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What Bell Labs Was Like C.1967 (theguardian.com)
New submitter niittyniemi writes: There's a rather interesting photo-gallery over at The Guardian
which gives an indication of what life was like at Bell Labs c.1967.
This was the year that Dennis
Ritchie joined Bell Labs and went on to produce a body of work which has
been pretty much unrivaled in its influence on the modern computing
landscape, even some 50 years later.
What's noticeable about the pictures, is that they are of woman. I don't
think this is a result of the photographer just photographing "eye candy." I
think it's because he was surrounded by women, whom from his comments he
very much respected and hence photographed.
In those times, wrangling with a computer was very much seen as "clerical
work" and therefore the domain of woman. This can be seen as far back as
Bletchley Park and before that Ada Lovelace.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT
company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is
woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
I think the simplest explanation for why women fled the tech industry is that the industry became toxic due to
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
The women who first worked with computers were treated like underling eye-candy, and told their daughters to avoid that shit like the plague? And their granddaughters now see it as a field where wages are going down, where they still get treated like second rate coders (even when they are not), and they are still avoiding that shit like the plague?
Shit, I'm not sure why any male wants to get into IT these days, never mind the ladies.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Unless you want to argue that the 60s and 70s were less sexist than now (lived through them. They weren't.), that argument gets to be shitcanned with other moral panics.
As far as why, women have more options now. There is literally no job that is available to a man that isn't also available to a similarly capable woman. The only real gender inequality left is having men value their lives more to not accept risking their lives and destroying their bodies without commiserate compensation. Someplace like Iran has high numbers of women engineers and programmers in part due to the multitudes of men that died in war. It's also Iran.
70 cents for every dollar doesn't even come close.
What is shocking is not just that the women were the focal point of this photo essay, but the diversity of the women themselves.
Fascinating. Honestly, fascinating.
remove nospam. to email!
Historically some cultures had primarily male clerical workers. Up till recently some had primarily female welders. Social context makes difference. Women have not been excluded for lack of capability. The decline is a sign of sociological bias because of where industry manufacturing was located.
Also decline of unskilled labor jobs in manufacturing after the decline of post war government funding of large projects drove more men to clerical (techie) jobs. The jobs were just rebranded to make them palatable to the post world war 2 cohort.
The cold war created the last of the big science jobs funded by government. Many of hose jobs were in research labs and clerical.
What actually happened in North America was grunt jobs disappeared and the grunts began to occupy the clerical space to make a living. This at it's best would reduce the clerical jobs available to women by 50%.
So, it probably wasn't a sexist plot. Just a shift in markets.
I checked. In one area 6% are women.
More technology, less politics.
In those days there were very few people with experience of programming, almost no programming courses, and almost no idea of what skills were useful for programming, except a vague idea that it might be useful to be good at math, and at solving problems. So go out and find a lot of bright people, remembering that management want to keep the age bill down - and you can probably expect that you'll want to get rid of a lot of them who turn out not to have whatever makes a good computer programmer. In those times, that suggests women. These days it would probably suggest ethnic minorities, as long as management were sure there wouldn't be a fuss about how low their wages were.
Dennis Ritchie worked at the Murray Hill, NJ campus, which is also where the transistor was invented, etc. These photos are from some Oakland, CA location.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle.
If the industry had turned full-circle then it would be full of women again. Instead it seems that the industry has done a vile 180.
Women back then didn't mind breaking a finger nail.
Women back then didn't complain about rugs in the office.
Women back then didn't complain if they weren't made CEO five minutes after they started working.
Put it this way, who would you rather work for your company: Grace Mary Hopper or Carly Fiorina?
... although I am worried that I be labelled as a misogynist for even suggesting it, I believe that the reason there may be fewer women working in that industry than there used to be is because back then it was more likely that women had keyboarding skills they may have acquired in training for secretary type positions that men were simply not as likely to aspire to become. While obviously technical training was still required to do the job, the additional factor of being more likely to have acquired the auxiliary training of being able to type quickly I feel would have doubtless led to fewer men being competitive for those positions in that era.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Women were not treated like underling eye candy. Your generalization matches propaganda, but propaganda does not match reality. Any attempt at explaining very complex social and economic issues with simple gender claims is wrong, and will be wrong.
Women in the 60s and 70s were looked upon with sadness and sympathy if they had to work. If a woman had to work, it was because her husband was not capable of supporting his family. If the guy was not in bad medical straights, he was a loser, a bum, an alcoholic, or an addict. Some women worked for the greater good, namely in sciences and teaching, but generally speaking it was frowned upon. Nothing at all to do with sexism, or the patriarchy holding women down. This modern push to get women working in careers for as long as possible before having a family, if they have a family is a newer trend brought to you by social engineers. It is not beneficial for society, it's beneficial for the wealthy who can cash in on the commercialism. It's also a great way of manipulating an economy to make it look progressive, when at the root it is nothing more than a string of broken window fallacies.
Women working in the sciences was actually common. Glamorized jobs for women didn't come about until the later 70s early 80s. Then women didn't want to work in Science, they wanted to work where they could do what they saw on TV and advertisements. Make huge bucks with sex appeal, marry that rich guy she worked with, and live happily ever after in the mansion. Scientists don't make money, and didn't then either.
Look at when development were made for like disposable diapers, fast food, the microwave, baby formula. Suddenly this fantasy about men abusing women by not letting them sit in an office for 45-50 hours a week will dissipate. Then you have to work on dispelling the more recent propaganda.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How about women don't find it interesting generally speaking? When was the last time you had a romantic encounter that included a discussion about regular expression syntax? Or to reverse the situation, when was the last time you found yourself not falling asleep waiting on your girlfriend to take 3 hours to pick out a handbag? Oh wait. This is slashdot. Nobody has a girlfriend. Because chicks don't dig computer programming or people that are all logic and math all the time. Geez.
It appears to escape everyone's notice that guys like taking pics of chics dressed up real nice especially back in the late 60's and early 70's. The main reason for the pics is to add eye candy to whatever other pics they would appear with.
I haven't seen a Winchester platter pack since visiting the data center at the Enogerra army barracks in the 1980's. I wonder if they're still using them? :)
I have to first point out that if the submitter is saying that the tech industry was full of women 50 years ago but isn't now, that's not coming full circle. If something comes full circle, it means coming back to the way things originally were, not the opposite of how things were. Instead, that's called doing a 180.
If the article is about Bell Labs 50 years ago, fine. But why is it necessary to make trollish comments regarding the state of the industry now? Also, the notion that clerical work is work that's fit for women is actually sexist. The idea was, of course, that women weren't fit to do other tasks so they were stuck doing clerical work. I don't want to go back to a time where certain jobs are considered in the domain of one gender or the other. That there were more women in the computing industry was a result of them being kept out of other fields.
Basically what we have here is a trollish and sexist attempt at an SJW summary. Can't such things be edited out? Also, we don't need four paragraphs for an article summary like this. Just saying.
It was learned early in the telephone business females a better job on the other end.
At first males were hired to be switchboard operators but they flipped bs to the other end all the time. Females replaced them, it worked out so well I guess females were more than welcome in their business outside of the switchboard.
Look around at the field of garbage collection, there aren't many women there either but I don't hear you complaining about it.
That's because writing garbage collectors is a man's job.
bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
Bell Labs existed to spend money - provided it was on research that had SOME plausible connection to improving the state of the art of telephony.
This was because, as part of the legislative deal that gave Bell a near-monopoly on telephony, they were allowed to set their rates to return a regulated percentage on their expenses, and those expenses included such research.
Suppose this rate was 6%:
1. Spend a hundred million dollars researching, designing, and delivering telephone service.
2. Set the phone rates so you collect 106 million dollars.
3. Deliver the phone service and collect the money.
4. Profit! (six million dollars of it).
Spend more on research, raise the rates, make more profit. So the incentive is to shoehorn in as much basic research as you can possibly manage to SOMEHOW connect to telephony and spend as much as you can on it. So spending money in this profitable way is what Bell Labs was intended to do.
But they get to (were REQUIRED to) license their inventions. And the money from these licenses counts against their costs. From year one they made more on licensing inventions than they spent on research. So they were a "failure" at their original purpose, but the poster child that proved basic research was a money-maker, big time, even though you didn't know in advance HOW you'd end up making money off it.
This continued through the Bell breakup, the spinout as Lucent technologies, and didn't get broken until about the new millenium, when management pulled a standard loot-the-company stunt: improving the bottom line (and their bonuses and options) by cutting off research that wouldn't pay off until a few years down the road (when they're gone, their money is safe, and their successors get to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.) A few years back some of the old hands were brought back to revive the near-corpse, and it seems to be on the mend.
Xerox PARC's opportunity to create wonders out of basic research was also enabled by an accounting pathology - though of a much different sort.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Groovy
Table-ized A.I.
Tape library work really was clerical work.
The computer would put up a number, the tape librarian would find the tape with that number and mount it.
That was drudge work, and those jobs are just plain gone. Most storage is on-line now, and what isn't is near-line where the tapes are located and mounted by robots.
I'm not saying women didn't do technical computer work then. But many of these jobs are non-technical. And the statement these women aren't eye candy is undercut by the fact that they are (almost) all dressed up and in some cases showing off their wall hangings.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It was a telephone company and employed a huge number of women in it's office based roles (rather than it's outdoor service roles) so there was a career path for them that opened doors to jobs associated with computing. So what has happened, nothing, now the jobs don't exist that lead to those other jobs, that mostly don't exist either. To confuse the work environment then and now and the skills that are in demand is a mistake.
Bullshit, I've been reading this since before 9/11. While I will admit that articles "like this" were not nearly as common back then, there was a ton of other not really relevant or great stuff back then too. Remember Jon Katz? This site was always a mix of democrats and conservatives, with a socially liberal, fiscally conservative lean if you had to assign it one. This summary doesn't beg some kind of SJW agenda either, it simply begs a question. How is asking how demographics in the workplace changed being a "justice warrior"? I think a lot of people are sort of mystified why there aren't more women in tech (usually those who don't actually work in it).
I love those hair styles that required many cans of Aqua-Net. Ah yes, how things have changed. I also think of the hardware is solid steel but failure rate of electronics components? Those big components seem like that can take a beating in temperature and humidity swings or did they? I imagine there were not much issues regarding hackers from outside implementing viruses. And also cigarette smoke was everywhere unless they made these clean rooms.
mfwright@batnet.com
Really. Shut the fuck up.
I've noticed something over the years. There is so much garbage on the internet you kind of automatically block it. Some gets through, but I invariably look for the X and close it. If you cannot ignore/dismiss sjw without software capabilities, you are either with them, very young, stupid, or some combination of those three.
"I don't think ... I think it's because ..."
So this is very much a discussion on the some random thought of some random blogger, isn't it? Richie was a good photographer, though.
She's wearing a ring... How much of this was staged??
That's not the mother Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and most of the women you see in the photos are indeed clerical, which is why they were following that particular hair and dress code. Women MTSs were not required to do so. There were lots of women at the various Bell Labs campuses, but very few women MTSs (Member of Technical Staff) at any of them outside of a few positions with groups doing psychological or sociological studies; fortunately there were several of those. The issue, then as to some extent now, was structural.
Bullshit. Slashdot has had a wide variety of articles and a wide variety of viewpoints back in the day.
What has made Slashdot into "what it is today" are neaderthal neckbeards like yourself who have the self control of a toddler and can't simply scroll past articles that don't interest them. Instead, they come into them and shit all over the place and get modded up by their equally ignorant and intolerant cronies.
These neanderthal neckbeards weren't what made Slashdot - but they are what is destroying it.
The problem is, this article is crap. It's trying to promote women going into STEM (Or, more recently in my kids school STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, Math).
It's trying to show women working in a technical field and that it's something anyone and everyone can do, regardless of gender, and it's something that has gone on for a while.
These are mainframe operators. They did NOT program or build anything. Not trying to dismiss mainframe ops, I worked in there for 5 years, but the most code intensive thing we ever did was fiddle with JCL when restarting a job abend. There were routine IPL's, but for the most part, it's watch the system, restart anything that abends and call someone if you can't restart it. This was barely technical.
The article is also crap, because the TWO of the THREE pictures of minorities are people whose names were forgotten (Rosie he remembered), with nobody caring enough to dig for it. They couldn't call a SINGLE PERSON that they had a name of and find out the name of the very few minorities that worked there?
This isn't something to use to get women into computer science or STEM (I dislike STEM to STEAM, http://stemtosteam.org/). This is prime example of why you shouldn't go into the field: your jackass boss photographs you for grins and giggles, without doing so for the men in the office.
Most of the pics in the article were of woman doing clerical and data entry. These job functions have been largely automated. So it would kind of make sense that the more we automate away the jobs that woman performed in tech, the less women will be there.
Am I missing something? The article is SJW bate right? But content of the article don't seem conducive towards an good old fashion SJW flame war.
But did the site have stupid 4chan/reddit style English grammar at the time? Discuss.
Over 90% of RNs in the US are female. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
If I might play devil's advocate here. The fact there were once far more women in IT is often brought up in the shortage of woman in IT situation. The idea is to say "see, woman must have loved to do engineering work until those evil white males drove them away with their neckbeards".
However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
So, at least according to the article, we know the cause of the decline of woman in the IT workplace. We just have less of a call for tape librarians.
That last line sounded kind of sexist now that I read it can. Feel free to burn some of my karma to get me square with the gods of Social Justice.
Perhaps this is true. But as we all know, diversity is far more important than merit or results, so the people in charge are evil misandrist monsters.
Any time a site with a muddy history like Slashdot does a story about something cool and totally ignores the cool angle and immediately focuses on what the only topic the far-left is interested in, that's a bunch of bullshit.
It IS part of the "oppress nerds, uplift women" thought. Because if it wasn't, where is the racist talk? Feminism is for white women, and that's exactly what we have here. The racists are totally absent from this conversation.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What a strange way to end an article. Maybe it's an american thing, but here giving a command like that would be suitable in a case where there's a certain hierarchy and non-voluntary component involved, like in a school class or a workshop. It's a bit strange to command it to the visitors of your site who come here for Leisure.
Why and how has this happened?
As clerical workers, those women did their 7.5 hour shift then went home. Even with the sexism of the 1960s, some fields concentrated on rewarding ability. The disappearance of women from many technology fields wasn't the only change in the workplace over the last 45 years.
But did the site have stupid 4chan/reddit style English grammar at the time? Discuss.
Ironically, you want to label 4chan/reddit as the birthplace of the Grammar Nazi...
Looks more to me like you're trying to project your ideological hangups onto a completely unrelated story because ZOMG pictures of wimmins next to computers, it's a plot to castrate us all.
*eyeroll*
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The submitter of this article did not work at the Labs during the Dennis Ritchie epoch. Women held jobs of a repetitive nature such as key punching, hanging tapes, and working at the input/output counter. They were respected and appreciated for doing jobs that engineers weren't allowed to do. We didn't have viruses in those days because security was much tighter than it is today. We shudder at what is acceptable practice today. Women didn't "wrangle" with computers back then. That is your submitter blowing smoke. In case you didn't know, engineers weren't allowed to do clerical work. That wasn't part of the job description. It was only later that highly trained and experienced software developers became clerks, shuffling papers more than writing meaningful code. Then standards dropped like a lead balloon, because corporations didn't want to spend one percent of their budget on software development. They wanted to buy packaged software to do everything for them and shyed away from inhouse development. The next logical step was out-sourcing.
The most striking photo was of the mainframe and what it could do compared to what my tablet or cell phone can do today. What we lack today is corporate committment to the industry, because corporations were burned too many times by inept management.
Agreed, but what I would say has changed is that the summaries are now trolling. This could have been presented a number of ways, just like the Code of Conduct story the other day which was a total non-controversy, but the summary trolled us and made a lot of people (who naturally didn't RTFA) angry.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
90% of prison inmates are men - how is that for sexism . . .
Take a look at how male software people treat women and you got your answer. The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS is that she was shocked by all the drooling guys in college. During the new student orientation week, there was always this 'magic number' buzzing around: How many females dared to show up. I sometimes really felt embarrassed by my fellow male students.
Because the question only exists because of the mindset that there MUST be a 50/50 split or something's wrong?
Nah, diversity is only important if women are under 50%. If they're over 50% well then that's just fine too.
Yeah but to be honest it pretty much wouldn't have mattered what the summary said. The people who got angry were the all the usual suspects and are part of the perpetually offended crowd who seem to believe that the efforts to get diversity in tech mean that everyone hates straight white men like them and is always out to get them by accusing them of rape or some such nonsense.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The submitter of this article did not work at the Labs during the Dennis Ritchie era.
Women at that time held repetitive jobs that engineers weren't allowed to perform. It doesn't mean that we didn't appreciate their work. We did. They made our own time much more productive.
What we lacked in those days was the instant feedback that we needed to catch bugs. That is the biggest area where our work environment was not productive. And we had to fight tooth and nail to get TSO terminals and mini-computers before the age of desktops, laptops, and blade servers ushered in the modern office.
The luckiest sons of guns at that time were scientists who had 24 hour access to a terminal in a lab, somewhere, like Lincoln Labs.
So the submitter used words like "wrangling" with computers, because he didn't actually work at the Labs at that time. Sorry, chap, but you missed the picture entirely.
You should focus more on Dennis Ritchie's contribution and where open software is headed today.
Thank goodness we're no longer constrained by FORTRAN architecture, batch jobs, reams of paper to recycle, hexadecimal dumps, card readers, and key punch machines.
We have bigger problems to worry about, like the corporate takeover of so-called open software. The bazaar is becoming more like a medieval cathedral every day. The bazaar is just the thin layer at the top.
Just look what happened to the Jews when moneylending changed from being an unreliable occupation of outcasts denied the honorary professions into the source of power controlling industrialization. Pogrom after pogrom, followed after an intercession of Enlightenment with the raging pan-European antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust.
Now software has become the place where the true power reigns, and women get out before they are killed (we already had "swattings" of women envied their influence in software development already, so this is not mere hyperbole).
"C" subject, it's true. The superior warrior Object Pascal has no such problems length contained in string and not null terminated like an imbecile would.
> software development is engineering, not clerical work
Thanks God Agile is changing that.
There was nothing insightful about your comment. Rather it proves the point that this article is all about the politics of Penis and Vagina counts for SJW types. Please don't take slashdot back down this rabbit hole, please stay in the light.
-GeekPoet
It's ironic that all the things they accuse "SJWs" of - being perpetually offended, wanting to silence others and shut down debates, demanding everyone agree with them and labelling any dissent as abuse and harassment - is all the stuff they themselves are doing.
Then they tell you to grow a thicker skin, while being unable to scroll past articles they don't like without getting offended themselves.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
vnc and bell labs?!
This story is so damn vague.
It sounds made up.
What did your "friend" end up studying?
Or did they just give up on college?
Seeing as more women than men attend universities and colleges now, I tend to also doubt you.
What place did she end up where "drooling men" can't look at her anymore?
Let me be the first to say
Wow, sexy ladies.
Do Americans also do this IRL? I mean, posit something and then end with: 'discuss'? I mean, it's annoying in message boards, but bloody hell that would make me lose it if someone were to say that to me in the flesh.
I propose that any post that ends with 'discuss.' is automatically deleted by /.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"What's noticeable about the pictures"
If only the SJWs could invent time travel to "fix" that too.
Look what a marvellous job they've done in 2016.
Do Americans also do this IRL?
Irrelevant - the submitter is obviously not American (judging from name and grammar).
I do however highly respect the people that develop and maintain the wonderful APIs I use on a daily base. Most of them I think are men. Never met them though.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The idea is to say "see, woman must have loved to do engineering work until those evil white males drove them away with their neckbeards".
That's just a deliberate mis-representation that anti-feminists use to discredit the argument, i.e. a straw man.
So, at least according to the article, we know the cause of the decline of woman in the IT workplace. We just have less of a call for tape librarians.
That rather misses the point though. The nature of jobs in IT changed, sure, but why don't we have more female sysadmins or technicians? It doesn't really explain why there are fewer female programmers, as a percentage of the total, than there used be. All you are really saying is that a heavily gender biased job was made obsolete, not offering any real insight into the issue.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What an odd turn of phrase, unless subby, like many people, can't tell women from woman?
Submitter is British and obviously a smug fucking prick as he reads The Guardian - therefore exactly the type of person to say "discuss" as if to illustrate his moral superiority by virtue signalling.
Note to submitter: If you read this, sorry if I made you choke on your cale and quinoa hummus salad. I just dislike smug pricks.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html
even some 50 years later
That's 48 years, you insensitive clod!
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
19"? 2U?
May I see your backplane and dongles?
How do they not remember Jack Thompson? Anita Sarkeesian is just a boring rehash of the same crap Jack said with more of a sexual spin less of a violence spin.
However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
You mean the same types of low level support positions that are replaced by H1Bs before they're completely automated?
How is it that slashdotters can identify and call out the "low level support personnel" when looking at a photo from decades ago but don't realize they're in the exact same position now?
If you're doing things the same way you've been doing them for the last N years, then you're about to be completely automated so that the rest of us can start working in the 2050 'efficient workplace'.
It doesn't really explain why there are fewer female programmers, as a percentage of the total, than there used be.
This has been asked (by you) and answered (by everyone else) again and again and again ad nauseum. You get told this at least twice a month. Let me try again:
Women in the 80's had fewer career choices than women today.
I'm actually genuinely curious at this point - why do you continue this argument? It's been debunked multiple times, yet you still try so hard. I'm not being facetious - I'd really rather like to know. It's now beyond the point of being commonly accepted knowledge - when women have choice they flock to areas other than CS. Time and time again.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
That is something you just invented. I'm for fighting all kinds of inequality, including if the minority in question is white guys. I'm not alone. I think your little outburst says more about how ill-educated you are on this topic than those you slung it at.
Take a look at how male software people treat women and you got your answer. The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS is that she was shocked by all the drooling guys in college. During the new student orientation week, there was always this 'magic number' buzzing around: How many females dared to show up. I sometimes really felt embarrassed by my fellow male students.
You should be embarrassed. Women understand well that they can't easily meet a rich doctor or lawyer to marry if they go to CS classes. Medicine or Law school is a better bet - and surprise surprise, there are more women in medical and law schools.
"The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS is that she was shocked by all the drooling guys in college"
No, the main reason was *she just wasn't good enough to do it*.
The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS
So, she's the type that blames everyone else for her own failings. Gotcha. "Omg those drooling women are the reason that I never got my nursing/teaching degree..."
Om, nomnomnom...
I'm supposed to feel sorry for someone that refuses to follow her dreams because of a tiny bit of adversity?
So, your argument is that there used to be an artificially high number of women in CS because they had fewer other choices, and now that more options have been opened up the percentage is returning to some kind of "natural" level?
That seems unlikely, especially given that you have not explained why the "natural" level isn't 50% (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying you need to explain your reasoning).
Or are you perhaps saying that the decline doesn't indicate things have got worse, merely that they stayed at the same level of badness since the 80s?
Please elaborate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I guess she wasn't really into CS, then. Because being shocked enough by a bunch of nerds who had poor social skills to give up your intended course of study isn't really a good excuse to give up your vocation.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Seriously. What else do you expect readers to do? That is a very condescending statement.
Being old enough to remember when IBM mainframes ruled data centers, I can assure you that these woman are minimum wage clerical staff; keypunch and tape librarians (a.k.a. "operators"). Notice that Bea, the one in front of the oscilloscope is also pictured pulling a tape off the rack.
Another big part of their job was pulling printouts off the printers and putting them into little pigeon holes for the engineers to pick up. When the young engineers wanted a break they would head down to the computer room to pick up their printouts and flirt with the operators; that's what life was back in those days.
Once in the early 1980s when I worked there, and old engineer at Murray Hill complained to me that "We used to hire PhDs to design hardware and hire housewives to program it. Now, we hire the PhDs as programmers and buy all the chips at Radio Shack." He was not pleased with this change.
This is childishly simple to answer: The talent pool comes from sexist countries. When I started in the 1980's, there were plenty of women in the industry. When H1B visas opened up the market to cheaper foreign labor, most of the talent came from India and China, two nations known for their sexist cultures - women were simply excluded because they were never part of the talent pool. U.S.A. college students - many of whom were women - quite studying CS in large part because they couldn't compete with cheaper foreign labor. Witness what happened at Disney recently. Disney threw out all the Americans and replaced them with cheaper labor from India. Palo Alto newspapers recently reported last year it's recent CS hiring spree was 75% foreign.
If we need any more evidence of these sexist culture, just Google for the article that highlighted "cheerleaders" in the office of CS workers in Asia. . .
Wire wrap backplanes and osciliscopes the size of a dog house. 2314 disk drives, 9 drawers so you could keep 8 online most of the time. Before voice coil motors, hydraulics moved the heads. There wasn't really a - seek and leak - instruction, it just seemed that way.
I guess that's better than sounding like a Daily Mail reader
TL;DR - The ROI for IT sucks in comparison to a lot of other fields. For whatever reason, women as a whole see this better and adjust. I'd like to submit my perspective. These are my observations, so please don't take them as gospel. I grew up in IT back in the 80s as a SysOp for mainframes. I've had two great mentors on the technical side and the first was a women back in the mid 80's Back then, there was a much higher percentage of woman in the field and more importantly the level of skill across the board (all genders) was MUCH higher. For example, a junior SysOp (sysadmin in today's terms) was *expected* to know how to script and a senior SysOp was *expected* to know how to port C code between different Unix flavors (but not necessarily write C from scratch). I'll refer to these people as the pre-IT workforce. How does this relate to woman leaving the field? I'll get there. When windows hit the corporate world, the demand for IT skills soared. To help meet this demand, the industry developed the GUI and promoted it as a graphical ADMIN interface as opposed to a graphical USER interface. This reduced the level of skill for new sysadmins entering the field (we're finally starting to shed the GUI crutch thanks to cloud scalability). Most of the people who entered at this time were not as skilled as the generation immediately preceding them. The GUI made the easy easier and the hard MUCH harder. A lot of people who were in that preceding generation of pre-IT workers were accustomed to do very hard and difficult work (the women included of course). Unfortunately, windows was not only new but also made it much harder to do the difficult things the pre-IT workforce was accustomed to. Because of this and inadequate corporate training programs, a lot of the people from the pre-IT workforce did not transition over to the IT workforce in time and a lot of their jobs were lost because the large companies in which they worked were transitioning to the IT world. It doesn't help that a lot of these companies also saw this as an opportunity to replace their higher-paid pre-IT workforce with more junior IT workers. Those pre-IT workers exiting the workforce did not generally recommend IT careers to their children, especially the women. So why didn't other women enter the workforce? When the easy was made easier and the hard was made harder, it really distorted the the ROI model for staff. Previously, anyone who got over the initial training hump and familiarization (command line and all) generally had what it took to eventually go on to porting C code if not writing it themselves (and other related advanced tasks). This all changed with the GUI. Large numbers of folks entered who were skilled enough to do some basic work with a GUI but a large percentage of them would not be able to handle the command line or scripting. This was entirely intentional as the workforce needed to grow and one way to do that is to lower the barriers for entry. Whereas before the pay scale took advantage of the fact that there was a relatively easy glide path to mastery, the new pay scale curve never adjusted to sufficiently motivate most of the new workforce to reach for a level of skill commensurate with/analogous to that of the advanced pre-IT workforce. Instead, that top-tier was effectively removed. Additionally, since the field really took off in the early 90's it required a significant amount of work just to maintain currency with emerging topics, let alone advance. All of this adds up to the fact that the ROI from a workers perspective is not as generous as other fields. As a point of comparison other than medical school, how many times a month does a dermatologist or general practitioner expect to solve a new problem - or are they just re-solving problems they've already solved?
Lol, this is like all the black land owners and bounty hunters in the Wild West in the histories according to Hollywood. Funny this guy doesn't seem to have a single male employee... Is it possible to stop confusing marketing with history or is propaganda just that much more palatable that we chose to lie to future generations rather than admit the truth and build from there. Lame. Article header should be man surrounded by well dressed, posing women just as the cameras get there...
The answer is that there were never a lot of women in CS or IT, if what you mean "women in CS or IT" women working as engineers or programmers. They were primarily not working in any jobs that exist now. Moreover they were not working in jobs that men of the period would have sought work in.
So yes there hasn't actually been a decline of women working as engineers or programmers in IT. The same low numbers that existed then exists now, or perhaps things are a little better. Where at work at a National Lab more than 50% of the IT people are women. Since the lab's founding every control system group leader has been a woman.
I have another question. Why is the "natural" level of men in the teaching and veterinarian not 50%?
At my place of work, we had n+1 programmers (the '1' being female, Carys where are you?) and 3 x n punchgirls in another room. Too dangerous for chaps to enter there, but the queenbee knew how to plug up the hitherto-vital tabulators. So the COBOL compilers soon ended her reign, poor Dear, but I tell you... those were Good Times.
I think a lot of people are sort of mystified why there aren't more women in tech (usually those who don't actually work in it).
Don't be disingenuous. It's not like we haven't had this discussion 500+ times already. Don't sit there and pretend this is something interesting, new, or meaningful. There's not one damned bit of insight going to be gleaned. There's not one bit of new information to be posted. There's just you trying to keep the message alive because you think we're stupid enough to have forgotten the last time you tried to browbeat us for things we're not guilty of.
The least you can do is be honest. The last thing you can do is pretend that it's somehow more meaningful or significant this time and expect us to believe you're being anything less than a manipulative twat trying to demonstrate some sort of superiority. It's pathetic. We've had this conversation how many times, Enrique? There's no fucking mystery to be solved. Nobody is mystified. And nobody is fooled by your pathetic attempt to be a manipulative cunt.
you ask a question.
you get the answer.
you're given the reason.
you ask for their reasoning.
you are not interested in learning.
you're concern trolling.
you've asked and been answered many times.
You repeat it again the next time.
we can see your prior posts.
who do you think you're fooling?
So, your argument is that there used to be an artificially high number of women in CS because they had fewer other choices, and now that more options have been opened up the percentage is returning to some kind of "natural" level?
That is not my position - my position is that your oft-repeated mantra "the decline in females within CS is due to sexism" fails due to the most basic counter-example - namely that female autonomy correlates highly with non-CS professional fields. It doesn't matter how often you repeat that statement, mere repeated assertion won't make it true.
That seems unlikely, especially given that you have not explained why the "natural" level isn't 50% (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying you need to explain your reasoning).
Why should I explain why the "natural" level should or should not be 50%. I am not claiming that it isn't - all I'm doing is pointing to observable evidence; namely that female autonomy is very highly correlated with non-CS choices. This actual evidence (not conjecture, but actual raw numbers) contradict your speculation about sexism causing low female numbers in CS.
Once again, for the benefit of anyone who is reading, I point out that the assertion "sexism is to blame for low number of females in CS" is directly contradicted by actual evidence: in places with sexism, there are more females in CS and in places without sexism there are fewer females in CS.
Or are you perhaps saying that the decline doesn't indicate things have got worse, merely that they stayed at the same level of badness since the 80s?
Please elaborate.
What makes you think it's "bad" (whatever the hell that means)? You cannot see past your ideology, which considers low numbers of females in CS to be "bad". Males dominate other intellectual pursuits, yet you don't consider it "bad". Females dominate yet other intellectual pursuits, and you don't consider that to be bad either. What's so special about CS that a disparity in numbers is a bad thing, if bigger disparity in numbers in other measures isn;t a bad thing?
PS. I doubt that this will be the last time I have to present you with actual evidence, raw numbers, showing that your assertion of "sexism is responsible for low numbers of females in CS" fails due to the low numbers of females in CS only occurring in societies with high female autonomy, and that high numbers of females in CS occur in societies with fewer freedom for females.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
"Anyone who disagrees with me is ignorant and intolerant."
The irony. If you don't like what someone has to say, how about just scrolling past it.
It's ironic that all the things they observe "SJWs" doing
FTFY
Shiny expensive machines turning to dusty junk, beautiful women getting all grey and wrinkled.
Not that there were a lot of women working there. The BIGGEST change is most I.T. stuff has been driven off shore to China, India, Mexico because of the punishing tax laws in this country. More and more corporations have moved a lot of their production off shore, and, their "headquarters" to other countries, to escape the excessive taxation in the USA.
TFA has really nothing to do with "Bell Labs." Bell Labs was not located in Oakland in 1967. The pictures are of some computer center. In those days, a computer center consisted of a bunch of mainframes, and people who operated it, typically by loading and unloading tapes, accepting punch cards over the counter to be loaded into the card reader, taking output from the line printer and splitting it and placing it with the job that was submitted on punch cards for pickup by the invariably male submitter. There were no IT people typically in the computer room. There were IT people and systems programmers who submitted jobs. They were invariably male.
Maybe the Bell System or Western Electric had a computer center in Oakland, but not "Bell Labs." Complete bullshit in every way. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historical_locations
Not really. I've seen plenty of cases all over the internet where something having fewer than 50% female was considered a problem, but 60% percent female? Obviously that's fine. I remember specifically a post on Imgur making the argument that we should be directly seeking a 50% female Congress. In the post they compared other countries, the ones that were closer to 50% were described as better than us, the ones far over 50%? Well they just got a "Great job!" not a "Hey maybe you should get more men in there."
Equality has a tendency in American discourse to be purely pro-female, with little to no interest in pro-male concerns. Just look at the reaction if you talk about MRAs.
You're off on your dates by at least 15 years. In the late 40s and early 50s, data processing was mostly done using "unit record" gear like keypunch machines, sorters, tabulators, and calculating printers. That's when it was dominated by women. That held true through the Eniac and Edvac era but faded rapidly when stored program computers began to dominate. By the late 60s there were primarily men in programming. I started programming in the late 50s and even then I encountered very few women practicing the craft.
We remember, but the messenger changed to a different "protected sex".
You could disagree with Jack, point out his misinformation, hell others argued against him in court.
The modern feminist doesn't want to debate her points, if you disagree with them you are labeled a sexist neckbeard racist rapist nerd.
And that usually shuts down any form of dialog with them, which ironically is what they want.
Well that, and your donations to their patreon accounts. There business model is whipping stupid people into a frenzy and getting money from them. It has nothing to do with improving equality for anyone.
If you don't like the skin color and gender of people working in an industry,
WHY NOT SCROLL PAST IT?
Correlation is not causation. And I doubt the correlation. Do you have any evidence to support your conclusion, like a peer reviewed study?
My position is backed by evidence. Women's experiences, detailed and comprehensive studies. I'm on my phone now so ask again tomorrow if you want a list, but Wikipedia has a good article about it with 59 references: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sir or Madam - consider yourself awarded an Honorary +1 Clueful.
Early computers were developed during WW2, mostly by smart women lead by a handful of very smart men. For example, take a look at the famous ENIAC picture, all women, except for the guy in the foreground who is actually a model and knew nothing about the machine. After the war these women went on to form the backbone of the computer industry during the valve and transistor age, with the notable exception of IBM which had a strongly male, Mormon influenced workplace and culture. If you thought it was coincidence that IBM staffers and Mormons dressed the same, think again.
In the mid/late 60's IBM offered the business friendly, scalable computing (IBM 360 series) which came to utterly dominate the market. By the 60's they were beginning to move women into the company but they remained predominately a male outfit. This shift coincided with retirement age for the many women who had got their foot in the door during WW2 resulting in an almost complete rout of women in the tech industry by 1970.
Correlation is not causation.
I did not imply that it is, I said that it disproves your assertion. If you make an assertion that $X causes $Y, and we find an inverse correlation, then we can be pretty sure that $X does not cause $Y. You asserted that $ISM causes $OBSERVATION. I contend that assertion by observing that $ISM is actually inversely correlated to your $OBSERVATION.
And I doubt the correlation. Do you have any evidence to support your conclusion, like a peer reviewed study?
You would doubt it; your ideology fails if the correlation of "more options for girls" = "Less girls in CS". Let's look at my observations, shall we?
Iran (few female rights): females account for 70% CS and STEM graduates (source)
Gulf region (so few female rights they can't even display their face in linked photo): females account for 60% CS and STEM graduates (source)
Qatar (few female rights): females account for 60% of CS and STEM students (source)
Malaysia (few rights for women): females account for 52% of CS undergraduates (Peer reviewed source)
Now let's see what the top ten feminist countries in the world look like:
Finland: 32% female CS students (source)
Sweden (possibly the largest number of female rights in the world?): 22% CS grads (source
Norway - newest figure I can find on line is from 1999, so ignoring it for now
New Zealand: less than 33% female CS graduates (source).
UK: 13% female CS graduates (source)
Canada: 27% female graduates (maths and CS) (source)
USA: 18% female graduates in CS (source
Netherlands: Can't find sources for this either.
The best countries for female rights have fewer female CS graduates than the worst countries for female rights. This is directly observable.
Now that I got some of the numbers, you just know that I'm going to repost this list (not a link, the actual list) every time you make the incorrect assertion that sexism *must* be responsible for the dearth of females in CS.
My position is backed by evidence. Women's experiences, detailed and comprehensive studies. I'm on my phone now so ask again tomorrow if you want a list, but Wikipedia has a good article about it with 59 references: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
You've given a list of 59 references, of which only one academic article supports your position (somewhat tenously, but there you go). As it is clear that you did not read your own references, I'll leave it to you to figure out which one supports your $X causes $Y position. The other articles all repeat your mantra - that there are fewer females in CS - but none of them address the glaring issue of why this is not
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
None of your stats show anything but a vague correlation. There is no evidence of a causal link. How can you tell that it's not due to, for example, differences in Western / post-Christian cultures and Middle Easter / Islamic cultures? That seems like a far more probable cause, especially since Islamic culture tends to separate men and women so the problems western women often describe in co-education environments are obviously going to be greatly reduced.
In fact, if you look at the University of Tehran's web site, you will note that women do in fact have a wide range of options. As wide as men. If anything, it is men who are socially pressured to limit their choices, while women are more free to choose. At worst, their choices are considered to matter little so they are free to study whatever they like.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. You say only one of the references on Wikipedia is peer reviewed, but I counted 12. They go into extensive detail about the reasons for there being a decline in women in CS, citing both interpersonal sexism and institutional sexism.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
None of your stats show anything but a vague correlation.
You doubted a correlation even existed, now you call it vague? What happens when you run those numbers through a basic statistics tool and it tells you that there's a strong correlation? Go ahead and do it if you feel that that is a are weak correlation (I assume that is what you meant by "vague" - we normally refer to correlations as either strong or weak, not vague).
There is no evidence of a causal link.
I never said there was. I said that an inverse correlation between two variables rules out a positive change in one variable causing a positive change in the other variable. This is still true.
It's basic science - if you assert that rise-in-$A causes rise-in-$B, and we find that most rises-in-$A correlate with fallings-in-$B, then it's pretty obvious that rise-in-$A does not cause rise-in-$B.
You assert that sexism-against-women causes low-female-cs-rates. The real-world observation is that sexism-against-women is correlated with high-female-cs-rates. The real-world observation contradicts your assertion.
How can you tell that it's not due to, for example, differences in Western / post-Christian cultures and Middle Easter / Islamic cultures? That seems like a far more probable cause,
I'm not trying to explain it. I'm pointing out (repeatedly) that the correlation we observe in the world is not "sexism-correlates-with-low-female-cs-rates" as you appear to believe, but it is in fact "sexism-does-no-correlate-with-low-female-cs-rates". You are trying to explain it, but your explanation is contradicted by the observation. I'm merely pointing at the numbers and saying "these numbers weaken the argument you're presenting".
especially since Islamic culture tends to separate men and women so the problems western women often describe in co-education environments are obviously going to be greatly reduced.
In fact, if you look at the University of Tehran's web site, you will note that women do in fact have a wide range of options. As wide as men. If anything, it is men who are socially pressured to limit their choices, while women are more free to choose. At worst, their choices are considered to matter little so they are free to study whatever they like.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. You say only one of the references on Wikipedia is peer reviewed, but I counted 12.
Great - you give 59 references knowing full well while you do so that that the large majority of them have no support for your position. But, once again, you haven't read those 12, have you?
They go into extensive detail about the reasons for there being a decline in women in CS, citing both interpersonal sexism and institutional sexism.
They can do so. However observation of societies with sexism contradict their extensive arguments. When you make an argument that $X causes $Y, only a single counter-example is needed to falsify it. The world provides many.
Empirical observations always trump explanations!
If you present an argument and facts contradict it, you can only change your argument to match the facts; you can't change the facts to match your argument.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
You are repeating yourself a lot without actually addressing the points I raised, but I think I found the problem anyway:
When you make an argument that $X causes $Y, only a single counter-example is needed to falsify it.
That is simply not true. $X causes $Y can be true, even if $Z causes $Y instead in some cases. There doesn't have to be precisely one cause that explains every single person's experience in the entire world.
Again, the studies I linked show a variety of causes, with evidence. While I obviously can't prove that increased choice has absolutely no effect on this, that's no reason to ignore these other causes that we can do something about.
What it boils down to is this: Can you explain why, when faced with someone who shows you evidence of sexism causing them to move away from CS, where the evidence is strong and verifiable and similar to the experiences of others, you dismiss it as that person having more choice than their predecessors?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That is simply not true. $X causes $Y can be true, even if $Z causes $Y instead in some cases.
What $Z?
You claim $X causes $Y
GP points out that in reality, what we observe is that in the presence of $X, $Y doesn't happen. Doesn't matter if it's correlation or causation.
There doesn't have to be precisely one cause that explains every single person's experience in the entire world.
The irony here is you're saying this while arguing for there being precisely one cause (sexism)
What it boils down to is this
No, that isn't what it boils down to. Another ironic thing is you accuse the GP of repeating the same thing, when that's exactly what you're doing.