<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">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 <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">separated. <br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 12:30 PM, McMillan, William W <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu" target="_blank">william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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.<br>
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Our graduate student body was dominated (maybe 90%) by female students from China and India, and we were bursting at the seams.<br>
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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.)<br>
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(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.)<br>
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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!)<br>
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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.<br>
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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?<br>
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Bill<br>
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________________________________________<br>
From: Members [<a href="mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org">members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org</a>] on behalf of Dag Spicer [<a href="mailto:dspicer@computerhistory.org">dspicer@computerhistory.org</a>]<br>
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 4:08 PM<br>
To: <a href="mailto:members@lists.sigcis.org">members@lists.sigcis.org</a><br>
<span class="im HOEnZb">Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding<br>
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</span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">Interesting piece… would be interesting in people’s thoughts…<br>
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<a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding</a><br>
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Dag<br>
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</div></div></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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