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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.
As I recall, it was more that, in movies and TV, women found romance working in business, and rarely in computing.
Computing meant anti-social. Business meant meeting attractive men in business suits with lots of money and power.
Geeks only had time travel in bad looking vans.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
FFS, enough with the concern trolling. We get it, there isn't a 50/50 ratio of men and women in tech.
I fail to see why we have to try and forcibly "fix" that and can't just accept that women, for whatever reason, don't want to go into tech.
You don't see anyone complaining about the lack of men in nursing or as elementary school teachers or the lack of women garbage collectors. Stop whining about the same thing in tech.
the thing is that computer science was transformed to during the 80's and not the same thing it was before
previous discussion about this
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I am by no means a feminist; but this sounds like patronizing, paternalistic bullshit. News flash: woman have brains and they do what they want. They don't want to code. Deal with it.
And I'm reminded about someone who objected to this line of reasoning saying "who cares if its social and political, let people make their choice".
And while I let that vacuous line of reasoning slide before, I'm going to nip in the bud here and point out that if you don't care about that, you also shouldn't care about us people trying to effect social and political changes.
In before SJW brigade comes in demanding everyone involved apologized.
Nope, only the white males--the source of all evil in the world. Any other group may use their "Victim of Evil White Male Oppression" card in lieu of an apology.
Coders (well, STEM jobs in general) will build the future. The more coders that we have the faster we will reach a bright future.
We are discouraging large chunks of people who have the intelligence to train as coders, thus our future is dimmer.
While I have not read the article, I suspect the article is being too simplistic. Culture is pushing away girls (As Barbie says, "Math is hard!") to woman. Most women pick careers that are "family friendly" or offers a good life / work balance.
That might be the same article that mentioned that Cosmo used to push the idea of women programmers. Do they still do that or did they stop doing that in the 80's.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
Nerds are the tail end of the problem. You're expecting them to wag the dog when it's the greeks and the jocks that control all of the really relevant media outlets.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We have a great reason, in fact I read it the other day and said "Wow, this is brilliant!". What is this reason? People are making too much money as developers so people are trying to drive the market price down. The same issues we talk about for women programmers are used for getting kids interested in programming, and the same reasons we are seeing all this hype to increase the H1B numbers for developers.
I know, I know.. it's really hard to believe that big businesses would collude for nefarious purposes because all of these businesses are purely altruistic and have never harmed society. It's probably harder to believe that the Government would be in on this collusion, because our Government has never harmed it's own people either. (if the sarcasm is not obvious I can't help you)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If we're looking for a reason, I think this is the best one I've heard so far.
The thing about the media being the cause I think is wrong, that was just an effect.
The cause I think is spot on, that males are competitive and in general more solitary (damn that testosterone), and females are more apt to be concerned with social aspects. In the late 70's and 80s computers became much more accessible to those competitive loners (nerd stereotyping here).
Which is to say, its not that females can't do it, or that males are better at it (insert whatever you want for it), its just that they are quite possibly just not interested as much. Before the advent of Personal Computers, computing was mostly prevalent in an academic setting, which is more social..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.
We "clearly socially and politically influence" people to hold down a job, not smoke, refrain from promiscuous sexual behavior, and a wide variety of other behaviors.
And yet - We all still have the right to live under a bridge, smoke, fuck anything that moves, yadda yadda yadda.
When women want to go into tech and can't, we have a problem. When women don't want to go into tech... Hey, start your own marketing campaign like Google has done, but lose the guilt-tripping SJW faux indignation BS.
Thanks.
...so today are women ndividuals who can do anything men can do and are perfectly capable of functioning in modern society to wit, choosing the career path that they want to follow out of interest, talent, and education?
Or are they intimidatable, wilting violets incapable of exercising free will, intimidated by the faintest approbation, and unable to choose a career because some shitty 1980s movies didn't ACTUALLY show "girls doing data entry"?
I'm just trying to keep track here. I need to know if I should treat them like plain old people, or tread delicately around their fragile sensibilities?
-Styopa
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yes women tend to outperform men over all in math but it's irrelevant because we are looking in the top percentile and if you look at the category men outperform women. Same as there are most men in the lowest percentile.
So to look at the averages when what is interesting is the top just creates disinformation.
In your view, is it a problem that men are nearly 10x as likely as women to die on the job?
What systemic factors should we address so that the number of women dying in mine cave-ins rises to equal the number of men?
Oh, this isn't a priority for you? Why not?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
That might be the same article that mentioned that Cosmo used to push the idea of women programmers. Do they still do that or did they stop doing that in the 80's.
It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.
Nerds are the tail end of the problem. You're expecting them to wag the dog when it's the greeks and the jocks that control all of the really relevant media outlets.
I wonder what this portends for the future of programming.
Because if young women are turned away, indeed discouraged by anything not completely positive, it means that Programming and all of the other Tch type careers will have to be completely revamped.
Case in point, I went for a tech career. I wanted it, and I gave not a flying fig what anyone thought about whether it was cool, socially uplifting, or fashionable. I was not in any way shape or form discouraged by my meekness, nor the portrayals of tech people on Television
All of the females I worked felt exactly the same way.
All of the males I worked with felt exactly the same way.
And we worked hard, put in a lot of hours because that is what we wanted to do. And we did it.
Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
Hey - we'll need good luck with that. I've always said that the only way to get gender balance will be to force young women into Tech jobs.
Or perhaps Tech isn't a job for everyone?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Where the Hell do you work? Sounds like a terribly crappy company - name and shame! Then change to a less crappy one (which may involve learning not-Ruby). I've been a dev for 20-mumble years in 4 states, and I've never seen a culture like that.
Or was that a list of imaginary problems?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Your post already provided the necessary context and the links in that post are references that refute what you've said. Declaring that it's not valid or is "a crappy post" doesn't make it so.
It is because women are smarter than men, and are making more informed career choices.
Back in the days of punched cards and computers the size of a whole data centre now, and memory that didn't got away when the power went off (yeah, I know, that one's come around again now), programming was a 9-5 family friendly (as much as any job was) day job. Programmers and operators were often women (my mother was one), if not mostly women - seriously, just do a google images search for "mainframe operator 1960s" (just for one example), those images reflect the number of women working with computers that you'll see in printed material from that era too.
Somewhere around the 80's - 90's with the personal computer revolution, and gaming, and continuing with the dotcom boom, programming turned into an aggressive deadline-driven first-to-market ship-it-yesterday career, with a long-hours work-till-it's-done culture that spread from startups out to entire parts of the industry (see gaming...). And the women stopped coming.
To pick a couple of other industries / careers I have some (UK based) knowledge of: in roughly the same time scale, in medical and veterinary, professionals went from being on-call all-hours (junior doctors infamously worked a standard 120hr week) to having out-of-hours contracted out and on-call hours counted into the limits under EU working time directive. Every programming job I've had has required me to opt out of the working time directive, but doctors don't. Now take a guess on two professional careers in the UK which are (or soon will be) majority female... medical (doctors) and veterinary. That is where all the smart women went, and if you want to know why just look at the culture changes in those professions and in programming.
Every time a company *does* start an initiative to get more women in tech, Slashdot has the exact same outrage that they do here. Seriously, go click on any of the articles, and you'll see people complaining:
"No it's just the ~natural~ way of things" :("
"women are stupid and bad at coding! "
"but now men are being discriminated against
Well, that's unfortunate. Because, try as I might, I've yet to find a way to make my team more attractive. I guess I could hire some male models, but they generally make pretty shitty coders.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
> And yet - We all still have the right to live under a bridge, smoke, fuck anything that moves, yadda yadda yadda.
There is something really off with you that you would equate women pursuing careers in tech with destructive behaviors.
> but lose the guilt-tripping SJW faux indignation BS.
Better to be a Social Justice Warrior than a Social Anti-Justice Warrior.
>Why do girls need to be motivated but not boys.
In STEM? Maybe because society (in the US, anyway) spends a lot of time, directly and indirectly, telling women they aren't cut out for this kind of work and should focus on being "hot" and be quiet? Remember the furor a few years ago when Mattel released a talking Barbie which said, "Math is hard!"?
Women get pushed around a lot in our culture, overtly and covertly, and many people (mostly men) are only comfortable when women are in very limited pigeonholes. Things are better since the entrance of feminism (really, it's humanism: the idea that women should be treated as people) into our culture since the 1960/70s, but it's still a problem. If you don't see that, and don't see how that is a big part of lack of women in CS specifically and STEM generally, then either you are a) stupid b) intentionally obtuse or c) blinded by your neurosis about women.
I got raised by smart, educated, strong-willed women (mom, aunts, great aunts, godmother) who had professional lives in the 50s and 60s when that was rare. I see what women can do, and I also see how much women today STILL have to fight just to get listened to in a meeting, let alone how they have to be able to put up with a myriad of small indignities.
Let's extend your argument and look at doctors. What if we cut the number of admissions to medical colleges by 1/2? By reducing the number of doctors we could boost the wages of all doctors! Wouldn’t' that be great? Would that not make our future brighter?
Probably not.
You are talking the same position as the old guild members, fighting to keep their privileged position as more productive factories raise productivity and living standards for everybody. I mean it is great that you beat everybody else in the great land rush, but I don't think you should close the gate behind you. I am not even sure you can as I look at India, China, etc. Give them 25 years. Don't focus on short term gain but on long term greed. You will benefit more from vibrant economy than a stagnant one.
Well, I'd say "fewer men should die" if I were going to make that statement.
It turns out, actually, that certain jobs are dangerous and unpleasant, and men seem to self-select for these jobs more often than do females.
There are a number of interesting possible explanations for this, but none of them are terribly surprising unless you've thought for most of your conscious life that the two genders are truly and completely identical, and any differences are only the result of social conditioning.
Of course, this is absurd.
Biologically, men are expendable and women are not. Biologically, the humans of today come from a narrower range of paternal ancestors, because human breeding was selective. Men who had power, prowess, ambition, and ruthlessness passed on their genes AND shaped the socities that men and women lived in.
In considering distributions of male size, strength, intelligence, and so on, the distributions are wider than when considering females. The smartest men appear to be much smarter than the smartest women; the dumbest men appear to be much dumber than the dumbest women.
Males simply have higher expressed variability.
Men need less sleep than women; men are not as attuned to empathy as are women; men engage in much riskier behavior than do women, and their neural reward and risk center works differently than it does in women.
You can continue to pretend that gender is a social construct, or that male and female distributions and outcomes should be identical, but here on the real world, they aren't and they won't be.
In the event that any public entity (e.g. a government) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should repeal that policy.
In the event that any private entity (e.g. a business) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should think that business owner is a jerk.
Individuals in a free society should be free to do as they like.
But what we should stop assuming is that men and women are interchangeable and will have broadly identical social preferences and outcomes.
They won't, and that's not because anything is standing in their way. They're just different.
By Nature.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
If that were true, the human race would have become extinct long ago. Pregnant women are actually pretty robust and remain capable of just about anything (except becoming pregnant again) for the great majority of the 9 months.
That's not the best way to start a sentence in which you care to make a point.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not a fabrication. Regardless of aptitude in math, science or computers, girls are less likely to grow up with a computer than boys. The difference is real, but anyone asking why is dismissed as a feminist? That doesn't make sense.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm sorry, but wtf is your point? Are you saying that we should be hostile to women instead of nice, or nice instead of hostile, or that we should completely ignore them?
You say that men who are mean to women chase them off. Then you say men who are nice to women chase them off. And I'm pretty sure you would say that men ignoring women would chase them off. SO WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Any time a woman points out a cognitive capacity in which women have supposed superiority, women applaud loudly.
Any time there is even a male suggestion that gender differences include cognitive differences, that man is shouted down.
It's silliness.
Next thing you're probably going to try and justify women's chess teams and women's chess leagues. It's because women feel "safer" there, right?
Mangina everywhere here.
Fixing it when the children are 3 is easy. But "invasive" to have children raise their children right.
When my son was 3 his favorite color was pink. It was bright and fun. When he was 5 and headed to school soon, he picked out his bag for school. He had the choice of Wiggles (Blue) or Dorothy the Dinosaur (pink). He picked the pink one. I let him, as it was his choice. When he got to school, the children made fun of him for having a "girls bag" (the exact same bag as the other, but different color).
Now, at 8, pink is his favorite color again. It took a few years to convince him that the opinions of others don't matter for that, and they were wrong. Every color belongs to everyone.
But beating "pink is a girls color" into him at 3 would have been easier and saved him a teary day or two at school, but at 18+, he'd be raising his children to be like the mean kids at school.
Similarly, fixing the sexism by parents (and others) as the children grow up is easier at 3 than 18. But in college, they are already 18, so the "fix" is much more obvious and extreme.
Oh, and it doesn't hurt CS to work harder at being inclusive. Women are run off by jackasses. And men into computers are more likely jackasses. Women will change jobs more readily to get away from bad people. So naturally, they'll change majors for the same reason.
Learn to love Alaska
How does the lack of interest in something that geeky boys like in any way fall under the responsibility of those geeky boys, who have no influence over what non-geeky boys are interested in? It obviously does not, and that is why claims that it does fall under their responsibility sound absurd to us geeky boys.
The problem is that men are intimidated by the presence of women, according to the article. But in my experience, men are afraid to be in a "women's profession" because it makes them look feminine. Those are different issues, but it happened with nurses and teachers before.
Any male who is foolish enough to be a teacher today is considered a pedophile. You mean that kind of scaring away? These are not the male pigs saying this stuff: http://www.mamapedia.com/artic...
Read this stuff, including the links. These are women who are pre-declaring all males to be pedophiles Ther are women who are really concerned that their babysitter has teenage sons. And you say its because Men, find aspects of jobs too feminine? This is just as bigoted, as declaring you down't want to leave any white women around black males because you know, they'll all be raped. Bigotry knows no specific gender.
But oddly enough, this blatant in your face hatred of men and assumption that all males are pedos is just "smart mommying". We've been trained that way.
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
Dude was attacked by a women for rescuing two children from a burning car. A guy who was stalked and acosted by a woman for restocking little girls underwear. A guy who won't have contact with children not his own because of the presumption he is a pedo.
http://www.boston.com/communit... Just for general reading of the bigoted stereotyping and hatred directed towards males.
Once women are "allowed" in large numbers, the men run off.
Reading the above links perhaps it is not "feminine" jobs they are concerned about.. Who wants a job where so many women assume without any good reason, that you are a criminal? I suspect before too long that many women will be just as concerned about taking their dog to a male veternarian because.... well.... you know.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Oh stop playing the victim. This is bullshit and you know it. It's a straw feminist argument, backed up by a few screaming morons on the internet who either say or claim to have been told these things. It's in no way the mainstream view.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are obvious cognitive differences between men and women but we as a culture refuse to acknowledge these differences. This stems from decades of civil rights movements toting that everyone is exactly the same. That just isn't true. People are different, but different isn't bad. We should've focused focused on that decades ago and celebrated our differences.
Unfortunately, we've backed ourselves into a corner where even the suggestion that one group of people is different than another is politically incorrect and even taboo.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
There are cognitive differences between any two men you might select too. To what grouping will you attribute those?
There are also many cognitive tasks where the range of difference within a gender is greater than the range of difference between genders. Given that, in what way is it useful to attribute difference to gender (or other grouping, for that matter)?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.