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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.
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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?
Why bother with details when the whole premise is bullshit?
probably are retired actually
Honestly, quite a few women that I worked with left the field to become stay at home Mom's. Usually, the husband was the bread winner so when it came to the weighing of super expensive daycare and wages, it was purely a rational decision to optimize income/expenses of the household. That's something that doesn't get reported enough. A lot of women either don't want to go into STEM or don't want to stay in those positions for various reasons that don't have to do with discrimination.
We'll make great pets
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.
If this was the primary explanation, then every field would have the same gender disparity.
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.
Honestly, quite a few women that I worked with left the field to become stay at home Mom's
Blasphemy! Women are supposed to have successful careers sticking it to The Man, not spending their time helping raise the next generation! They're wasting their talent if they're staying home teaching their children to read, write, and be responsible individuals!
/sarc
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.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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
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.
What's the over/under on tech bros litigating every tiny, pedantic detail in TFA in order to make themselves feel better?
"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."
If a company has to spend a considerable amount of time and money investing in something, only to find that there was a very high chance that the investment would not pay out in the long run, perhaps it shouldn't come as such a shock that companies started to make the decision to not take that chance.
What percentage of women did leave a job after getting married or having children 30+ years ago? Was it statistically proven that hiring women was deemed a considerable risk to the necessary investment?
And before you try and label this argument pedantic, keep in mind that from a purely business perspective this is standard risk analysis and ROI 101, and would logically apply to every business decision.
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?
Plus the long hours. I haven't worked with a single woman yet that was willing to work Seattle Hundreds. The women I work with work about half of the hours of the men. There's a reason they move to other jobs like program or project management.
1) Women have babies come out of their reproductive organs. Men do not. There is much physical trauma, though temporary, to those regions of the female body due to this.
2) Women tend to be much more physically and emotionally invested in childbearing and child-rearing than men, probably at least partly due to #1.
3) Women are vulnerable during the process of childbearing, and children are vulnerable during the process of child-rearing. Women and children tend to bond over these protective relationships. Men, not so much.
4) Due to #3, men have much more time to go about other pursuits. They also stay in fit physical shape for longer (#1) and have a different focus (#2). This leads to them being able to be the "bread winner".
5) Modern society likes to ignore these factors due to various, usually political, reasons, and does so at their peril.
The above is discriminatory based on actual differences between men and women. That's not unfair discrimination by any means. Note that nothing about this post is prescriptive of discrimination. (It doesn't tell you you should discriminate, only that there are valid reasons if you choose to.) The plural of anecdote is not data, so individual results and experiences will vary.
Just don't jump to conclusions that something is "bad" because it's discriminatory. When you start doing that, you become unreasonable.
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.
This is actually a huge issue. If you really want equality and not just some token feelgood bullshit, let's start with eliminating "maternity" leave and turn it into "parental" leave, with mandatory equal times for husband and wife. As long as this ain't the case, there is actually a very real incentive for employers to prefer men over women, simply due to a lower chance of losing them for a few months or even years, depending on the country you're in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is a lot of moronic bullshit, starting with "Editor's note: the link could be paywalled." No, asshole, you do know that the it is paywalled, that's why you were providing an alternate link. Why get all mealy-mouthed about it? WSJ is paywalled.
Then it blathers on about how it was written by a millennial without enough knowledge of cultural history to know that women usually did leave professional jobs after being married in those times. A few would try to keep the jobs and complain if they were forced out, but it was somewhat rare. It was only much later in the 70s and 80s when the demand from women to keep those jobs after marriage picked up; and the societal changes allowing it happened rapidly.
It wasn't normally government bureaucrats who were keeping married women out of the work force, it was either the women themselves, or their husbands, depending. They didn't anticipate women leaving those jobs after the war because they were uniquely sexist; women in those jobs also anticipating moving on to other things after the war in most cases.
You can always find the exceptions and trumpet their voices, but it doesn't always really explain what was going on in society. It is simply not the case that women were perfect and enlightened and without stereotypes, and the evil men were mean and held them down. That isn't how it was at all. In reality, men and women were both filled with the exact same gender stereotypes. Everybody was harmed by it. And a small minority outgrew the stereotypes together, and society was seen to have changed.
> Gotta love the nerd rage. Just because your gross doesn't make discrimination okay.
How can you possibly be so ILLITERATE and post a response? Women self selected for this. They were NOT discriminated against. They CHOSE to avoid computing because of the exact social stigma pointed out in what you responded to.
This entire SJW nonsense is prefaced on the idea that personal choices equal "discrimination".
Pretty much every female in my (current) entire economic class dumps their corporate overlords because they have the means to do so. Can't say I blame them really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Meanwhile, in the real world I know women that completely retired from the workforce once they decided to breed. They did so because they could. They had the economic means to do so. Society didn't put them in a position of being forced to work.
Some also come back after an extended absence.
A lot of Americans simply don't have to settle for his 12 or 24 maternity leave bull crap that a lot of people find so amazing.
"Maternity leave" just means that you eventually have to split your time between your jackass boss and your kids. A longer maternity leave just postpones the pain/expense. It doesn't really get rid of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Split evenly with your wife?
The core of the problem is not that you cannot volunteer to take a leave. What is required is mandatory 50:50 split. Else you will in most constellations end up with the woman taking the longer share and true equality is impossible because it is STILL preferable for the employer to employ a man because he is more likely to be available and not on leave.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.