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The First Women in Tech Didn't Leave -- Men Pushed Them Out (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A column on the Wall Street Journal argues that sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself. At its genesis, computer programming faced a double stigma -- it was thought of as menial labor, like factory work, and it was feminized, a kind of "women's work" that wasn't considered intellectual (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). In the U.K., women in the government's low-paid "Machine Operator Class" performed knowledge work including programming systems for everything from tax collection and social services to code-breaking and scientific research. Later, they would be pushed out of the field, as government leaders in the postwar era held a then-common belief that women shouldn't be allowed into higher-paid professions with long-term prospects because they would leave as soon as they were married. Today, in the U.S., about a quarter of computing and mathematics jobs are held by women, and that proportion has been declining over the past 20 years. A string of recent events suggest the steps currently being taken by tech firms to address these issues are inadequate.
What's the over/under on tech bros litigating every tiny, pedantic detail in TFA in order to make themselves feel better?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
probably are retired actually
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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Most bean counters are so stupid. To make a big gain on the bottom line, hire only women. You can pay them less, and they do just as good a job. (Like my wife) And if they are a minority, you can pay them even less!
Why does it need to be repeated every few days that discrimination is the only possible reason why there could ever be more men than women in a profession and that men are collectively guilty? Curiously, it is rarely seen as a problem when women form the majority in a profession.
Did they get pushed out? 'cause 91% female doesn't seem like that's any kind of normal distribution. So, why aren't there more male nurses? If I use the current media-logic, it must be because women are pushing them out, sexually harassing them, and basically being general pieces of shit. So, because men don't show much interest in nursing, is it because women are playing dirty?
You talk about women in IT in the UK. Then you try and link it to the US? So did the sexist men in the US push the UK women out of work? Why just compare US to UK. Since obviously no culture differences exist, why not compare IT women working in the US to say China, South Africa, Mongolia, or even the moon.
The same thing happened to the several women who trained as astronauts in the early 60's. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-american-women-who-trained-space-1960s-180963704/). You can't keep a good woman down.
The first "programming" jobs were more akin to sewing with core rope memory.
Several generations of women did not go into tech, and lo and behold 20 years later the retirees are being replaced by -- you guessed it -- men.
Yes, let's blame men for literally everything that ever happens...
You'll hear non-stop about "robot privilege", and the "robotriarchy pushed us out."
They were 'computers' well before that.
By Computers I mean math execution units. IIRC It took thousands of person years of work to calculate the shape of the B-29's wings.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You mean what people at google and facebook do isn't mindlessly operating large machines?
Yes, its a global conspiracy. Us men like to keep them women in place. It doesn't matter if I'll ever meet the woman making less than me or if they can do a good job. Its all about keeping them down. In fact all men get together and discuss in secrecy how to keep women out of tech. It doesn't matter if companies could get the same job done cheaper because big companies put the bro code first. We even implanted brain controlling chips into the female dominated HR departments to keep them from hiring women. Muhahah because programming is so prestigious we can't dare let women in on this prideful position.
As government leaders in the postwar era held a then-common belief that women shouldn't be allowed into higher-paid professions with long-term prospects because they would leave as soon as they were married.
Before you can claim it as merely a "then-common" belief that women might leave as soon as they were married, you FIRST need to prove it wrong.
What data is available, and what does the data for that time period say about a majority of Women staying in and remaining committed or LEAVING professions in general after getting married?
For all I know at that time that WAS then the norm for women to be expected to change their priorities and leave profession after having kids, AND all of that perceived stuff might have been fully justified.
That MIGHT even be the norm today that the Man or the Woman might abandon their field following marriage+kids, and then it could be reasonably regarded to maintain a STABLE profession to seek the character and type of candidates that are most likely to be COMMITTED and not leave, for instance; single people who will sign an agreement that they won't date or marry for 10, 20 years, Etc. Etc.
Typical feminazi bullshit "logic" on blatant display. Now reality itself is "spurious" and being a code monkey that could be outsourced to another country if the company boss hair gets pointy enough "has value and status [and men take it over]."
You really are an astonishingly stupid vagina worshiper.
I know because I still remember a time when there were women programmers around who started out on keypunch machines.
Picture yourself spending all day typing COBOL programs into a keypunch machine. Back in the 60s and 70s that's pretty much tantamount to picturing yourself as a woman. Don't you think you'd figure that programming thing out, particularly if you were a smart girl?
Another thing you don't remember, there was a time when being able to type carried a professional stigma. Men didn't type. If you were a woman applying for a job you'd automatically be given a typing test. This was true as late as the 70s, when my wife (a physics undergrad student) was looking for summer jobs in science. She had to pass a typing test, but ended up writing Fortran programs which helped design what became the Chandra X-Ray observatory.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A string of recent events, where?
I heard the american work culture are very different from what I am used to, like I am used to question what "the boss" says or my male colleagues have to leave a meeting at 16:00 because they need to pick up the kids.We don't need to wear a shitty suit so "casual Friday" is alien to us(I know the "you need to wear something with a tie also exists in the UK"). All these things seems to baffle our american contractors.
I can only assume that the american work culture would have other problems as well?
Maybe not, but it's going to be hard for women getting a position writing Python code for important systems with their fucking English and Gender Studies degrees. Answering phones, however, is perfect for those English degree wielding women. Gee, I wonder why the coding is done by men? Oh, because women in general choose to follow the paths of lower resistance. And that is their choice, it is them exercising their female agency to run their own lives, so you don't get to argue that it's the fault of "teh menz."
1) Programming work was never considered menial even when it was relegated to women. COMPUTER work, that is being a small part of a biological Arithmetic Unit was considered menial. Indeed it was, assembly line work doing basic arithmetic, it was in every way factory work that wouldn't ruin a pretty face. Many women used to computer revolution to take their experience doing this sort of work to become programmers which were always respected.
2) Machine operators and system operators were generally relatively low skilled workers compared to programmers. They would actually operate the computer in the days when most people couldn't use it themselves. Most of these jobs eventually were taken over by the helpdesk. Once again a deservedly menial job.
. Today, in the U.S., about a quarter of computing and mathematics jobs are held by women, and that proportion has been declining over the past 20 years.
Here is where the intentionally deceptive author shines through. 20 years ago was the PEAK of women in tech, when they were nearly at parity with men. Many people have taken guesses at what pushed women out 20 years ago.. My favorite explanations are that this correlated with the rise of the autistic man child nerd archetype in the collective conscious. But the best I've heard is that the dot-com bubble attracted greedy assholes to the field and women don't want to deal with that shit.
I find this highly believable for the reason I believe BLM. It's a problem that I can relate to and accept may even be worse for the person making the claim. The part that sucks is that the sort of PHB MBA shithead that ruined everything will be the first one to demand a comprehensive code of conduct, and comprehensive training package to teach our fragile engineers and scientists not to rape.
It's often the female version of the men that originally drove women out in the first place. Except they get the be the toxic boss and victim at the same time. There will be no scandal if their abuses are brought to light.
Really - let's just go there.
Women made up the majority of the mathematicians and the calculators to make the firing tables used for artillery launches in WW2.
Computers were setup to automate the process so it could be done faster and cheaper, thus depriving women of those jobs.
SYSTEMIC CHAUVINISM TO FURTHER WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE!
I love it when premises are dismissed out of hand without being addresses whatsoever. It's honestly my favorite. This article summary contains many such premises being dismissed without even a batting of the eye.
They made a movie based on my career, it was called "9 to 5" and released in the '80s.
Can't we have more stories about bitcoin?
Even if men pushed them out, they still "left". Who writes this stuff?
time to cap OT and maybe lower 40 hours down a bit?
were the kids they decided to have when all the men came back from the war.
The labor force wasn't set up to handle men and women working. And they were smart enough to quit and become home makers rather than have their husbands sit home getting drunk all day and smacking them around out of frustration of being useless.
What exactly is the problem supposed to be?
No one wants to train and invest in people who are going to flake out. What matters is not their gender, but their behavior. The behavior was the consideration, not the gender.
These gender war baiting articles are starting to piss me off. Slashdot is controlled by social justice warriors.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
According to your logic jobs grow on trees, which is kind of fucked up, eh?
Found the Frenchman!
(more seriously, I'm all in favor of that)
#DeleteChrome
they would be pushed out of the field, as government leaders in the postwar era held a then-common belief that women shouldn't be allowed into higher-paid professions with long-term prospects
And please why that didn't happen in medicine, for example? Or in law practice, or in accounting, or in social services, veterinaries... Somehow the law faculties were less hostile to the sudden influx of females? Allow me to be skeptical of that.
We humans are really bad at getting to grips with complex processes, and are much more comfortable with a narrative, that simplifies the process in a couple of rough brush strokes that are easily consumable. Much better if the "story" has a bad guy against which personal irritations of one's daily life can find a target. To recognize that the playing board of society is more or less fair, and that sexes gravitate to the jobs that better fit them, taking into account all kind of conditions, is probably too much to ask.
But still! Nevertheless! To choose precisely tech among all fields, for that inane tale! I cannot think of an area where the last decades have been more dynamic, the demand for talent so pressing, the barriers of entry so low, and the competence so fierce. Does anybody really think that the under-representation of the females (never enough regretted by the males, I feel compelled to add) in this field is some sort of Machiavellian plot?
Had Google be better served by a mixed team, would they have renounced to it for...exactly what? And then they would have their lunch eaten by Bing, that had in the meantime renounced to the loggia's precepts and admitted many women to the development team. Netscape rests in the pantheon of heroes, because they could have been saved by a timely infusion of the female of the species, but they chose to sink with honor instead of selling themselves to the enemy. And when everybody was building the next wonderful thing in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists sent promising teams packing if they could smell just a bit of perfume in the presentation, just because they were not really in the business of getting rich, but part of a global sinister conspiracy,
Utter nonsense.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Ladies who entered data on punch cards or stitched core ROMs were not programmers, although they were participating in something important that deserves recognition. On the other hand, ENIAC programming was fairly high skill, requiring understanding of mathematics to wire the function tables. Still, it's misleading to say that men were not interested in computer science back then. Hardware design of ENIAC was done by (mostly?) men. Now hardware design is not a major source of CS employment, so similar men are going into software. Not saying women are not interested too, but there are factors other than men forcing them out.
In fact all men get together and discuss in secrecy how to keep women out of tech.
SHHHH!!! You're not supposed to be saying that in the open. Now we're going to have to revoke your Bro Card and put you on Bro probation. Please be ready to turn in your card at the next Super Secret Bro Meeting And Football Viewing. This month we'll be meeting at Elon's Battery-Operated Internet Cafe and Bait Shop in the basement, btw.
Yep. this is why you see so many women in garbage collection. Oh wait...
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Why don't /. editors respect women's choices?
Claim:
The First Women in Tech Didn't Leave -- Men Pushed Them Out
Passing reference to reality:
women [...] leave as soon as they [get] married [or became pregnant].
You see, if you just ignore all the misandry (as well as heterophobia, anti-white racism, anti-conservatism, anti-Christianity, and anti-other-traditional-aspects-of-the-west) and read between the lines, you'll see the truth. These social justice cretins have to mention reality, however briefly, in order to have a shred of truth in their anti-west drivel.
Women are free to work in whatever field they want. If not a lot of them want to work in tech, then fine. That's THEIR choice and I respect it. Why don't SJWs respect it?
Ada Lovelace died in 1852 and didn't even have the right to vote.
But, honestly, I don't really give much of a shit because nobody alive today was alive then and the world has changed so significantly since 1852 that, frankly, anybody transported from then to now would probably die of shock.
Get over it. It was over 150 years ago. The country I live in (Canada) didn't even exist back then.
We're still mainly driven by instincts hardwired into our primitive primate brains, which is why we treat each other so poorly. Coin flip whether we survive as a species long enough to evolve out of acting like animals, or whether endless war and endless predation of our own species kills us off.
First: data entry != computer programming
This is just a bunch of hearsay with subjective interpretations of irrelevant data.
This is some classic marxist propaganda.
Let's read along:
But replacing experienced women with male novices didnâ(TM)t go as government bureaucrats planned, according to Dr. Hicks. âoeThey were just hemorrhaging money and time to try and train and recruit this ideal young man, this technocrat who will manage people and machines,â she said.
Not only were the male recruits often less qualified, they frequently left the field because they viewed it as an unmanly profession. A shortage of programmers forced the U.K. government to consolidate its computers in a handful of centers with the remaining coders.
So men are the bad guys for trying to solve the problem of women leaving the job too early by hiring the only other people available...men...and they ruined the industry because that didn't work either even though there were no other options. So because no one wanted to program computers, men are the ones at fault, because the author of the story feels like saying so.
Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself.
Americaâ(TM)s computing workforce is 24% women, and that proportion is falling too, despite hundreds of millions of dollars the industry has spent on diversity and inclusion efforts.
So which is it, is the industry sexist or is it inclusive?
Oh its the male hiring managers that are the good guys and every other man is evil and sexist! At least there are some good men!
Seriously, Slashdot was sold to marxist SJWs, this kind of story has no place in existence much less here. It is 100% lies and nonsense.
Our society is being destroyed by stories like this. Civilization is doomed unless we fight back against this poison. We need to start being very, very vocal about these things.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
You present an extreme case here, just like these assholes who write such articles as TFA always do. I like your idea of electrones being female though.
It probably was, at one point, like another user said, menial data entry. I get the impression though, that women were very involved in the process of developing better tools to make it easier, and I can believe that men displaced them as it became less menial. I think though to assume this happened by men simply jumping into the profession like outsiders performing an ambush is probably misinformed at best. Much more likely, the increased automation made it attractive to other fields, meaning other already male dominated professions integrated and as they were already trained in the adjoined male dominated field (for example aerospace engineering), the women lost out.
I also dislike this wording on previously common practices that we now look down upon. It was not just a commonly held belief that women would leave jobs as soon as they were married, it was more accurately a highly probable outcome at that time. The truth is that now these things don't happen because of changes to social expectations, back then they did happen and it was a problem for businesses. People weren't ignorant idiots in the 60's, they were equally as astute but the social conventions and level of knowledge were different.
make some themselves.
There were plenty of women working in early computers, BUT they were mostly not "programmers" in the modern sense and they were NOT pushed out by a bunch of piggish sexist men. The situation was akin to women in the telephone system.
Just as the phone system originally operated with lots of facilities full of women sitting before huge plug panels who used patch cords to connect calls (my mother did this) and they were replaced by computers and huge banks of relays, most of the women in early computing were simply replaced by the computers themselves as the systems became more reliable and more capable. Early on, the engineers would design a "program" that actually involved physically patching the hardware and then some women would follow the instructions to "program" the computer. It was menial labor that required attention to detail and at the time such tasks were often assigned to women who were less expensive employees. It's also true that many women in computing and in aerospace were originally performing mathematical operations with multiple women effectively doing parallel computing. This is all now done by microprocessors - no sexism involved, just increased automation, speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
Next thing you know, the invention of the cotton gin will be re-interpreted as a racist move that caused many blacks to become unemplyed in the south [facepalm]
Stop bullying us.
...that women are too weak to hold onto anything without men.
I have worked in tech for over 25 years, going back to my first days in college I never observed a single incident of issues with women or heard about it from the women in my classes of any attempts to push women out. It was always the opposite, exclusive scholarships for women and minorities only, as a poor kid relying on financial assistance this was disheartening. The same occurred in work, this constant narration of women being picked on in tech but never observing any indications or even idle chatter to the contrary. I think alot of this is made up to push some type of agenda.
Another day, another article encouraging woman to enter tech in the hopes of driving down already depressed wages. For the record I made sure my daughter got into medicine. And I tell anyone who'll listen, man I'm woman, to stay out of tech. Math is fine, but Math != Tech.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just more Self Flagellation on the part of the SJW crowd.
You suck, I suck, we all suck. History is all about woman haters blah blah blah.
If we are going to go back in history to find reasons to bash men today, we can just right back to Eve and blame that bitch for getting us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
That is precisely why the "data entry" or "key punch" was equivalent to the sci-fi sounding Machine Operator class - almost a Tom Clancy-ish video game designation, or a Team Fortress rank.
Yes, because how dare you have priorities other than to serve the corporation. In tech, most of the marriage/kid arguments affecting employee turnover today are bullshit because even the males, if they are any good, move companies every 2-4 years anyway. That's no different a turnover time than someone getting married and having kids, if they decide to leave the workforce. If anything, I believe women are more likely to be committed to a single employer than their male counterparts, making any retention arguments not only bullshit but, the complete opposite of the truth.
Note: I'm referring to modern women in tech, not the the 1950s-1980s.
To the Michael Eigner of WPIX. CBS anchor Otis Livingston that i met told me scary story when he had privete contact with Michael Eigner’s spouse, Otis Livingston also wants to destroy Michael Eigner’s spouse if she will open her mouth. never trust Otis Livngston he belongs in prison!!!!!!!!!
This is not true the first women in tech were engineers who became famous. Adm. Grace Murray hopper worked right alongside Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC. Then she went on to invent the compiler.
Eckert and Mauchly's wives did a great deal of hardwiring and associated technical work and it was considered women's work but the notion what they did was considered menial is totally inaccurate.
The article and your post also completely misses that 20 years ago was the peak of women in tech, nearly at parity with men.
Seems feminism has forgotten Adm. Dr. Prof. Grace Hopper PhD I guess. :(
I believe the phrase goes, adding insult to injury, if I'm not mistaken.
Women do tend to bail on their job once they decide on having children.
Now the SJW swamp donkey (feminists) types may not, but no one wants to hire someone who is a lawsuit waiting to happen and that smells strongly of cats.
I am a male.... At my very first job in the tech industry - back in 1988 - I had a female boss. She was 10 years older than me. She was married with 2 kids and continually made sexual innuendo's, advances and comments. I ended up have a 4 month affair with her. .....
Do I get to join the #metoo movement?
Do I get to out her today and embarrass her, get her fired and perhaps un-hire-able?
Na, that would make me a self loathing, pathetic victimizing monster.
Nobody talks about when it happens to men....
Just out of curiosity, what do slashdotters think about men being forced to work with women?
It would seem, judging by things like history books, and the biggest news stories of 2017, that a lot of men don't like working with women. So why are we forcing them to? Is there something wrong with a group, even a large group of men wanting a life where they don't work with women?
Maybe they simply aren't comfortable around girls? Maybe they want to go home to their wives having not spent all day with other women? Maybe they feel overpowered by women in the work place, or maybe they feel like every comment they make to or around women to be a liability in a way very different than comments with male colleagues?
The point is that it doesn't matter what the reason. Why are we forcing men to work with women? What's wrong with the very simple: this is a men-only workplace?
I understand that twenty years ago, that would have meant women couldn't be hired. But these days, there are plenty of female-run companies, and plenty of what-would-have-been-called-progressive companies who enjoy women in the workplace.
So is it time to drop the affirmative action of requiring men to accept women in the workplace?
Today, going forward, what would happen if we were to start allowing companies to limit their workforce to men-only, purely because their workforce desires such?
She wants to go into Family Medicine, and has no aptitude for computers. But I've firmly told her "No! You've internalized the patriarchy in thinking you don't want be a programmer! Now listen to your father and spend your life chained to a terminal like I have!" /s
the lack of men in nursing is something the nursing profession is actively working to fix.
Nurses need someone to get things from the top shelf and open containers.
You are right, garbage collection is male-dominated.
We should get rid of Java and Go and replace it with C and C++ to restore balance.
You can't even talk about that.
I though equality was more about getting equal than getting even.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But I work for Google so better keep it for myself.
There was gender discrimination in the past?
Next thing you'll tell us that we thought black people can be owned, right? Or trying to ease us slowly into it and didn't want to drop that bombshell yet? Hope I didn't spoil your surprise.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most of Slashdot probably recognizes this story as feminist propaganda. It's the James Damore debate all over again.
But the purpose of the article isn't to convince us . Instead, the purpose is to indoctrinate the general public, so that when the feminists come after us, the public thinks that the feminists are justified. They're putting a target on our backs. If we don't fight back, we'll be eliminated. Wake up!
Thats how it is girls. Don't mess with free will.
Yup.
The fact that you are paranoid, doesn't mean that they are not out to get you!
Not a possible conclusion when dealing with wicked-problem systems theory. Not even a possible provisional conclusion.
Possible conclusion: We have yet to see compelling evidence that recent steps taken by tech firms amount to a hill of beans. But that conclusion would be true of 99% of everything, 99% of all the time.
Sometimes with complex systems, there can be a brief flash of obviousness, but not very often.
While is technology being singled out, when most of the 20th century was on board with woman mainly being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?
This was an official plank of conservative family values, necessary for the upholding of the fine social fabric, etc. etc. yada yada. I can't recall a time in my life where I didn't believe that women ought to be able to do whatever the hell they want, to the same extent as men. I was an attentive child. I remember much about the 1970s quite well.
However, I've never been 100% comfortable with trying to force any complex system into a normative state. If you are intervening on behalf of one variable (out of thousands), you are usually throwing those other thousand variables to the wind.
I'm progressive enough that I've even argued in the past for separating achievement from ability (with equal ability, those with more opportunity should be expected to demonstrate more achievement).
Schools and other organizations intake on some mixture of ability and achievement, but to the extent that ability is the main factor (as viewed through an achievement lens), women deserved an intake boost (in Canada, we already have more women than men in higher education, so there's not a lot of residue left here).
I suspect men are hard wired to put up with more crap in the pursuit of extreme narrowness (otherwise, you don't get the girl; this is basic sexual competitiveness asymmetry from Robert Trivers). We don't have any reason to believe that exact equality is a natural outcome on any dimension.
I'm simply not wired to give any employment at all to the Handicapper General.
Almost every other mechanism of promoting equality appeals to me (those that don't involve normative head counts).
Andrew Wiles and the Taniyama Conjecture will be able to reconstruct your argument! Oh, wait....what were you saying?
There's nothing like when a "generation removed" tries to teach a lesson to the people that lived it. It sends the wrong message to the generations that follow.
Most women thought, and openly expressed, openly mocked, computer use as being the domain of the nerd. As someone that actively encouraged women to become more involved I can say that the predominant attitude by them was that "computers are for nerds".
Men didn't make it too inviting, however that wasn't their responsibility. It wasn't their purview.
Granted men did create a highly competitive environment and this was filled with intimidation because the work was intimidating. It was. If someone wasn't able to embrace that they obviously wouldn't stick around, male or female. I'm sure the atmosphere created by this was intimidating to the point of being viewed as hostile by some. This intimidation didn't keep men from pursuing their goals.
I remember playing darts with a friend who was into computers. We were talking about Macintosh vs. DOS. I asked him how he got involved. He talked about his brother that worked for Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). He told me that he was writing drivers for some hardware component for the Macintosh. He told me his brother had taken some "obscure math" class in college and that ILM was looking for anyone that had that knowledge. This was when I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley so I had no reason to disbelieve his story.
Back in the early tech days competition was heavy and hard. People would enter and leave in droves. They'd enter because it was a new skills market and they'd leave as they failed to achieve or they burned out. I noted back then that so many left yet I stuck it out -- I didn't seem to burn out.
Learning technology is a very personal thing. I mean most of those that stayed with it were people that spent their nights and weekends learning everything they could. Their job didn't stop at the close of business. If you wanted to learn a new programming language -- the up and coming new one such as C or C++ or C# -- you traditionally built on your prior knowledge. It took months if not years to learn these languages adequately, and that didn't always happen by going back to school. In fact, I'd venture a say that it rarely happened that way. I can't say what occurred at the level of the executives, but I can say that it wasn't likely that anyone was going to achieve the level of executive unless they had an intense indepth of knowledge in the field.
If you weren't into software then you were into hardware and if you weren't into hardware or software you were into support. It took years to learn to design hardware, and that most often required a degree in electrical engineering and/or math. So, if you weren't going for a degree to develop computer hardware and you weren't developing software then you were supporting infrastructure and/or the users. That took a broad understanding of multiple areas. You needed to know how the hardware basically functioned and you needed to know how software was supposed to work more than you needed to know how a specific piece of software/program worked. For instance, you needed to know the idea behind word processing versus knowing a specific word processor. You needed to be able to look at a piece of software that you'd never seen before and know why it broke -- and you did know because you knew how software was supposed to work. None of these skills came over night. You needed to thoroughly indoctrinate yourself and you needed to be around others that didn't mislead you, around people that also knew their stuff, and if you couldn't put up with the competition you were shunned. If someone was able to deal with that then whether they were a man or a woman didn't matter.
I do remember many times where I heard a complaint that such and such wouldn't teach such and such a person. When asking about it I'd get a response that that person just didn't get it or took too much time away from what they were do
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Unlike being a cop, being a large animal veterinarian is one of the more dangerous jobs one can do!
Anonymous Coward has never worked in a restaurant and also is prone to assume things about others without any basis. Yep, I"M A TRUMP! HAHDHAHDAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAQHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
no one.. its not relevant if you have a vagina or a penis... just if you can write good code.
Rather than guessing why not look at the research done into why there are not more male nurses?
Bullying is a factor. Like women trying to get into tech and science, it's partly down to men being discouraged by teachers and parents. Partially social pressure, partly the low status of nursing making it an unattractive career (thus less motivation to overcome barriers to enter the profession).
That's why it's worth looking at these issues, they affect men as well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Reference counting seems somewhat homophobic by nature. Two strong references pointing to each other will end up leaking memory. Why can't two shared_ptr instances be a couple in the same way a shared_ptr and weak_ptr can?
And C-style manual memory management? Seems a bit ageist to me. As a senior citizen with one foot in the grave myself (meaning I'm over 40), how can I possibly be expected to remember to free() all those malloc()s? It's a little unfair that we can't make the compiler take care of that for me, with my rapidly failing memory, rigid mindset, and rapidly failing memory. What were we talking about again?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So..? Do you think women are incapable of competing against men in the same workplace?
Really makes ya think doesn't it.
Men test each other all the time. Men challenge each other all the time. You can call it gatekeeping if you want, but the fact is men have done it to each other for a long time. Women join men, and they don't want to be treated equally. They want to get special treatment. Equality is seen as sexism. It's only benevolent sexism that's seen as equality.
Bullying is a factor.
You mean by women. Back in the 1980's and 90's there was a large coordinated push by feminists to push men out of both areas. In both cases it was some mantra of the "he's male thus a rapist." There's no social pressure against being a teacher or nurse, there is a big social pressure not to go in it because of the perceived problems relating to working with women.
Again, look in your own damn backyard. And you'll find plenty of stories of men run out of the teaching profession especially k-12, on claims of sexual harassment that turn out to not be true or have their lies completely ruined by false accusations. On the other hand, there's plenty of female sexual predators who get slaps on the wrist for hooking up with a 14yr old boy or girl.
Om, nomnomnom...
In the U.K., women in the government's low-paid "Machine Operator Class" performed knowledge work including programming systems for everything from tax collection and social services to code-breaking and scientific research. Later, they would be pushed out of the field, as government leaders in the postwar era held a then-common belief that women shouldn't be allowed into higher-paid professions with long-term prospects because they would leave as soon as they were married.
Perhaps, but aside from a dastardly evil plan to keep women out of advanced fields like programming, maybe - just maybe - at the end of WW2, when the boys came home, the women left the workplace and returned to being the homemakers they were before the war?
In 1945 the world was a much different place than it is today, don't Project today's motives on last century's actions.
Ken
English degrees are just fine for programming. I've worked alongside several. Precise grammar and correct choice of words are very important. Arguably much more important than math for most software projects.
By Computers I mean math execution units. IIRC It took thousands of person years of work to calculate the shape of the B-29's wings.
Seriously? Do you mean like 500 to 1,000 workers 2-4 years to calculate?
No, YDRC - You Don't Remember Correctly. It is inconceivable that 500-1,000 workers reported to work for two+ years to figure out the calculations involved in designing the wing on just one of several different bombers designed and built during the war.
Ken
Mashiki, what did I tell you about making stupid assumptions about me?
I was referring to bullying by women in my post. That's exactly what I meant. And as usual, you made an incorrect assumption that doesn't even make sense in this context.
Ignoring the bullshit about feminists, your are right that paranoia over paedophilia is driving men out of teaching. The has been a big push to fix it because young children need male role models. Make teachers can get extra money to do training courses etc. It's very hard to combat the newspapers pushing that nonsense though.
I guess you don't follow UK news but in the last year at least three women went to jail for sex with children they were teaching (all teenagers). On the sex offenders register for life, obviously never going to be allowed to work with kids again. It's that what you mean by "slap on the wrist"?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, usually the bullying is by assholes full of stereotypes. Like you.
It isn't the other nurses doing the bullying, it is the doctors and patients.
Mashiki, what did I tell you about making stupid assumptions about me?
One doesn't make stupid assumptions by self-described male feminists who also call themselves allies.
I was referring to bullying by women in my post. That's exactly what I meant. And as usual, you made an incorrect assumption that doesn't even make sense in this context.
You should read more slowly then, then go pick up some teaching magazines from your local library(providing your council hasn't shut it down), and you'll figure out where you've gone wrong.
I guess you don't follow UK news but in the last year at least three women went to jail for sex with children they were teaching (all teenagers). On the sex offenders register for life, obviously never going to be allowed to work with kids again. It's that what you mean by "slap on the wrist"?
3 in the last year, that's pretty good. Of course, that's why there's such a problem where feminists rally around those women and defend them nearly unto death right?
Om, nomnomnom...
No, usually the bullying is by assholes full of stereotypes. Like you.
Uh-huh. Facts are stereotypes huh? Why oh why are nursing organizations trying to put a hard brake on the entire thing and stop female nurses bullying male nurses then. Oh right, let's pick one then: Because that's imaginary or because you have no idea.
It isn't the other nurses doing the bullying, it is the doctors and patients.
No? You should go let them know that, especially with the nurses who've been bullied out by other nurses for not being the right gender.
Om, nomnomnom...
Got any examples of feminists "rallying round" these accused and fighting for them? It never happens here.
Seriously, where do you get this stuff from? I want to read it myself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Explain how to expect the same number of women in IT when we only had three (3!) girls and two hundred boys in college in my computer science course.
This doesn’t accord with my memories. I joined ICL (the product of earlier mergers) in 1972 and as a programmer worked with three women on the team. Later, at a publishing company, the chief programmer was female, as were two senior systems analysts. I don’t recall any animosity or other bad feeling towards any of the women I’ve worked with. As for minicomputers, their design really didn’t fit the corporate processing requirement; though by the end of the 60s ICL had developed a successful small 24-bit mainframe comparable to (say) the PDP-11 in processing power, though arguably with the wrong form factor for laboratory use. I do wonder whether a US issue is being projected onto the UK here.
If you read that article on WSJ you would think 'poor women bullied by men'
Well, what about Grace Murray Hopper?
Was her bullied by men, and pushed out of the field she liked?
Was she???
... but for reasons unrelated to their job performance.
The fundamental problem is, that a woman can do something no man ever has and ever will be capable of: She can bear children and comfort a man. This is a cold hard evolutionary and technical fact. As a man in a society where women take the worth out of what I'm doing and care less about choosing a man for good and using him to start a family, I must subconsciously suspect that I and most importantly my genes are not needed. I thus withdraw.
If however I am building an entirely new society from scratch ... Let's say for example I'm a sexually unattractive super-nerd leaving a society were I'm not needed that wouldn't ever get me a decent women and I go into a barren wasteland and rent a garage and start cutting up silicon on the wacky premise that this newfangled semiconductor thing takes off - then I would be pretty demanding that any women that comes along plays her part and takes care of a good or halfway useful man and leaves the hard work to us men.
It's really that simple. Sorry lady, but your PhD mean less than nothing to me if your young and beautiful. You could be a cleaning lady (not for long though) and I would still be interested in you. Have a PhD and signal me every step of the way that you don't need me or any other man around then no, you won't get my support. You will probably get even less than some male asshole at work. At least I don't ever expect to make love to him and he might come in handy when we need to oust that pesky competition.
Bottom line: A big problem in today's society is that it doesn't love or respect it's men that much anymore. If we are not needed, coun't me out. I'm doing part-time webdev, and dancing and the occasional ONS on the side. I musn't, but it's what today's educated women seem to want. A reliable relationship seems pretty unlikely these days and times. And what looks like the Fall of the white man may actually be the Fall of society. I'm not saying it is so, but 2nd+ feminists shouldn't applaud to loud just yet.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Just like the bullshit that women are paid less. There's a great and truthful quote...
"if employers could save 23 percent by hiring women, they’d fire all the men."
Just another day in Paradise
Seriously, where do you get this stuff from? I want to read it myself.
Are you in that much of an echo chamber that you don't know that "feminists" like Lena Dunham, Germane Greer, Jessica Valenti and so on have all defended female pedophiles and pushed that feminists should rally around them. Go pick up a copy of Female Sexual Abuse of Children by Michele Elliott, it directly talks about how feminists white-wash abuse by women of both boys and girls because there's no direct benefit to feminism. Hell you just finished *having* a female pedophile that was groomed by "asians" and lured other young girls into the rape gangs, not only did she ply them, but feminists were arguing that she should have a significantly reduced or no sentence at all. Do you not read any news in your home country? Or even the court transcripts and records?
Hell you've got feminists in the UK that today argue for the abolition of all female prisons and sentencing of women for any crime.
Om, nomnomnom...
Not sure if this will actually prove or explain anything, but here it goes.
It used to also be the case that a family only needed one bread winner. You could support a family with a good wage. That seems to have changed, where in many cases it may be more important now that both parents be in the workforce. Now I will not pretend that this was uniform, women have worked since the dawn of time, I am only speaking generally, say middle class.
This dates back to WW2, and all the men going to war. As a result as many are aware women were asked to fulfill a lot of workforce roles they might not have been accustomed to in the past. As a result when the war was over, and men returned to work, while many women left the workforce many stayed. You pretty much doubled your workforce. As a result (and also with women making generally less than men) due to simple economics, that increase in the number of workers lowers the amount being paid to do the same job. Over time as even more women enter the workforce, this intensifies further stagnating wages. This has led to the afore mentioned reality that both parents need to work in order to support a family in modern times. Who are the winners here? Certainly not men, and not even really women (empowerment aside), but rather corporations and those few at the top able to take advantage of the situation, further escalating wealth inequality.
Now I am certainly not saying that the above is the *only* cause of both wage related issues, composition of male/female workforce, and wealth inequality in general, however it is one of the primary causes (of which there are probably several others). The basic premise being that adjusting from one workforce to a more numerous (inclusive of lower paying) is going to have a predictable and obvious impact to both wages and the resulting feedback loop of further pressure for more workers to support a family.
Put in that context, next time you see an old fat white rich guy, and assume they they are against women's libs, you might be surprised. The more women they can get in the workforce, the larger the pool or potential workers, the less they pay for the same work, the more money in their pocket. Surprised they aren't out in droves at rallies holding a sign with a shit eating grin...
Just a lot of bros in the comments who choose to take offence instead of own the fact that our old ways were wrong.
Yeah... real "manly" there guys. Sidestepping responsibility and being whiny pissbabies.
I guess that is manly. I guess that's what being a man is about.
Untrue. Computer operation was considered clerical work, and was much more than data entry. Women were doing that era's equivalent of being a sysadmin. Before electronic computers, it was also common for women to be human computers, ie, get a bunch of people in room and have them work through methodical mathematical calculations (parallel processing). The majority of calculations done at Bletchley Partk were done by women. When electronic computers came along, women followed naturally in similar roles, turning high level descriptions and specifications into the actual machine language (in old IBM style, programmers versus coders).
I decided to take a leave because I would be fulfilled by going to a monastery in Tibet. My employer should pay for my fulfillment leave. They did not look kindly on my demand.
Then I decided that I would be fulfilled by having a child. My employer should pay for my fulfillment leave. A billion feminists agree. I got it.
Then I decided that I would be fulfilled by having another child. My employer should pay for my fulfillment leave. A billion feminists agree. I got it.
Then I decided that I would be fulfilled by having another child. My employer should pay for my fulfillment leave. A billion feminists agree. I got it.
You wanna solve this? Either no special leaves for anything that is a choice, or else anyone gets up to 2 years total lifetime leave to do whatever choice fulfills them.
But these things don't get decided by rationality; they get decided by politics, and politics is determined by self-interest, delusion, and power.
The women were actually writing the code, they were not just threading cores. They were not the chief programmers of course, "coder" was much lower in the hierarchy. The women took the specifications and programs and turned them into actual machine code. This was somewhat a rote translation job, but because the coders were the most familiar with the actual machines they were also the experts in what the machine could do. The higher level programming jobs were much more abstract, sitting at a desk without even a computer terminal and writing out the specifications and designs on paper.
Anyone who lived through that era would know that women were much more involved in computing early on, and over time the relative percentage of women in computing has declined. This actually happened, it is not conjecture or theory. All the ranting form the men's rights conspiracy groups won't change that. Yes, these coding jobs were the grunt jobs at the bottom of the totem pole, and yes, that's why women were doing those jobs.
Today, the bottom ranks of the IT are almost all men, and they're being outsourced. They're being outsourced because they are the bottom rung jobs. And surprise, if you look at those foreign outsource agencies, their talent has a much higher percentage of women in programming and team lead positions than you will usually see in America.
No. In female dominated fields males are of course considered intellectually and emotionally impaired which is why they don't have a chance to prevail :) SJW and feminist thinking allows only one conclusion and that is that white males are the problem, whatever the problem is.
Could you at least consider another profession, Focker?
I'm not sure which plane it was. Early laminar flow. But I know it was that order of magnitude of 'computer time' required.
They did do all the calculations twice, as error check. IIRC it was an iterative numeric design process. With wind tunnel runs to validate between iterations.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, right. Ada Livingston was punching cards and didn't know what she was doing. As did Grace Hopper.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've viewed your recent posting history and wow you sure have an axe to grind! Need intense psychotherapy much? I pity fools like you and anybody who is forced to share the same space as you.
Who the fuck is Ada Livingston?
And, of course, you select for crazy when looking for news about people you don't like.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
To the Michael Eigner of WPIX. CBS anchor Otis Livingston that i met told me scary story when he had private contact with Michael Eigner's spouse, Otis Livingston also wants to destroy Michael Eigner's spouse if she will open her mouth. Micheal Eigner and his famely must becareful of crime Otis Livingston!!!!!!!!
Dunham isn't considered a respected, mainstream, feminist. Greer and Valenti have never defended female pedophiles (I don't believe Dunham has either, but frankly she spouts so much BS I don't know what she's said now.) If you have evidence either Greer or Valenti have defended female pedophilia, link to an article by them stating it. And yes, that's the standard I'm asking for, I don't want some half-witted Brietbart piece that quotes someone out of context - GIVE ME THE DIRECT QUOTE IN CONTEXT.
No mainstream, respected, feminist has ever argued that. Ever. Again, name names, and point to direct, unfiltered, quotes with plenty of context.
You won't, because you're a liar. You make shit up because it's all you have nowadays.
Wow, you might want to find a mirror and consider what it says about you that you review my posting history in order to attempt to blather on about how you can't comprehend what I said and feel really threatened by it.
I really doubt you would find even one "nursing organization" who would agree with your characterization of their actions.