[SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

[Murray Turoff]

I suspect there is more than one reason.  When i started in computing as a
physic student in 1958 there was a lot of people from many different
fields.  However, the field by the 70's were largely dominated by the
fields of Business and Mathematics.   People from the social sciences were
not appreciated and the approaches to social and interactive design issues
largely got developed by the area of Information Science out of library
science.   Even today ACM does not have the best record in appreciating
social science topics even though it is a lot better than the early days
due to the work of people like Ben Schneiderman and his 1981 book on
software psychology.   .I do seem to recall that Information Science had a
lot more female academics than Computer Science in those early days.    Our
book in 1978 "The Network Nation" did not receive much attention in the CS
literature.   In 1973 my co author a sociologist sent in a draft paper to
the leading sociological journal on our plans to study human communication
groups on computers and the editor rejected it with out sending it to
reviewers because "a meaningful communicating human group was impossible to
have on a computer system."   So there were reactions in the other
direction as well that kept the disciplines
separated.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 12:30 PM, McMillan, William W <
william.mcmillan at cuaa.edu> wrote:

> Maybe it's too obvious to point out, but the international graduate
> student population studying computer science in the U.S. -- and many other
> countries, I suppose -- was certainly not hit by any mid-1980s falloff.
>
> Our graduate student body was dominated (maybe 90%) by female students
> from China and India, and we were bursting at the seams.
>
> My U. at the time, Eastern Michigan U., is 6 mi. from U. Michigan, and
> many of our M.S. students were spouses, mostly wives, of Ph.D. students at
> U-M, so our majority female population was partially a result of that.
> But, still, this demonstrated a huge interest among women.  (One female
> student whose family had forced her to study art in China, ate up computer
> science and mathematics as if she were starving for it.)
>
> (This changed in the U.S. after 9/11 and we finally realized the threat
> posed by 22-year-old wives of Asian Ph.D. students.)
>
> A faculty colleague from the Philippines told me that half of the computer
> science student population was female in that country.  She thought it was
> because computer science was seen there as a feminine version of
> engineering.  (Take that, hacker boy!)
>
> I'm sure that people on this list are aware of the differences between
> male/female ratios in technical disciplines across cultures and nations.  I
> don't see how movement to personal computers and social forces like
> advertising could explain very much of the disparity in the U.S. all of a
> sudden.
>
> Nathan has something in the masculinization and grubbification of
> computing at universities and small software companies, but didn't that
> happen all around the world?
>
> Bill
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Members [members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Dag Spicer [
> dspicer at computerhistory.org]
> Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 4:08 PM
> To: members at lists.sigcis.org
> Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding
>
> Interesting piece… would be interesting in people’s thoughts…
>
>
> http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
>
> Dag
>
>
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-- 





*please send messages to murray.turoff at gmail.com <murray.turoff at gmail.com>
do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor
EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff
<http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
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