[SIGCIS-Members] Podcast: "When Women Stopped Coding" (NPR Planet Money)

Bill Aspray bill at ischool.utexas.edu
Sat Oct 25 06:05:33 PDT 2014 

Paul,

I am glad to see that NPR is addressing this issue. I recognize that public journalism has to keep the story simple. However, I would be dismayed if professionally trained historians would buy into this single-cause explanation (Please do not misunderstand me, Paul; I am not claiming this is your position.) I don’t know why 1984 was a local maximum in women’s participation in computing, but there may be multiple explanations. Computer science as taught and researched in the universities was moving increasingly from being a mathematical discipline to an engineering discipline, and increasingly computer science programs were found in engineering schools rather than arts and sciences units of the university. The engineering schools had a long-standing under-representation of women, and one might see the change in women’s enrollment in computer science as a movement towards towards the established low enrollment numbers of electrical engineering. 1984 was just about the time that computer science took another step towards professionalization in the creation of a directorate of computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation. Does this have a bearing on gender representation in computing? I don’t know, but one might argue that funds that historically been spent by NSF for documentation projects by scholars in the LIS field, which had a high representation of women, were replaced by funds for engineering-oriented projects. Most computer science departments in the US were formed between 1965 and 1975, and some were still settling into standardized practices including standardized admissions practices in the early 1980s. Perhaps those standardized practices, including the curricula that were created by the professional societies ACM and IEEE CS, were not equally welcoming to women. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when computer science enrollments skyrocketed at the time of the dot-com boom, CS departments had a hard time coping with the increased enrollments because university administrations did not give them anything like equivalent increases in faculty lines or teaching budgets; so many departments introduced barriers to entry as a coping strategy, and some social science research has suggested that this disproportionately weeded out women and minorities. In my current research on organizations that have as part of their mission broadening participation in computing, I frequently find ties to larger social issues such as the women’s rights and civil rights movements. And what about things that were going on in the computer industry? For example, my recollection is that women are under-represented in entrepreneurial organizations no matter what the nature of the business; so, as computing became more entrepreneurial in the 1980s, the computer business may have become less attractive to women for reasons that have to do with the nature of entrepreneurial activity rather than anything about computing. I don’t know the explanations and there are probably many additional possible explanations, but I strongly believe that there were many factors at play-not a single explanation. 

Bill

On Oct 24, 2014, at 9:14 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne at umich.edu> wrote:

> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
> 
> Quite well done - based mainly on the 2003 Margolis/Fisher book “Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing,” but with some audio from 1980s films and TV ads.
> 
> P
> 
> On Oct 24, 2014, at 10:05 , Janet Abbate <abbate at vt.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Thanks, Paul, for that (see Katherine Johnson video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8gJqKyIGhE). Following that thread, I discovered that an independent historian, Margot Shetterly, is creating a website on the African-American human computers at NASA/NACA.   
>> 
>> http://margotleeshetterly.com/the-human-computer-project/
>> 
>> She also has a book in progress, "Hidden Figures: The African American Women Mathematicians Who Helped NASA and the United States Win the Space Race." I hadn't heard of her work before but it looks promising.
>> 
>> Janet
>> 
>> On Oct 20, 2014, at 8:41 20AM, Paul N. Edwards wrote:
>> 
>>> On this theme, I was fascinated by one of the nominations for the Computer History Museum Fellows prize this year (this is not the SIGCIS book prize):
>>> 
>>> Katherine Johnson is an African-American mathematician, born in 1918. She joined NACA/NASA in the 1950s to work as a human computer. After a short time as part of the pool of (female) human computers, she was drawn into higher levels of work and became a trusted specialist in calculating spacecraft trajectories for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. She’s now 96 but (I think) still going. NASA did some oral history interviews with her which are readily available as video, as well as a Wikipedia page and some other resources easily found with a search.
>>> 
>>> The oral histories make fascinating listening - I’ll be using them in my undergrad class this winter. 
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> 
>>> Paul
>>> 
>>> On Oct 19, 2014, at 23:58 , Allan Olley <allan.olley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hello,
>>>> 	Just following up on the e-mail Janet Abbate sent, I think the podcast she menitoned is up. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
>>>> 	An interesting piece (about 17 minutes) on the trend away from women majoring in Comp Sci that started in 1984. Some reference to the prominence of women in the early computer industry and then looking at the personal computer culture of the period. Also, references to later attempts to increase participation rates among women in computer science (specifically the project in the mid 90s by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher at Carnagie Mellon).
>>>> 	It ends by acknowledging many people and sources including various pioneers, the organizers of the Grace Hopper conference, the book Gender Codes and its editor Tom Misa and authors including Janet Abbate and Carolyn Clark Hayes (sorry I don't have the energy to transcribe the list).
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> 
>>>> Yours Truly,
>>>> Allan Olley, PhD
>>>> 
>>>> http://individual.utoronto.ca/fofound/
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
>>> 
>>> ___________________________
>>> 
>>> Paul N. Edwards
>>> Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan 
>>> A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)
>>> 
>>> Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)
>>> 
>>> University of Michigan School of Information
>>> 4437 North Quad
>>> 105 S. State Street
>>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
>>> (734) 764-2617 (office)                  
>>> (206) 337-1523  (fax) 
>>> pne.people.si.umich.edu
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>>> _______________________________________________
>>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
>> 
> 
> ___________________________
> 
> Paul N. Edwards
> Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan 
> A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)
> 
> Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)
> 
> University of Michigan School of Information
> 4437 North Quad
> 105 S. State Street
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
> (734) 764-2617 (office)                  
> (206) 337-1523  (fax) 
> pne.people.si.umich.edu
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> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

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