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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
No, perhaps you should learn to read, or perhaps learn to ont read things which aren't there. But ayway your "argument", that is more or less:
feminism is anti feminism because it implies women are weak and therefore we shouldn't actually be doing anything
is crap. Women are human. Humans are herding creatures and on the whole hate being the odd one out. Therefore a big gender imbalance is offputting.
Does that mean humans are weak? Possibly. Does that matter? No, not really.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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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.
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 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.