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Computing was originally seen as clerical work, and it was one of the few acceptable career paths to women even before the social upheaval of the '60s.

What changed was when home computers became widely available, causing society as a whole to redefine how they saw computing. Marketing campaign after marketing campaign promoted computers as a boys' hobby, with consumer software being dominated by games centered around playing sports and shooting things, and nearly all ads for those games showed them being played by boys. Rather than a clerical field, computers were now the latest expensive toys for boys. Computing was presented as "the cool new thing" to boys, and since marketing campaigns targeted boys pretty much exclusively, it gave girls the impression computing was a boys' club where girls weren't welcome. And since girls didn't feel welcome, they got out. The tipping point of this was in 1984, when the number of Computer Science degrees awarded to women peaked and then sharply fell off; it was so bad, the number didn't flatline until the very late '00s.

There have been a few articles on the phenomenon:

* https://www.engadget.com/2014-10-20-what-happened-to-all-of-...

* https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/2875/why-did...

* https://www.codefellows.org/blog/1984-year-women-left-coding...

> Computing was originally seen as clerical work,

Because it largely was. What people originally called "computers" were actually people doing manual calculations:

https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa

During the world wars in the 20th century, most of those "computers" were women since men were more directly involved in the war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)#Wartime_...

> As electrical computers became more available, human computers, especially women, were drafted as some of the first computer programmers.[47] Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women, namely: Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.[48]

My mother was a computer in a bank for a period of time.

Not only seen as clerical, the women who did the work were collectively known as "computers". These computers filled vital roles during both world wars, being tasked with computing the trajectories of shells fired from cannons in the first to working with the mathematicians of Bletchley Park, in England, with solving the decryption of the German Enigma machine. Even as late as the 1960s, women, primarily black women, were employed by NASA to perform a variety of complex and utterly essential calculations that predicted where the rockets were to go during the manned space program. It's really only been within the last 20 years are so that they have achieved the recognition and acclaim they most assuredly earned.

Marketing campaign after marketing campaign promoted computers as a boys' hobby

I don't think so, at least in the early years of personal computing; look at these 80s computer ads and see how many females are in them:

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/retro-computer-ads-from-198...

Another article on the same phenomenon:

* https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

> Grace Hopper and Kathleen Booth

WWII might have had some effect on what young men were doing when those two got their start.

* Breadwinning is associated with the male gender role, so men face more social pressures to be breadwinners than women do. (The proportion of men who e.g. stay at home to parent is much smaller than women, and it's likely fewer women are willing to date a man with that goal, compared to the number of men willing to date a woman with that goal.)

* Once IT became a big industry with lots of good paying jobs, it became extremely attractive to breadwinners.

OK, now rationalize the ratio of men:women who program as a hobby.

Often hobbies are at least adjacent to careers in my experience.

That’s why so many programmers paint small science fiction figurines obsessively.

Then why aren’t single women dominant in tech? You seem to have the assumptions :

1) women are uniformly incentivized against making the most money for their time possible 2) women have children 3) women are married 4) … to men Etc.

Given women were very prevalent in tech until about the advent of the home computer maybe the fact home computers were only marketed to and for boys and the computer was installed in the boys room?

> women are uniformly incentivized against making the most money for their time possible

What makes you assume men and women are working the same amount of time? Labor statistics show that men work more overtime and women are more likely to work part time.

Which fits the hypothesis that men are socially judged more by their breadwinning and women are socially judged more by things like having the flexible time to be a good mom.

> … to men

I'm taking about statistical trends, nobody said all women are married to men, but lesbians are a tiny minority compared to straight women. Even if all lesbians adopted masculine gender roles, that wouldn't change the fact that the majority of women follow female gender roles.

> why aren’t single women dominant in tech?

Because single women are equally subject to workplace hostility: men "don't discriminate" when we discriminate.

> Breadwinning is associated with the male gender

The passive voice is undermining your point, here.

Patriarchal ideology associates breadwinning with the male gender and men, fearful in light of the aforementioned social pressures, are uniquely hostile to women who, under patriarchy, our society has agreed to side-line as a class.

Then it seems the main enforcers of "patriarchal ideology" are those straight women who prefer to date men who are successful breadwinners over men who aim to be stay at home dads.

Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in particular, and it's extremely worrying how prevalent this opposition to romantic freedom has become in online discourse.

It's worthwhile to explore from where these social pressures arrive. Parents, teachers, peers, religious authorities, bosses, and advertising come to mind. I wonder where you'd rank the influence of all these? For reference, don't hesitate to look into bell hooks "The Will to Change;"[0] as feminist texts go, it's extremely sympathetic to men. I think you'll find a lot to agree with, right off the bat.

0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change

> Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in particular

Of course not, don't be ridiculous. That doesn't change the effect of their preferences, though.

And, of course men's preferences also have an effect on women. There's no need to be defensive (or aggressive) here.

> Parents, teachers

Which gender are those mostly? Who is buying girls Barbie dolls and boys Action Man?

> Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in particular

Who said women (or men) are? But who people choose to date is obviously a very strong source of societal pressure. Have you not heard of "sexual selection"?

If men refused to date women who wear pants, that would be strong pressure on women to wear dresses instead.

If women refuse to date stay at home dads, that's strong pressure on men to be breadwinners instead.

It is only "male dominated" in the West. Look in the East (both Asia and former USSR) and you'll see far more females working in the computing/electronics industry.

In India most IT jobs are male dominated.

Maybe because it's largely populated by people trained in CS, which in turn is rooted in the fairly male-dominated field of math.

I think in times past, the achievements of woman in STEM were downplayed and disproportionately overshadowed by men of their same era. You have to assume that most reporters and journalists covering tech would have been male as well.

> Between pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Kathleen Booth, it's still weird to me that IT has ended up becoming a male dominated industry.

The issue is segmenting "IT" as some special industry separate from any other skilled trade that relies more on knowledge than tools than say... car stuff.

When you have to clarify if someone meant someone is a rapist or just someone who TK when the word "asshole" is used in policy circles, you begin to understand why some things went the way they did.

I ended up enrolling in a PhD to get out of my hometown because they actually did a good job of making things like STEM admissions more gender equal -- but they did it with don't ask, don't tell in effect, when you'd be told sarcastically "maybe you should go smoke some weed" by folks who didn't seem to grok -- you're a social worker who can send people off to prison, how dare you just casually tell people who the system has failed to just go take a risk whose costs won't fall on you.

(But I wasn't mature enough to articulate it that way, so I drank a lot and made a lot of rude posts on the internet)

Anyways, it is ABSOLUTELY weird, and tied in with the fact that post WWII many GI bill benefits were not evenly distributed... and so on and so forth.

I'm not going to rehash the American civil rights movement in the HN comments section at shortly after midnight on what will be, later... devil's night.

PS: As always, I'm a guy, so take what I say on these matters with a grain of salt.

It's a solitary activity and it seems men are more prone to living single, solitary lifestyles and see no decline in lifestyle moving into IT. Conversely, women tend to be hardwired to be more social and gravitate toward more social jobs like nursing.

The real question is why more men don't enter nursing since it would allow them the social lifestyle that they don't have and won't get going into IT. Both fields pay about the same starting salary too.

> It's a solitary activity and it seems men are more prone to living single, solitary lifestyles

Software development is not a solitary activity, it is a highly social and collaborative activity, and besides that, introversion is no less prevalent in women than in men.

That the field became male-dominated once computing became simultaneously expensive and highly profitable should be entirely unsurprising.

Isn't medicine expensive, highly profitable and significantly female-dominated these days?

Medicine is not at all female dominated, just certain categories in it like nursing and pharma sales reps. If you move up the ladder of money and influence, you will find that the majority of doctors, administrators, CEOs etc. are very much male.

Breaking down just doctors, the profession is 2/3 male, and within it women lean towards specialties like gynecology, pediatrics and palliative medicine while the most prestigious ones like various kinds of surgery and radiology are male dominated.

Not as to doctors: https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data...

Nursing (which is a huge industry of course) is the notable exception within medicine. But it’s still subordinate.

Working physicians is a trailing indicator. The leading indicator is MD students which have been majority women for years now.

But what proportions will actually work as doctors?

I assume most of them have to, for at least some years, to pay off their medical school loans.

1. these days 2. nursing may be female-dominated, but the gender ratio of doctors (for whom the industry is significantly more profitable) is still heavily skewed towards men, is it not?

Not in my experience, the more senior roles are still skewed towards men.

> once computing became [...] expensive

At what point in time do you think computing became more expensive than it was before? If anything, the cost of computing has been strictly monotonically decreasing since the very first programmable computer.

Indeed. My personal pet theory is that this combination (expensive + unprofitable) might have been why so many early pioneers of computing were female in the first place.

> My personal pet theory is that this combination (expensive + unprofitable) might have been why so many early pioneers of computing were female in the first place.

That doesn't make any sense. Just 10 minutes before you've claimed that computing became male-dominated because it was expensive:

> That the field became male-dominated once computing became simultaneously expensive and highly profitable should be entirely unsurprising.

and now you claim that it was female-dominated at first because it was expensive?

> simultaneously expensive and highly profitable

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