they "performed". What matters is: would they have chosen that profession if they weren't placed there? Could it be that men preferred computer-related careers more than women did? If so, then the fact that many women were placed in those careers initially is completely irrelevant to the question of why there aren't a lot of women in those careers now.

The graph in the article linked by the OP plots the number of women majoring in computer science (and another three fields). Unless "computer science" meant something radically different in the '70s and early '80s than it does today, or secretaries' roles included coding algorithms and data structures in PDP assembly, then no, those were not secretaries, but computer scientists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com