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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.
Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
Why should we? It's not Friday. Asshole.
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!
Look around at the field of garbage collection, there aren't many women there either but I don't hear you complaining about it.
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.
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? :)
We know you come here for Linux and technology info, but instead we're going to shove Social Justice Warrior/Why Aren't More Women in STEM articles down your throat.
Every.
Single
Day.
Because we actively hate the actual posters that made Slashdot what it is today.
Discuss.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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.
...but got any of them naked?
More libtard crapola from limp dick pansy ass queers like BeauHD.
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.
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
"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.
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.
Over 90% of RNs in the US are female. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
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.
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.
perform keeping kUnows that ever
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.
Blah! Blah! Blah! For once I would like to see an article that is NOT about genitalia.
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.
Nah, diversity is only important if women are under 50%. If they're over 50% well then that's just fine too.
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
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.
"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.
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)
Oh do fuck off.
Can we just read about the history of Bell, without having some SJW agenda pushed down our collective throats in an entirely transparent way?
What comes next? "This vintage set of pictures of the 1993 Super Bowl winning Dallas Cowboy's side. What these pictures really show us is that the gender pay gap is skewed 100% to men, INFINITY against women and therefore every cis het white male scum should kill themselves now."
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
What an odd turn of phrase, unless subby, like many people, can't tell women from woman?
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?
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.