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Comment by bigdubs | Hacker News Reader

Something that occurred to me when I first saw this video is the number of women featured, I can't say with certainty if I've seen a recent major tech demo video from a large company feature as many.

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This was right around the peak of CS degrees awarded to women: 37% in 1984.

Thank you for mentioning this - there's a perception that CS and tech has always been male dominated, but there were plenty of women programmers in the 80's and the field has become even more male-dominated since. It's really annoying that one of the primary qualifications for tech CEO's is apparently 'be a tall man, ideally white but Asian is OK too'

"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since"

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

There was, in fact, a point in time when programming was 100% dominated by women.

Indeed! At one point a "computer" was a person, and this was also a field where women were relatively well represented (when compared to other fields during the same time periods).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

Who'd have thought that women could be nerds, too.

Yep. Interesting reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-program...

One of the women, Lorinda Cherry raced rally cars as a hobby:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry

Here's an interview with her that I just dug up:

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/cherry.htm

I noticed the same thing when watching the SICP lectures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PL8FE88AA54...)

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