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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! --
In before SJW brigade comes in demanding everyone involved apologized.
The only thing responsible for a "lack of women coders" is that fewer women than men are interested in software development as a career path. So what? I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why this is a problem, why this is something to be concerned about, or why millions of dollars are being thrown around in an attempt to change the situation.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
How many smart people are swayed by advertising?
Or salespeople?
Rhetorical of course. Advertising and salespeople only sway stupid people.
...they're constantly finding new reasons why there's no women 'coders'?
There has to be, what, 12 different reasons now?
Men started to outpace women at an accelerated rate when the highly personal learning style of "having a pc to play on" became an option. Given that we see more and more of an imbalance in favor of women in group learning environments (college and even moreso in graduate programs), maybe this is just something very obvious, and a good thing for men, as men can excel in solitary study which they can tailor to their own interests and pace. As my wife, a school psychologist said, girls tend to learn better in groups, and don't typically like to work in competitive/solo situations given the choice, whereas boys often do. I'll take the advantage on this one, gladly.
When computers were viewed as toys, it was acceptable for girls to have them. Once they became tools, however, they were only for boys.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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...
Who cares! Coding is on average a dead-end job with long hours. Why not talk about good long-term careers for women instead, rather than high burn-and-churn jobs? Coders happen to be demand right now, but we've seen bubbles before, and will probably see them again.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Here's an idea: instead of using this just to pin blame, why not try and see if it's true by spending money on showing the girls of today how awesome they can be with the power of programming! Then in 30 years we can blame those ads on the declining interest boys have in computing and circlejerk some more.
So all big wigs made it a boys toy for sales in 80s and now its society and evil patriarchs fault not enough girls find interest. But now we know the truth. Its their fault
My mother used to be one of those programmers working for IBM. These women where nothing more then secretaries with a glorified title.
They punched the holes for the programs the real programmers wrote.
Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as medicine, law, or science....
I'd really like to seen some substantiation for this assertion, as it is so important for the validity of the other assertion that there has been a change since then.
I read a post about this article somewhere else the other day and someone pointed out that there was a drop in CS majors at the same point for males as well. Possibly due to more varied degrees which involved computers being offered. So there may not have been a real drop in female CS majors at that time, just an overall drop.
80s ads are probably the reason for the lack of male nurses, too.
If 80's pop culture had that much lasting influence, every college student would still be majoring in kicking commie ass and breakdancing.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This site has become just a clickbait for angry nerds and basement MRA types.
Madonna wore a Boy Toy tee shirt. Does this explain the lack of female pop singers today?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There were many other things going on during the '80s. The country was in the middle of a deep and prolonged recession. Women were given hiring preference in most technical fields. Comp Sci programs became more competitive. Maybe 0.1% of coeds ended up in other fields for various reasons.
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.
And the results in most IT offices being a f'in sausage-fest.
Whilst I have no aptitude for HR or marketing, I'd urge any undecided young person out there to fully consider.
the computer establishment was shown as Big Brother and all the tech workers were depicted as mindless slaves. All shown in dull black and white footage.
Then comes running a feisty young woman in colorful athletic clothes. She hurls a hammer and destroys the system. Lesson: girls hate computers and break them!
I'm now the parent of both a young boy and a young girl, and already I'm starting to see the social cues kick in. My wife, who's incredibly smart and finance-minded rather than IT minded also confirms that the separation of roles starts very early and parents really have to work against it if they want to avoid pigeonholing. Even now, in the 2010s, the idea of girls being swept away by handsome princes is still drilled into girls' heads right from the start. Same thing goes for girls being conditioned to think of nothing but their wedding day for the next 20+ years. Boys don't have this same relentless pressure for whatever reason...they're still steered towards harder subjects in school, and conditioned that they will be the breadwinner someday. It's been a while since women would go to college solely to find a husband, but the messaging is still there.
But...one of the things that isn't mentioned is the fact that I think women self-select out of the profession as well. Regardless of gender, you have to put up with a lot of crap in an IT or development job. Being a woman makes it worse because of the potential for sexual harassment, the perception of women not being able to contribute as much due to their childbearing responsibilities, etc. If I were a woman, I sure wouldn't want to work around some of my colleagues, whose behavior and attitudes toward women sometimes make me uncomfortable. (And I can deal with a lot -- I'm far from some PC feminist.) I work for some pretty conservative companies too, I can't imagine the environment at a Web 2.0 startup where most of the management are the founders' hand-picked fraternity brothers.
At least it isn't yet overrun by effeminate SJW types insisting everyone should be as self-loathing as they are.
I am by no means a feminist
You don't say.
In the dawn of computing, women were largely typists, inputting data.
Data entry was part of CS.
Now, that's long gone. The degrees you typically see women actively and passionately pursuing relate to social welfare / being social / large community involvement.
Management and teaching are such areas. IT, being entirely solo or part of small, tight knit group? Not so much.
**I am NOT saying there is no place in IT for females, it just that the females I've talked about pursuing IT careers don't care much about the job itself, but more about the salary and as a way to slide into a management roll. I've yet to find a female who gets as excited that a new processor or software X is being released.
Women don't make good computer code. They just can't do it.
Satya
...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
Barbie is just as much to blame. So many girls raised to believe that beauty was more important than anything else to have a successful life. Beauty means getting to marry a rich man that you can stay at home, cook, clean, and raise the kids for. "I'm just a girl, tee hee hee".
The dominance of computer's as something for men in 80s pop culture was probably reflecting the trend rather than causing it. The timeline seems too short for so few pop culture things to influence.
The market for coding evolved at first primarily from 'data entry', which required nearly no training. Women of the time (disadvantaged or disinclined from training depending on your opinion) could take those jobs and men who needed to 'provide' sought higher trained jobs with higher pay. Basically straightforward data entry started to become 'advanced data entry' that started incorporating things like formulas and continued on from there. Perhaps because it started to demand more and more skills, narrowing the labor pool and driving up compensation, enticing men to start participating more heavily and an overall male-favorable social bias started to take effect. Or perhaps the nature of the work fundamentally changed enough in a way that drive a different male/female interest. Or some other factor, these are all guesses.
I just doubt that a handful of 80s movies changed the entire landscape of female participation in the market basically within a couple of years of the first movie's release, and there's a lot of alternative explanations that are quite viable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Hear me out. There are many reasons for women not being coders but one is games. Myself and other male friends who are "good with computers" had to do all kinds of stuff like make custom boot disks with virtual memory specifically targeted for one DOS game*. We did this as we were 9 and just wanted to get a game to work. All of that trial and error led to understanding things like variables and If/then decisions. In just a few years we had confidence to try things like programming whereas people who didn't get into the guts of their computer were more timid and didn't know the difference between a memory and storage space. Therefore making the task of learning to code more challenging.
*Why girls didn't play games is another issue. I think many of the same factors like NPR points out.
Overall, there's not that many women in any of the STEM fields. Can't blame the lack of women in chemical engineering on advertising, although the computer tech field is probably worse than most other STEM fields.
My wife has an electrical engineering degree and has been developing software for about 20 years, and in my time knowing her I can say she's worked with some real ignorant, arrogant, and possibly sexist men. Her ideas are frequently ignored when she states them, but listened to when a man states them. She approaches problems from different angles and many people she's worked with refuse to stop their single-mindedness to look at the problem from a different direction. IMO it's issues like these that drive women from engineering more than anything else. There's a culture that is almost hostile for women, and it is certainly harder to get anywhere in our field as a woman.
I admit I suffer from this at times when we are working on a problem together. The difference is I actually care to hear her input even if I have to force myself to shift gears. It isn't easy but her view is so alien from mine, but it has ALWAYS been valuable. Her view either directly leads to a solution or sets us off in another direction for the eventual solution.
It's not that women can't do it, but imo it really seems like men don't want them in the field.
[nero-0nline.org].
One of the worst shows on NPR if you ask me.
They were built by people that submersed themselves in the field. Fucking feminists have no fucking clue who to blame and fail to see the limits of their own minds.
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.
In the dawn of computing, women were largely typists, inputting data.
I was doing computer work in the 1980s. I worked with women who were programming, doing VAX & mainframe admin, and performing actual rigorous systems analysis.
The claim that women are not interested in technology or computing is just false.
Good work! I *knew* this wasn't a complex problem with multiple related causes spanning decades. Now we know The Truth: One cause, from a small span of years. IN YOUR FACE, everyone else!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is this trend apparent in other cultures what were not affected by 80's Western marketing?
Say, for instance, is there a 50/50 split among woman and men in computer science in China, India, and Africa? What about South America?
I have a feeling this is not as simple as the author is making it out to be.
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.
I had no clue that "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy was a popular book in 1984. My Apple ][ class in middle school at that time was split down middle between boys and girls. Some teachers must have read that book, noted the errors of their ways, and pushed the girls back into the typewriter class thereafter. Well, duh.
You heard it folks, women won't get into programming, unless they are tricked by advertising.
back a few century ago nurse were men, same with teacher, and less and less entered in the profession and now it is not exclusively but at least crushing majority of women. And yet nobody is complaining about "t's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely medical and teaching field has had the opposite trend"(this article)".
I see a dangerous tendence : if women have an disadvantageous inequlity, it is fought against. If men have a diadvantageous inequality it is glossed over, ignored, or mocked. There are many example of this , to take one at random, for willing men, how many do you think get the children guardianship during a divorce with visiting right to the mother ? And how many father get visiting right and guardianship by the mother ? That is a problem.
I used to be a feminist 20 years ago when it meant fighting for gender equalkity in both direction, when we used to recognize that only fighting for women equality without fight for men's would generate much higher resistance than fighting for both equality. Sadly that is nowadays less and less true for vocal feminist. In fact you rarely see that mentionned, except as a token when feminist debate MRA (which I think are a bunch of idiot which do more negative against their cause , but it is a theme for another discussion). But if you look at the detail, feminist nowadays do diddly squat for men's equality, and that sadden me. I consider myself not a feminist anymore but an gender-egalitriste.
And I think with time it will even be worst.
I wonder how many of these folks trying to peel the onion of female tech empowerment are actually in the fucking industry. Seriously, blame the 80's? How about blaming parents that don't teach their daughters the realities of the career prospects for Art History major or Marine Biologist. Technology in America is the ultimate democracy. Anyone willing to truly master a skill set that is in demand in the industry can have their shot given enough talent and persistence. The only segment you could really say gets shut out is anyone who cannot for whatever reason pass a background check. One of the things that keep us honest in this industry is being free to speak our minds, so people need to cut out the "boys won't play nice" rhetoric. If women need men to change their attitudes before they are willing to participate it will be a long road to progress.
Yeah, let's have more women coders. I can't wait for the "Say Yes to the Dress" app!
...that women act like lemmings?
Most egregiously, the sexism study shows that women dominated fields scar newcomers so much that if they then join a more accepting male dominated field they may overreact. It's not the computer field that's chasing women away - it's their previous experience working with many women.
The PNAS.org study is fundamentally flawed. The premise is to hire someone for a math task. In most countries, men do better in math. Yes, it's a simple math task that anyone could do, but the study shows that men are most often hired. I contend that is as reasonable as typically hiring a woman to babysit - even though either gender could do the basics.
I can't find a guy in college that has seen Die Hard let alone remember an ad from the 80s. This is probably the stupidest thing I've heard and Slashdot has been digging up a whole lot of stupid lately.
The ads showed computers as toys for boys because that was what the market was like and not the other way around.
In the mainframe days most people only met a computers in their college days. Some would become more interested in them than what they were supposed to be studying (physics, biology, whatever - computer science courses were pretty rare back then) and would end up becoming programmers. It was mostly men, but there were a reasonable number of women (a lot more than today in relative terms, fewer in absolute numbers).
The microcomputer revolution happened because a certain kind of guy (as far as I know, no women participated in the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, for example) wanted to have his very own computer even if it was completely useless. Normal computer people looked down on those weirdos, but they soon hit it big. As prices came down it was possible to give a kid a computer as a toy. Practically no girls were interested (and those that were tended to be discouraged by parents and friends) but most boys were also not excited about calculating Fibanacci sequences or typing in Basic listings to draw mazes. It was a rather specialized market and that is what the ads aimed for.
The computers in the 1980s ads simply were not interesting for the general public. This changed in the early 1990s with the home office - a computer with disks and a reasonable printer and compatible with the one you had at work and changed yet again in the late 1990s with the Internet. That brought its own set of problems (which the Raspberry Pi was created to address) without killing the "computers are toys for boys" image that had been created.
Why do the editors keep accepting these bullshit stories? War games and Weird science chased women out of CS, seriously?
http://hugelolcdn.com/i700/235...
I love NPR. However, Planet Money is a glib and superficial show. Just because they talk about money doesn't mean that the host or its researchers correctly understand technology or how it is affected by social/media events from over 30 years ago.
Conspire is a pretty strong word...
Let's hunt down and execute those chauvenist bastards!
Seriously, obviously the ads existed, and depicted a male-centric environment. They are a piece, but not the whole answer.
Early programmers were typists. Somebody came up with the calculation (a mathematician) and someone else typed it into the computer (a programmer).
Now programmers come up with the algorithms, do the math, and type the stuff themselves (software engineer).
If you want to blame it on anything in the 70s or 80s, blame it on making typing class mandatory. Once everyone could type, there was little need to hand over a program to someone else to enter into the computer.
So why were early programmers predominately female? Because typing pools were predominately female.
They missed a big one:Revenge of the Nerds. Who wants to be associated with that kind of Nerd/Computer culture?
How many women are entering the IT field TODAY?
If you assume that the women who were influenced by 1980s pop culture stereotypes were 10-20 years old, they're now in their 40s or older now. That might explain the dearth of women in more senior IT positions, but what about women entering IT now, ie, women who were too young to be influenced in the 1980s?
Despite the fact that most young women have smartphones and are heavily influenced by their own peers to use them, there's probably some other narrative that tries to explain away women's lack of involvement in IT.
So it's also the 80s movies to blame that women are not interested in careers like soldier, spy, pilot, policeman (apology, -woman), archaeologist, exorcist, karate fighter,...
Has anyone ever looked closer at the 80s? The 80s were not a geek decade. The only movie I can remember where geeks were not just the comic foil (ok, even in that one they were) was "Revenge of the nerds". The whole "engineering geeks" were no role model in 80s movies, and even less so in TV series. Whenever they were in some prominent role, they were the little sidekick of the actual hero. Be it Automan's creator Walter, who was mostly a comic sidekick (ok, the show wasn't that memorable, but the special effects were great for its time) or Street Hawk's Norman who was some timid, beancounter-ish scaredy-cat. The geek roles were at best meant to make the hero shine some more.
Actually, the only engineer role I can remember that was allowed to be superior in areas to the hero and be more than a nuisance to him was that of Bonnie in Knight Rider.
A woman.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This one goes against the stereotype: Youtube
This one features a female computer operator: More Youtube
IBM ad showing neckbeard nerd devian- ah, no it doesn't : IBM
Yeah, but there's unfortunately a tiny subculture of self-hating, self-denying homosexuals that are very outspoken in their contempt for women. Many of them hang out on Slashdot and in multi-player games. I wish they would just get over their unrequited desire for gay sex, stop hating themselves, and leave the women alone.
When you see a Republican politician condemning homosexuality, the odds are close to 100% that he's a self-hating gay.
When you see a slashdot post that uses terms like "social justice warrior" or "feminista" the odds are only slightly different - say 85%+.
Just go get laid, guys, and let the heteros handle talking to the women, aiight? Jeezus.
This is crazy. I programmed PC's way back in the TRS-80 days. Yes, there was social stigma - the "nerd" archetype. The crazy part is it WAS discouraging but directly aimed towards us geeky guys who were doing it! Why is this now interpreted as something that specifically affected woman? MEN who had interest in programming were stereotyped and depicted as lifeless, sexless, unattractive, socially awkward, physically weak, and all-around laughable. (See characters in old films like "Revenge of the Nerds"). Is it supposed to be that men are happy to be characterized disparagingly and woman aren't?
Really, I never once considered what was going on in hollywood when I started playing with computers in the late 70s, nor did any of my friends. The women I did know who got into it got into it for the same reason they got into chess and maths and DnD and all other geek activities.
This thesis is laughable. If you believe advertisements in the 1980s are responsible for a perceived shortage of female programmers today, then you are an imbecile.
and self reliance and self definition? It is always the larger world that wronged someone, or coerced them to act in ways they never would have on their own? Maybe just maybe we need men and women looking at themselves and deciding for themselves what and who they want to be without societal influences bending our wills one way or another. If it is societies fault/influence does it matter if a man or women isn't coding or breast feeding? They've lost the only battle that matters which is free thought.
Prove me wrong!
Ok, why aren't there:
- more men in fashion design ...
- more men in nursing
- more men in hair dressing
- more men in
I don't see an outcry over professions that have typically been dominated by women wanting more men in them, why is that?
Oh, it's money!
See, there's a lot of money in the tech industry and not a lot of women so there's an outcry. The thing is, there's plenty of money for anyone who is good at what they do, whatever that might be. Trying to systematically push women toward a career choice so an industry's demographics look better is bullshit!
Getting equal pay for equal work is the underlying problem, and that extends way beyond the tech industry for women. Let's stop trying to push people into jobs they would rather not do and work on getting the pay structure fair for eveyone.
Without looking I can guarantee this "study" was conducted by a female SJW. How do I know? Because the premise assumes the conclusion - a hallmark of SJW worldviews. Specifically, that the proportion of women in the IT field doesn't match the population distribution of women is a "problem" and this problem has a cause.
NPR: "vapid women subject to images in media don't apply to CS programs"
Surprisingly, the women that start in CS tend not to wash out. Guys were washouts a lot.
I grew up in the 80s . When I was 5 my parents bought a computer, ostensibly to help my father with grad school but the rest of the family used it much more. They also bought various books with computer programs that you were supposed to type in, but I read them instead because we didn't have the extended memory module required.
As a pre-teen I played edutainment games that included logo level programming and logic circuits. I went to a high school that had programming courses - and took them. By the time I hit college I had a lot of experience with computers. I also had a role model as my sister majored in computer science. Most of the other women at my school went into engineering majors where the starting position was more level.
So yeah, these things matter. Buy your daughters (and sons) raspberry pi's, arduinos, anything they can hack on - tablets, phones, and most PCs these days don't count. Maybe they decide not to play with them, but at least give them the opportunity.
Wow, look at the stereotypes in Wargames (came out in 1983) - shows the coder guy already nerding out. Just to say the trend was firm in the 80's.
As a child of the times, yeah it was guys wanting to shoot. TRS-100? TI 99/4, TRS-III, etc. Then apple II hooked some young women, but the basic of the day just killed.
Wow, not only is this wrong, it's stupid. Home computers were aimed at FAMILIES, especially Commodores. Apples were ubiquitous in education, and I don't remember girls being asked to leave the room while the boys hacked on BASIC and LOGO. Were there male-oriented ads? Yes, but I don't remember any unless you count Shatner's-- and that would be only if you were some ironic sexist who thought Star Trek wasn't for girls. The author provides a biased sample by digging up two that happened to feature boys in them-- and they still have girls present. If I felt like slogging on YouTube for an hour, I could probably find ten that had girls and women prominently involved.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
NPR doesn't know jack about anything anyway. It's a wonder they still exist.
So ... here's an article from the Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com... .
Research first reported in Science Magazine regarding the contribution of women to the collective intelligence of a team garnered worldwide attention, particularly the studies highlighting the performance of women when tested on tasks relating to brainstorming, complex problem-solving and decision-making. The findings confirmed that a group’s collective intelligence was strengthened by the inclusion of women and their enhanced capacity for listening, collaborating and intuitiveness. The CIA is one example of an organization that made a notable transformation of its culture by not only ensuring women had greater representation in senior positions, but also explicitly recognizing that it was women on their team who discovered the location of Osama Bin Laden, allowing for him to be captured.
You want men and women working together. Simple as that.
The business case goes like this:
The financial benefits of greater gender equity are undeniable. Extensive global research conducted by Credit Suisse, Catalyst and McKinsey & Co. examining the link between women on boards and stronger financial performance of Fortune 500 companies has been cited in numerous publications. Examining the return on sales, return on invested capital, and return on equity, their research confirmed that companies with women on their boards of directors outperform those with the least number of women by significant margins in each category.
Credit Suisse is not exactly some radical feminist organization out to overthrow patriarchy.
>as self-loathing as they are
um, you're projecting again...
Guys like porn and video games; girls not so much.
Computers were made for porn and video games.
At least it isn't yet overrun by effeminate SJW types insisting everyone should be as self-loathing as they are.
Are we reading the same page here?
anyone who has a collection of computer magazines from the 80s knows this is pretty much bullshit. Girls are plastered all over Ahoy, Compute! Compute! Gazette, Family Computing, and every magazine of the era. Women features as programmers and artist. http://www.bombjack.org/commod... is a great archive and you can use google to find more. There seemed to be an effort to be inclusive of women... What will you not find so much? Black people. Here and there, but for the most part missing.
And I think of the keeping up with the commodore commercials... They all had women and girls in them. The vic20 commercials with shatner had a boy and a girl.
There were pieces about software designers, like the woman who was part of the team that created archon. Women featured in the computer art contests and programming contests.
The problem lies not with advertising. It lies with schools and the fucked up social system of the status quo.
That you're a stupid cunt who can't accept that people gravitate to what makes them happy, regardless of gender. Socially undesirable to who? What the mainstream media told you? Ah yes, another mind controlled idiot.
It sucks that humanity has nothing else better to write or complain about. But when 99% of the people in the tech industry are estrogen filled males I can see why you're all such whiney assholes making excuse after excuse for whatever situation you perceive is wrong.
Fucking troll.
That is all.
Software development is usually done in an anti-social way. You chunk up a release or backlog or whatever into features, each dev takes a feature and goes off and writes some code. Later there is some collaboration in testing, code reviews, troubleshooting, etc.
But that is a TERRIBLE way to do it. The wrong code gets written way too often. Designs are bad because people aren't contributing along the way. Requirements get missed because the developer makes an assumption that s/he didn't know was an assumption. The more eyes on the code at all times the better. Devs should be constantly communicating with testers and people who understand the business case (product owners). One way to do that is pair programming. It sounds like a waste of time, but it is actually faster. Silly mistakes get caught right away. Debugging goes faster. Another way to do that is to chunk the work into very small pieces and constantly communicate to integrate your tiny piece with the other devs' tiny pieces. This leads to clean interfaces and modular code.
The Cowboy Superhero model of software development only makes sense if you are the only one developing a project. And remember in that case, your code dies when you get hit by a bus (or kill your wife and go to prison).
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Women like attractive men, and they choose work where they'll come into contact with attractive men, dressed nicely, well groomed, etc. That's not in IT. It's in banking, law, real estate, sales, and so on.
If the computer industry was where all the good-looking dudes were working, then women would outnumber us in a decade or less.
That is always the central, consistent message from every study/interview/book/doco/conversation ever.
...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?
In your case, you may just want to avoid them altogether.
1) Just earlier today I saw a *different* posting saying that female involvement in CS peaked during the '01 .com boom. Which is it? The '80s, or the .com boom? The conclusions were similar, though, men oppressed women out of the field.
2) If you are a woman and you apply to a CS program, you're MUCH more likely than a man to get in. At the top schools, they get fewer female applicants, but the matriculants include many women.
3) If you are a woman, you are much more likely to get an NSF GRFP.
4) Once you get to that big faculty stage, you're more likely to get hired, because they need to pad out the number of female profs.
5) Companies will bend over to hire you. The top companies are seeking female coders.
6) You get all kinds of school programs to help you get into coding.
Still, I'm supposed to feel bad for you because fewer women go into CS. I'm supposed to put *my* career on hold and let less-qualified applicants through because they are female. That isn't to say, being female made them less qualified. That is to say, because we need more people who have vaginas in this field, I'm supposed to let you get the job, and hey, fuck me, I have all of this "privilege."
Excuse me if I think that this is bullshit, and, while I'm at it, fuck you for your bullshit.
I love how they're always saying women are equals to men... and then saying they're complete half wits or incompetent about something.
Its really sort of weird.
Look, if women are the equal of men, and for the record I believe they are, then they don't need to be coddled or shown special treatment beyond what men get.
So that is the logical trap that is pretty fucking inescapable here.
Either women are inferior or they don't need your help.
Pick one.
I pick option 2. Its called being an adult and taking responsibility for yourself.
Why didn't women get into coding? Because they didn't want to.
Coding is a solitary job with long hours that gives no shits anything besides if the code is good. Yes you can code in groups... but that's only with division of labor and once labor is divided you are working on your code yourself.
What is more, the coding all stars are always mad geniuses in the field that put insane hours into honing their craft. Would be sexist to point out that women don't seem to find that kind of work appealing?
And another thing, consider how many one man shops there are out there. How many one woman independent coders are there out there? Many of these companies get started in a dorm room or a garage with their moms doing laundry behind them or something. Discrimination? The bar is so low that anyone can get into this so long as they're willing and able to do the work.
If you lack the will or the ability... then that is why you're not a successful coder. Period.
And here some one is going to say "you can't just say period"... well yes I can... I just did... after a long argument that had a lot of supporting points and I summed it all up with a closing argument and then said period. Think I'm wrong? Tell me how women can be both our equals and in need of special treatment. Your brain will literally explode in raspberry jam all over the walls if you try to divide by zero by saying both of those things can happen. They can't. The logic is inescapable. Either they're just girls and inferior and thus deserving of protection... or they're adults, our equals, and don't need it anymore then anyone else.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I remember those days well. What's your point? Are you trying to say that the reason we have toxic and thin drywall is because of Hispanics? That's the dumbest thing I've heard all week!
Movies are to blame for why more men aren't nurses, news at 11.
Oh, this just in, movies from the 80s are also to blame for why the NBA is mostly black, news at 11:05.
Seriously, different groups of people have different aspirations. Let it be. If this was on CNN or something fine, but every 2 days on Slashdot it's "this is why women are oppressed and it's the tech industry's fault." Wtf.
I found an interesting graph. Why is there no uotcry about the declining number of men getting degrees in the following discaplines? Biology, psychology, communications and journalism. And no outcry about the historically low levels in the following fields? Health professions, public administration, education, foreign languages, English, and Art and performance.
In the 1980s, the boys that were into math and science and (especially) computers were also getting their asses kicked on a regular basis by the popular kids Perhaps the girls were smart enough to not want any part of that.
Or at least they'd rather follow other interests than be associated with something or a group of people who were at the bottom of the social scale.
do() || do_not();
80s ads are responsible for the lack of male shoppers at shopping malls because the merchandise in stores appeal predominantly to women.
Really, it all comes down to marketing. The mens' clothing I see in stores have zero appeal to me because women are usually in charge of purchasing at clothing stores and they stock colors and patterns that are too effeminate. Not to hard to see a parallel with computers as they simply LOOK like mens' tools. Next time you see a woman using a palmtop or cellphone, note the accessory(s) that are matched to her wardrobe.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
why the fuck are you assuming a feminist would have any interest in applying logic to the situation! silly man...
Oh I am aware that bigots and ideologues find logic to be inconvenient. Nothing new there. I just find it useful to find the central fallacy in their running stream of bullshit so that when they pop up again with the same old crap... I can bop them on the head with logic and then go back to doing whatever.
In the case of this branch of feminism...
The killer point is that women are either inferior and in need of our aid as the big strong men. Or they are our equals and as adults able to manage their own lives can handle it on their own.
Next issue. :-)
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Women who choose to major in "Women's Studies" instead of something STEM-related are the reason there aren't as many female engineers/mathematicians/coders/etc as there ought to be. You weeded yourself out of the field due to your own pre-existing lack of critical thinking.
The boys playing with computers were nerds when nerd was an epithet. It's as simple as that.
Girls innately tend to do less "not cool" things. Now that computers are socially cool, this dumb article is a lame attempt to rewrite history and cast the culprit as anything but girls hewing to the norms they helped mold while growing up.
Women dont want to be around the freaks and geeks. If the guys in the room will wet themselves when a woman talks to them, they wont want to be around them. CS programs need to p90x so the fatties lose weight. This is more likely to grt women to code. The guys also need to be required to bath daily
They assume anyone care about ads - or did in the 80's. I don't think so, the majority is merely annoyed by ads.
People becoming programmers then are retiring now.
There have been a few generations between that period and now so what accounts for that??
My question is what events WHENEVER has led the people running NPR and shoveling out stuff like this to have the thinking power of fresh water clams...
Or peer pressure patterns ???
As much as I have looked into the general subject of why women don't "Y" and why men don't "X." People keep wanting to believe that it's "male domination" and completely forget about the functions of our bodies and how they drive and support our behaviors.
If it were a cultural issue, there would invariably be some example somewhere of an exchange of roles between men and women on earth SOMEWHERE. There really isn't.
At the core is essentially a way of devaluing ALL people (both male and female) by removing their significance and importance in any given role. This serves to further weaken families and other structures which invariably compete with other control structures like... uhm... government.
Perhaps Women in Management positions.
Most "coders" are entry level positions. I have been working in my field for 15 years now, and I grew up in the 1990's really. If you grew up in the 1980's you might still be or do coding, but most would be at a high level position now. Ad's from the 1980's would have little effect.
Now you might make the argument that, most of those Managers would do the hiring and have a preconceived idea about hiring Women VS Men. However you could pretty much use the same argument for any field of work, none of which has anything to do with stupid 1980's ads.
Given that it's supposed to be men earn 1/3 more than women, that's a FUCKING HUGE thing.
DOES NOT MATTER if it's 12c a decade more, IT IS NOT LESS THAN MEN.
Care to take the actual news as it is, rather than assume that since it's not a lot more, that it means you can continue to claim women earn a lot less?
You're gish galloping away from the point.
Women are under-represented in the coal mining industry.
BUT NOWHERE IS THAT MADE TO BE A PRIORITY TO FIX.
Why?
Women equality is only wanted where women would be advantaged by it.
You're ALSO wanting men to be killed, because if women were taking those jobs, then there would be fewer men in there and therefore fewer male deaths.
Why?
Men aren't worthy of consideration.
Of COURSE you don't see it that way, but that's because you're bigoted. Just like the old wolf-whistling lout of the 1950's-80's, who just never knew their attentions were disturbing to some.
Who's to blame for the lack of men being secretaries? A lot of these discussions are pointless. People will do what they want to do. If that means breaking social norms, be my guest. Good for you.
Computing would not be the same without women in tech. Fuck, the original concept of programming in a machine was done by a woman.
Token mentions to Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper (she made the first fuckin' compiler for fuck's sake)
In general, women tend to prefer situations involving lots of moving pieces, and the relationships between them, while men are tend towards activities involving a single, tight focus. We're different, we tend to be better at different kinds of things. Programming a computer requires your mind to build a mental model of the logic, and then execute it internally. That's a very good example of a single, tight-focus task, that women often find unpleasant. A woman might enjoy talking about complicated relationships with a friend on the telephone, at the same time that she is watching a television show about complicated relationships. As a man, I would this task to be impossible, and certainly unpleasant.
--- wad
Men are men, women are women. As much as we want everything to be equal, it's not. It never will be. Do we need to address sexual harassment and discrimination, absolutely. All of this other stuff we read about unequal numbers of men and women in the workplace being a problem is rubbish. Men and women are geared differently, have different brains that are influenced by different hormones. As equal as you can get within those facts, is to say that men and women have different strengths, weaknesses, and interests that somehow they balance out over all.
This broad stoke stereotype does not define all women, but for many there is a lot of truth in this statement. Many women are not geared towards being analytical people. Many tend to do very well in social skills, which can be as valuable to a person than being analytical. There are always exceptions to this. We've mostly all seen analytical women, and men with good social skills that aren't analytical. Those are exceptions though.
So what am I trying to say? You can't measure anything about a field's respect for women based on employment percentages. It's a dumb and useless measure. Let people do what they enjoy. It's borderline ignorant to say that women aren't treated fairly because interest in a subject isn't equal across all men and women.
As for the ads and movies targeting men, well they target men, because those things interests more men. Advertising and entertainment target audiences based on who will be most likely to consume it, not on sexism.
Perhaps if you spent more time away from tech news, and more on current issues about nursing, you would realize the irony in your statement.
You can't be serious!! I was into computers back in the TRS-80 and Commodore 64 days. I built my own computers and coded in Basic, Fortran, Pascal and a number of other languages and never heard anything like this. I was a super big fan of the Zenith/Heath Do-it-yourself electronic kits. I was a math & physics major but I loved gadgets and programming/coding was like crossword puzzles to other people. So, from my own perspective, I never heard anything of the above and actually thought the field was more womanly and that guys who were in this field on the soft side (as opposed to the real man side).
And these days, I *am* seeing more female gamers (though often more casual etc).
Many guys I know started with computers/coding because they wanted to replicate the stuff they played on in younger days. Perhaps we'll see more young girls who grow into women with similar aspirations, which may be a feedback loop resulting in more cross-gender-friendly games.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The article claims that *marketing* had a bright idea along the lines of, "Hey, I know how we can cut our consumer audience in HALF!" Yeah, right, marketing departments do that all the time, because, hey it's more important to support patriarchy than make money, right?
Might it just be possible that those marketing execs were thinking more along the lines of, "Hm, our audience is primarily male, set's market to our primary audience."
There's no conspiracy here, people. Nothing to see here.
The real reason is that the perception of coders went from respected professionals to the 90 hour a week work all night asocial geeks. The media, including NPR profiling of Silicon Valley, have to take some blame
The thing is that in the 1970s and 1980s computers WERE boys' toys. There were barely enough boys even interested however - it was the nerd's nerd type of toy. Most boys were interested in cars and the "outsider" boys were into computers. Boy's clearly were just about the only 1-in-1000 of ANYONE interested. Girls? Not even above the noise floor back in the day. Those of us who were into computers also were into slide rules, chemistry sets, guns, making explosives and blowing up small animals, etc. We didn't like sports much because we sucked at them and computers were the one area we excelled at and could get respect for - though never from anyone "normal" or mainstream in interests or values.
Back then also, women's lib (which is what "feminism" was called back then) was still über-new and not at all universally valued or respected even by most women. It was in the 1970s when I was told I wasn't allowed to take a cooking elective course that was nominally open to all simply because I was a boy and the class was intended for women/girls only. People today either don't remember this or weren't alive to know how things really were.
The short and sweet of this is the article is pure revisionist bullshit based on utter ignorance of history or the times. Not even relevant or remotely accurate.
(Someone who lived through the ENTIRE PC revolution starting in the 1970s!!)
So, now "they" want to blame nerds for being focused inward, since many in society outwardly rejected them.
And any nerd who dared to creatively express some drama wrapped in technology is a "sexist" for doing so.
Ad agencies that rationally targeted campaigns at the people who were most interested in the purchase and use of computers are somehow "to blame" for being rational. ....got it.
Holy cow, the nerds just can't even enjoy a moment of personal victory or broader celebration for actually MAKING COMPUTERS and applications and devices that are miraculous and innately a-sexual.
The concern-trolls are effing useless nags.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY had in their head the intention or agenda to suppress or hinder or nudge women away from technology. Holy crap, if a woman had joined our computer club we would have been beside ourselves with glee. It would have sent tectonic shock waves through our world. We were repellent to women.
These absurd, "progressive" litigations of history are pointless - and typical of an ideology that indulges in wallowing in temporally displaced victim-hood.
I'm uninterested in haute couture - and I have not a smidgen of resentment about the fact that countless fashion magazines, novels, movies, TV shows, books, clubs, and entire industries didn't roll out the red carpet for me - as a straight male. Bless all who seized the day. Good on them.
As a nerd growing up, it doesn't bother me that recruiters were not aggressively trying to get me a football scholarship. I'm 100% sure I can never, ever dunk a basketball in real life on a regulation court.
I made choices, freely, based on the capabilities of my brain and body.
The nectar of Popularity and ubiquity finally baptizes nerds and then instantly indicts us for the accomplishment.
Eff this, right in the face.
We call this.....freedom.
Please someone dowmod the troll that posted the "fucking troll" post.
Women make up for around half of the mathematicians, and a solid percentage of economists, biologists and chemists are women.
Why do women avoid CS and engineering programs? I don't know, but it is the wrong question:
Why does it matter?
Faux diversity like gender and race is not something to aspire to. Finding students who have the aptitude and interest is far more important than meaningless demographics.
In my undergrad and graduate experience and working in industry women tend to fall along the same curve as men.
Very few are great, most are average and some suck.
The great female programmers bring nothing different to the table that the great male programmers bring. The female CS students that were great were naturally interested in the field and were self-driven into it. I have yet to meet anyone who was talked into majoring in CS that wasn't an abysmal failure.
So what does it matter if fewer women are interested?
I am far more concerned about universities dropping weed-out courses than faux-problems like attracting more women. CS and Engineering programs need to stop graduating substandard students, and instead these students should be booted out of the major and forced into brain-dead nonsense like business and communication.
It wasn't that long ago that the undergrad program I went through had 4 weed out courses(2 were CS courses and 2 were math), you had to complete it with a B- or better to pass, and you only had 2 chances at it. There was also a weed out written and programming exam that needed to be passed to get promoted to a upperclassmen and take 300 or 400 level courses. All of that is now gone.
Every course in my graduate program started with a qualifying exam, which you had to take the first or second day of class and you got dropped from the class if you failed it which meant you might as well drop out because it was a small program and each course was offered once a year. It was a masters program and not a PhD. program but less than half who started made it to the point where they could start their thesis or project and less than half of those made it to and passed the defense.
This isn't a "I had to walk 10 miles in the snow both ways" whine, this is a specific reason why CS graduates suck today and why it doesn't matter what the demographics of CS majors is.
That is the sort of thing that needs to come back, not a senseless drive to try and force women into careers they aren't interested in.
I was a CS student in southern California in the early '80s, and about a third of the students were indeed women. But the reason was because we had a large group of Vietnamese and Laotian students who had emigrated to the US in the '70s following the Vietnam war. Slightly over half of this group were women, and they had no cultural bias against computer science. Most of this group would have started college by the mid-80s, and of course the emigration was a one-time event because of the war. The percentage of native born US women was much lower, probably not any higher than it is today.
The link referenced in this article also postulated that boys had experience with PCs by the '80s, and colleges assumed students had a basic grasp of CS by the time they got to college. This wasn't true before 1983 -- my intro CS classes assumed no prior knowledge or programming skills.
This may be off topic, but I HATE the term, "coder". I find it insulting and demeaning. Yes, developers, engineers and architects write "code", but that doesn't make them "coders" anymore than your doctor is a, "knee-whacking, tongue-depressing, ball-grabber".
Think your lawyer would enjoy being called an, "arguer"?
How about calling judges, "gavel-whackers"?
I know that soulskill didn't intend to offend, but now you know.
Hi nice soft respectable feminist male.
In the past girls were married at 6 or 7 or 8 or 9.
Even snow white was noticed at that age in the original version.
Girls didn't have to wait forever to be a handsome man's pet.
and they were still girls when it happened.
Your cunt society which is bombing the few cultures that still allow that is the problem. You took away men's freedom to marry girl children.
(Also allowed in the old testament (deuteronomy 22 28-29), even rape)
Fuck You.
Why is no one fretting about this?
Okay, but seriously I think there's a legit cultural issue here with girls and all things technical in general. But this thing with laying it all on the media got old in the '80s. Yes media influences. But the assumption that we're all so weak-willed that we make life choices as heavy as careers we follow based on it is downright cynical, bordering on offensive. Let's focus more on baby boomer dad not buying gen x Suzy a computer when she showed some genuine interest/aptitude and the assumptions science and math teachers don't even know they have about girls when they teach them and less on ads and media and games which everyone keeps excitedly shouting girls are playing plenty of. Because if you're legitimately interested in this stuff, that shit on the idiot box/screen is not going to be a factor for you.
I personally don't have a problem with the idea that feminism as a movement is still necessary. I just wish the movement had less appeal to people with poor logic skills.
And granted it lacks clarity in headline and it's a bit wish-washy in focus (is it just a synopsis of the podcast?) but movies/ads are given very light mention in a paragraph. The most interesting idea to me is that girls fell behind in personal computing at about the same time they fell behind in computer science. And that makes a lot of sense. I knew no girls who spent a lot of time on Atari 800s and Commodore 64s and the early IBM PC compatibles outside of a classroom.
We can probably lay some of that at the feet of baby boomer dad's gender issues and the assumptions math and science teachers have about girls that they don't even realize but I also suspect there's a more general cultural problem with young women not being taught how to handle failure well. Because learning/doing anything new beyond just being a non-power user in technology is 90% failure. You try and try again until it works. Academia is different. They have problems to solve and they'll show you the solutions. You can copy those down, memorize them and always have them ready. Whether you succeed is often largely about whether you have any aptitude for it and whether you studied.
One thing I remember a lot of girls saying even in high school in the late '80s/early '90s was "I'm just not a <fill-in-the-blank> type person" and then they'd quit whatever discussion/problem they had just been exposed to. It was easier to to redefine their identity to a more limited narrow view than it was to try something and maybe fail at it.
Even my own wife who is brilliant, creative, a very successful artist, has borderline photographic memory, and can do math in head as well as I do swears that Algebra 1 was a horrifying experience for her. Says she just "can't handle the mixing of letters and numbers." She had to take a stats class recently to wrap up a long-delayed degree and aced it. Hated every minute of it but she attacked it and rote-memorized and got through but couldn't tell you a thing about stats a year later. And it's the same with technology. Any time something doesn't just work as well as it probably should she gets so frustrated she can't even think through what the problem might be or a potential workaround.
If she could do that, she'd be great at it. She's the kind of smart that could be great at anything she lets herself get interested in. But she's not a "that" kind of person. Men put themselves in boxes too but never to that degree, IMO. And I think that's at least in large part probably a cultural thing, but absolutely crippling for women facing tech problems once they carve any aptitude for it out of their identities like that. It should take more than one asshole teacher to dissuade you from an interest.
That was when the movies and TV started to portray technical people as being wierd and unappealing. It made a great joke and sold tickets, but it slandared the real Techs and Engineers.
I think it was partly because many of the corporations were taken over, about that time, by former salesmen and lawyers. The were afraid of the Techs because they didn't understand them, so they tried to "cut them down". And were able to make it stick, until we started to have problems because too many corps were run by salesmen.
Now it's beginning to change, but change is slow...
Kids, remember, if someone tells you not to act smart because it's not "cool", they are -not- your friend. They are just trying to sabatoge you, so they can continue to be lazy. 8-)
I was told I was too good at math by my professors. A man would never be told that by his professors. It is an absurd statement which I've railed on if I'm worth a cent.
Women computer scientists who worked on the Eniac weren't invited to the the celebratory dinner...they got sent home.
Ada Lovelace ... women do code.
My dad was a rocket scientist. My mom discouraged me from studying math and computer science. Maybe she was right that the environment in CS is not super women friendly (engineering and physics the same) - hell my dad made grown men scientists cry routinely - I'm a hell of a lot tougher then they were because I think that old school attitude is normal. I've been the only woman and the only American in the room often; there are cultural discrimination sometimes also.
The Cosmo crap remarks are crap.