<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">So now it is women who studied music as well as those that studied English in the early days of programming that did well at it!!<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">What was very nice in the early days of computing is that a lot of people came from very different backgrounds to be in the field it always made many early teams more creative. We lost some of that in a period where everything had to be programmable to be computerized and decisions based upon experience was considered old fashioned.<br><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 6:14 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dave.walden.family@gmail.com" target="_blank">dave.walden.family@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>re women programmers, see the right column of the second page at</div><div> <a href="http://walden-family.com/ieee/anhc-34-2-eands-whirlwind.pdf" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://walden-family.com/ieee/anhc-34-2-eands-whirlwind.pdf" target="_blank">http://walden-family.com/ieee/anhc-34-2-eands-whirlwind.pdf</a></div><div>and the paragraph which begins "Forrester was asked about software".<br><br>Sent from my iPad</div><div><div class="h5"><div><br>On Sep 2, 2015, at 9:26 PM, Murray Turoff <<a href="mailto:murray.turoff@gmail.com" target="_blank">murray.turoff@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">In the early days of computers, the mid 60' to mid 70' some of the best programmers were females who had been English majors in college and who later learned to program. They were very good also at learning new languages when needed.<br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:54 PM, Dag Spicer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dspicer@computerhistory.org" target="_blank"></a><a href="mailto:dspicer@computerhistory.org" target="_blank">dspicer@computerhistory.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Dear SIGCIS friends,<br>
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I’m beginning research for a long-form essay on how women were used to sell computers as protrayed in the industry magazine Datamation.<br>
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I have completed my survey of images and am now seeking some guodance abdout possible theoretical perspectives to consider.<br>
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Estelle Freedman at Stanford pointed me to The Feminine Mystique, which I am now reading. Of course, that was written many decades ago. I don’t really track the scholarship in this area so any pointers would be greatly appreciated.<br>
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Working observation: In the late 1950s, women were portrayed as functional, "sensibly” dressed, clerical workers using the computer in a (contrived) but plausibly real-world application. Beginning in the mid-1960s and onwards into the mid 1970s, women were portrayed as highly sexualized, alluringly dressed “human parsley,” garnishing a computer product -- in one case literally draped over a mainframe CPU cabinet in a bikini — with no relevance or appeal to the usual benfits cited for computers, viz. efficiency, cost-control, &c. One of many questions I have: Does this long-term movement to sex rather than the prior economic or technical arguments reflect a change in the people making computer purchasing decisions? Was it an ephemeral trope in adverstising — “it was the 60s, man!” or something else? Sex sells… but who’s buying? How does the portrayal of women in the leading journal for the ccomputer industry over decades reflect buerys and sellers? Can we draw parallels with how other technologies have used women in their advertising? &c.<br>
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Thanks for any thoughts…<br>
<br>
Dag<br>
--<br>
Dag Spicer<br>
Senior Curator<br>
Computer History Museum<br>
Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing<br>
1401 North Shoreline Boulevard<br>
Mountain View, CA 94043-1311<br>
<br>
Tel: <a href="tel:%2B1%20650%20810%201035" value="+16508101035" target="_blank">+1 650 810 1035</a><br>
Fax: <a href="tel:%2B1%20650%20810%201055" value="+16508101055" target="_blank">+1 650 810 1055</a><br>
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</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>This email is relayed from members at <a href="http://sigcis.org" target="_blank">sigcis.org</a>, 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 <a href="http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/" target="_blank">http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/</a> and you can change your subscription options at <a href="http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org" target="_blank">http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org</a></span></div></blockquote></div></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
This email is relayed from members at <a href="http://sigcis.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">sigcis.org</a>, 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 <a href="http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/</a> and you can change your subscription options at <a href="http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><b>please send messages to <a href="mailto:murray.turoff@gmail.com" target="_blank">murray.turoff@gmail.com</a> do not use @<a href="http://njit.edu" target="_blank">njit.edu</a> address<br><br>Distinguished Professor Emeritus<br>Information Systems, NJIT<br>homepage: <a href="http://is.njit.edu/turoff" target="_blank">http://is.njit.edu/turoff</a><br></b><br></div>
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