Hacker News Reader

> Remember all those women that dropped out of the Software workforce in the 70's?

What's this?

A lot of the early CS-related workforce was actually made of women, because dealing with mainframes was originally seen as an extension of typing and shorthand (secretarial work traditionally reserved to women) with some math on top. Sometime around the early '70s / early '80s, the field morphed into the male-dominated world we see today.

This has been discussed on HN in the past, usually in threads about female CS pioneers working at NASA and so on. I believe the consensus is that there wasn't a single individual cause for the change, but rather a number of conditions changed around the same time, discouraging women from CS-related jobs.

The field morphing in to being male dominated and the existing women dropping out are two different things. Sure, what you're saying has been discussed plenty on HN. As far as I know the other posters statement hasn't.

See Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over" and Marie Hicks' "Programmed Inequality".

https://youtu.be/4vCDHJ4-D80 https://youtu.be/WTLJ7saIV3o

Reply on news.ycombinator.com