[SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

[Deborah Douglas]

It would seem that this is a case when it would be helpful to consider other disciplines.  When I think of my own work on women in aviation the pattern is different. Just consider the example of pilots.  There has been nearly a half-century of aggressive “evangelical” efforts (not to mention the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, the 1991 repeal of combat restrictions on women in the military, and the more recent changes to military policy)  to encourage women to become pilots and while there are a more military and commercial airline pilots today I think it is striking the fact that the overall percentage of women pilots has not changed very much since Amelia Earhart and the 98 other women founded the 99s, the International Women Pilots Association, in 1929.  The stories being written about women in computing today, feel like the same stories I was reading and writing about with women in aviation 25 years ago.

My intent here is not to derail the discussion of women coders, programmers etc. but rather to suggest that a fuller explanation of this very leaky pipeline needs to be considered in the broader historical context.    I do have questions about the impressions of those who have explored this subject more fully:  Do you consider the experience of women in computing to be anomalous or typical?  Do you view them (the way those of us who study women in combat aviation consider our subjects) as the “tip of the sword” or “bellwethers” for what is going on more broadly in society?  How is the experience different from one country to another?

Thanks,

Debbie Douglas


On Dec 15, 2015, at 1:48 PM, Nathan Ensmenger <nathan.ensmenger at gmail.com<mailto:nathan.ensmenger at gmail.com>> wrote:


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

---
Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/
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Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room N51-209 • 265 Massachusetts Avenue • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 • ddouglas at mit.edu<mailto:ddouglas at mit.edu> • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://web.mit.edu/museum • http://museum.mit.edu/150






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