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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.
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!
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.
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.
... 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.
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? :)
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
"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.
There is literally no job that is available to a man that isn't also available to a similarly capable woman.
Sperm donation.
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 English language is being pummeled into submission by reddit style reporting on the front page. Discuss.
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.
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.
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!
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.
You mean they'll pay you for that? My guidance counsellor has some serious explaining to do...
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
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.
Exactly. I thought we were done with Friday's are SJW day. Please no more penis and vagina counting articles. That is part of the reason why this website started to seriously go down hill. Let some other website handle those kinds of political articles and just stick to tech stories. Slashdot is so much better than that junk, let reddit handle it.
-GeekPoet
"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.
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
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.
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
Women back then didn't complain about rugs in the office.
Presumably you are referring to Chris Wanstrath removing Github's "United Meritocracy of Github" mat.
The reason it was removed is that Github and the tech industry isn't a meritocracy, and saying it is just enables people to carry on thinking that the reason there are more white people at the top is because white people are better than minorities. If it's a meritocracy, that's the only explanation.
In real life, white people tend to have more privilege. Not all of them, and not equally, and no-one is blaming them for that, it's just an observation that explains what is happening.
There were also some institutional issues at Github back then, which have been improving steadily. Maybe one day the mat can come back, but Github acknowledges that there is some way to go.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
even some 50 years later
That's 48 years, you insensitive clod!
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.
In reality, white people make up about 75% of the population of the USA (even more in places like the UK), so there's a bigger pool of talent to choose from.
The idea that white people are privileged is a bit of identity politics from the black and identity-politics brigade that seeks to denigrate white people and promote blacks (same applies to women, for example, this isn't a racist thing) saying things like "only white people can be racist because they're privileged", meaning any excuse to promote inequality in favour of a particular group is acceptable because they are not white males.
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.
The vast majority of women today don't do those things, just as some guys do those things today.
You're going to have to try better than using "INSERT AGED STEREOTYPES HERE" as an argument. Your wonderful use of illogical generalisations and the masterful false dichotomy at the end really drive home just how vapid your argument is.
Do you tell all the women you know in your life just how much contempt you seem to have for them? Or do you hold this attitude just towards women you don't know or like? If that's the case, how can you explain including the women you do appreciate in the same gross generalisations?
The mind boggles...
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'.
You don't think the alienation great swathes of the possible IT workforce is of any concern to anyone here? I'd say it's very important, and hand-waving it away as some sort of politics or even non-story is incredibly disingenuous.
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.
Possibly the same reason: societal splitting of jobs based on assumed "suitable" gender, and then the cementing of those assumptions through generation after generation of workers being exposed to them and reinforcing them through participation. IT having fewer female developers and nursing having fewer male nurses are quite possibly part of the same issue. If we just scream "SJW! SJW! SJW!" and stick our fingers in our ears we might never know for sure.
It's not Stuff That Matters to Nerds.
They have probably taken that off the site's header, though. Slashdot has been passed around to a lot of owners.
But women back then did complain about things such as being paid 30 to 50 cents on the dollar that men made. They also weren't very fond of the rampant sexism.
The reddit account isn't me. In fact, on the first page of Google results only the Slashdot account is me, the Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, Sourceforge and Deviant Art accounts are not me. I thought it was a fairly unique name, but I guess not.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
Nothing to do with lint and static electricity, of course.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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.
It's not Stuff That Matters to Nerds.
If it doesn't matter, then why does anyone comment?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.
Indeed! The police bend over backwards to include them in stop and search, and employers bend over backwards to include black people in the category of people discriminated against purely on the basis of their name.
Wow such inclusion many privilege.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That is too broad, and invokes something resembling the survivorship fallacy. You're only focusing on the success stories. There are a more white hicks, rednecks, drunks, and crazies living in squalor than successful ones.
Some more plausible explanations:
* People who were taught some class and groomed to act and dress in a professional manner have more privilege.
* People who were taught marketable skills, such as fundamentals of the trades, repair, crafts, and technology at an early age have more privilege.
* People who received corporal punishment as a child are more humble, and thereby more privileged.
* And most importantly and likely, people who have had to (or watch a parent) kowtow to a crazy white woman learn to accept responsibility and fault for the actions of others gracefully, leading more effective management skills, and thereby more privilege.
The real path to male liberation
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?
denigrate white people
How appropriate: Latin denigratus, past participle of denigrare, from de- + nigrare to blacken, from nigr-, niger black
That could explain the higher population of Women working there. As they had a monopoly on the telephone systems, they had staff of telephone operators who were slowly becoming obsolete and need new jobs for them.
However Woman in Computer Science based jobs were much higher back in the old'n days. If you go to any place that still has mainframes as its core technology you have a much higher woman (most of them are at or near retirement age) % then newer organizations.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Many things are important. Not all of the world's important things need to be discussed on Slashdot. Slashdot would be better with less politically-sensitive stuff. Fewer penis-and-vagina accounting stories. Fewer "they took our jerbs" stories. Fewer political clickbait stories.
Maybe try a month where all the stories are about something with a version number?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
The reason it was removed is that Github and the tech industry isn't a meritocracy,
The reason it was removed is that one Julie Ann Horvath, HTML writer and pretend to be "software engineer" went around crying that it bothered her.
PS: Apple stock holders, Horvath is now working at Apple. So now is probably time to sell your stock.
In real life, white people tend to have more privilege.
That's right, we white techie geeks have had a lot of privilege.
We've had the privilege of being laughed at by women we ask out.
We've had the privilege of being picked on in school.
We've had the privilege of being the first in line to be beat up.
Now we have the privilege of having to hand over something we've work hard at, put our blood, sweat and tears into, given up our personal lives for, to people too lazy and too stupid to build something for themselves.
Yeah that's right, you suffer so much at the hands of white privilege. So go cry me a river.
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.
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