[SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

[Nathan Ensmenger]

> 
> On Dec 14, 2015, at 4:08 PM, Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org> wrote:
> 
> 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


I have been thinking about the 1984 decline in CS enrollments among women a fair bit lately.   I have a piece in the recently published volume of *Osiris* on “Scientific Masculinities” that provides my take on what happened.  

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682955?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The short version is that although the 1980s PC culture is significant, what is really important is the late 1970s and the emergence of the “computer bum” culture in academic computing centers in places like MIT and Stanford.  It is in these almost exclusively male domains (which differed considerably in their gender composition from their corporate counterparts) that many of the cultural practices that later will be associated with “hacker” culture are constructed and disseminated.  The media picks up on the “computer hacker” in about 1982, and it is this set of narratives about who does (and does not) “belong” in computer that influence enrollments in academic computer science programs.


The "PC is a boy’s toy" interpretation has some validity, but 1984 seems a little early for that effect to be significant, and I have found the PC ads from the early years (say 1977-1983) to be surprisingly gender inclusive.

That being said, by the end of the 1980s the hacker/nerd as white, adolescent male is firmly established, and no doubt strongly discouraging to women.   But I think the causal chain implied the NPR piece is not quite right.

-Nathan 

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Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/