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NPR: '80s Ads Are Responsible For the Lack of Women Coders

gollum123 writes: Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as medicine, law, or science. But in 1984, the number of women majoring in computing-related subjects began to fall, and the percentage of women is now significantly lower in CS than in those other fields. NPR's Planet Money sought to answer a simple question: Why? According to the show's experts, computers were advertised as a "boy's toy." This, combined with early '80s geek culture staples like the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, as well as movies like War Games and Weird Science, conspired to instill the perception that computers were primarily for men.

7 of 786 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

    It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

    It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article)
    It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men
    It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field
    It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

    These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

  2. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
  3. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? by nctritech · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is no excuse for this being modded down Troll, especially sinec i kan reed's three-link reference post is Informative. Agenda execution detected.

  4. Or by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or, it could be, that this is complete nonsense:
    http://www.computerworld.com/a...

    The entire field had the same bump. It wasn't just women. The percentage of women in the field has never risen above about 35%
    I'd argue that's when the field was new and exciting. Then it tapered off and remained stable until the internet bubble... and tapered off again.

    I think that, if anything, this shows women are savvy. They saw a new tech, took advantage of it. After the industry became less flashy, and the best jobs were harder to get they moved on. Then when the realities of the industry started to sink in and the industry collapsed they again left.

  5. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Where she will be subjected to daily microaggression from male coworkers who know they will get away with it because the bosses are all male?

    Based on my professional experience in Silicon Valley, the pressence of a female into an all male group causes the guys to clean up their acts and behave appropriately in a hurry. Any "microaggression" is taken care of within the group. If anyone does get out of line, it's a long visit to the HR office.

  6. Re:1..2..3 before SJW by LWATCDR · · Score: 3, Informative

    "If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. "
    That is not sexism. Guess what? They did the exact same thing to males in the class.
    I have read studies that show that women do better in all women schools because men tend to compete and display while women tend to co-operate.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  7. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Informative

    With that many links they won't refute anything because nobody is going to click them. It is an obvious troll.

    If there were just 3 or 4 links, then a person might think, "Oh, somebody researched it and found something contextual." If it is a giant list of links, it is more like, somebody did a search and pasted it. Which is just trolling, we all know how to do an internet search on our own. With that many links, I'll bet half of them repeat each other's language because they're repeats of the same source documents.

    And the high percent of tumblr and youtube links makes it even more clear it is not serious information.

    The vastly most likely answer is that it is pasted from some anti-feminist list.

    I did check a couple of them and they were absurd crap, not anything relevant to this discussion, and not anything that a reasonable person would confuse with being relevant here.