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-wome... Dag
Hi Dag (and all)- I remember listening to this episode back when it came out, and I certainly enjoyed it. A lot of times though, I think that this history (at least as presented in popular media) is informed or framed by a kind of technological boosterism that is often quite unhelpful, and even implicitly based on discriminatory practices. As a counterpoint, I would like to offer this article I just read today about efforts to get more women and minorities into computing, and some of the problems with that as a goal in and of itself: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-pie-is-rotten-re-evaluating-tech-fem... I think this is a very interesting debate for historians because it gets to the heart of what kinds of things really "fix" structural discrimination. It also asks us to extend our gaze down the economic chain/tech production chain and into global contexts. I'm reminded of Nathan Ensmenger's keynote from this year's SIGCIS. Thanks for bringing up the topic! Best, Marie ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net | mhicks1@iit.edu | @histoftech On Dec 14, 2015, at 4:08 PM, Dag Spicer <dspicer@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-wome... Dag _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, 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 http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Dag Spicer [dspicer@computerhistory.org] Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 4:08 PM To: members@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-wome... Dag _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, 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 http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
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@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@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Dag Spicer [ dspicer@computerhistory.org] Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 4:08 PM To: members@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-wome...
Dag
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, 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 http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, 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 http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
-- *please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@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>*
participants (4)
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Dag Spicer -
M. Hicks -
McMillan, William W -
Murray Turoff