The computer girls (1967 issue of Cosmopolitan)
thesocietypages.org
thesocietypages.org
The Computer Girls By Lois Mandel
A trainee gets $8,000 a year . . . a girl “senior systems analyst” gets $20,000—and up! Maybe it’s time to investigate . . . .
Ann Richardson, IBM systems engineer, designs a bridge via computer. Above (left) she checks her facts with fellow systems engineer, Marvin V. Fuchs. Right, she feeds facts into the computer. Below, Ann demonstrates on a viewing screen how her facts designed the bridge, and makes changes with a “light pen.”
Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher . . . maybe a librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could go into the professions and compete with men . . . usually working harder and longer to earn less pay for the same job.
Now have come the big, dazzling computers—and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store.
And if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work—well, it just is.
(“I had this idea I’d be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all day long,” says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. “I couldn’t have been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem, and then instruct the machine to do it.”
“It’s just like planning a dinner,” explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”
What she’s talking about is apititude—the one most important quality a girl needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind. And if that zeroes out the old Billie Burke-Gracie Allen image of femininity, it’s about time, because this is the age of the Computer Girls. There are twenty thousand of them in the United (cont. on page 54)
We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.
(Almost twice as much, since a few women have managed to emerge with amazing technical superpowers from a still very sexist and sexist-tolerant society.)
For a very long time I had faith in how far we had progressed in sexual equality in American culture. But very many experiences over the past many years have convinced me overwhelmingly of how very far American culture still needs to go before every girl and woman has a level playing field at EVERY STAGE of educational and professional opportunity.
This is extremely important for every single one of you. If you're an American male programmer or engineer or scientist today, keep in mind always that almost half of your potential awesome colleagues or awesome employees aren't there working with you because they faced obstacles you might never have imagined.
Please, everyone, make it better and treat every single person the same way in every way from now on.
I know sexual harassment is an issue at some conferences, etc, so I doubt we're there yet as far as the reaches go, but I wonder if 50/50% representation is ever going to happen in IT, the boardroom, the classroom, science or in prisons. For instance, the suspicion towards males at playgrounds and in teaching positions and the lack of suspicion towards females removes a entire set of males from many child centric occupations, thereby sticking them in ones unrelated to children, unbalancing it.
I hope that there isn't the case, but there may be something about testosterone, expectations of mating, etc holding us here deeper than just educational awareness, or promotion mechanisms. I am not saying this is good, just pointing out we may be approaching the point where bias isn't the issue, other socio/biological factors are and may require bigger tools to get past.
Thinking that just better advertising will solve gender imbalances in technical roles is overly simple.
It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!" if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like tinkering with computers?
It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter), you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion about empirical truth.
So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other possible explanations we haven't ruled out.
We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same opportunities regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender distribution.
> We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.
In other words, women are in a minority in this field, therefore someone must be oppressing them.
> But if you think we're anywhere near [the point of everyone having completely equal opportunity] you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't educated yourself at all about this.
I'm of the opinion that modern young men and women have equal enough opportunities in education and in the programming job market that a lack of opportunity probably is not a primary cause of the gender gap in computer science, any more than I think a lack of opportunity for men accounts for the predominance of women in education for example. You keep talking about discrimination but you still fail to provide any evidence; if you want us to believe there is a legitimate gender discrimination problem here, the burden of proof is on you to show that it actually exists. At the moment all you offer is hand-waving.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...