Why women stopped coding - what happened in the 80s

[noblegiraffe]

Fascinating graph here of women studying comp sci in the US.

This podcast looks at what happened in the 80s which might have influenced this trend.
www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

The image of geeky men as programmers is manufactured and nothing to do with men being better at tech - most programmers at the beginning were women.

There is a lot of poor people management in IT, partly because in some companies, you can only get so far in technical roles; to progress further, you have to go into people management, and not all people who are very technically skilled also have good people skills, which I think, while not absent in other areas, is less of an issue in areas such of sales and marketing and customer support, because you have to have people skills to do those roles in the first place.

Yes. This. ^^ I'm about to break the 'tech or manager' structure in my office I hope. They're trying to figure out how they're going to do it.
I was another 1986 O level Computer Studies student with an A who didn't do the A Level but that was down to my school being unable to guarantee they could do the whole course.
I did IT at uni but didn't go straight in to IT because of the recession.
Four years later I went back to IT and stayed. I've had the dc and kept it going.
The culture in job #1 was hugely laddish and I had to outlad and outcode them (at that point I could still outlad most lads) to get some respect but fortunately I built a solid reputation there which saw me through a few jobs and now I'm a veteran in my field :)

I think it's true that there's a lot of sexism in the industry, though often hidden as it's not overt anymore. And that's worse, as it's harder to call out. Certainly, the proportion of women gets worse as you rise up the ranks. I reckon that my department is

I have advised a lot of software businesses and most but not all of the coders have been male (same with those starting their own business which is one way to get over discrimination found and own the business although plenty of people like coding but not managing a business - different skills).

I agree that the initiatives are good and the coding stuff around now is far more fun than anything that was around even 10 years ago but it is still seen as a 'male' thing.

The women doing coding in the 70s were maths graduates who didn't end up as statisticians or other 'maths' jobs - perhaps as a pp said, they were the lowly maths grads jobs, not the serious maths jobs for manly men. And then it turned into a better long term bet that the number crunching jobs that the manly men had because the computer could do what the manly men did. Without shagging its secretary and fiddling expenses.

So the men moved back in and made it all manly with engineering type terms and the women went off to be accountants or actuaries.

The language used is scary to anyone who doesn't understand it. And it isn't explained properly. Showing children how to use Powerpoint contributes nothing.

One school I know has got Raspberry Pi boards in so that children can see what a computer is in its simpler form which I think is great. Demystify and simplify stuff.

But quite how you hold on to teenage girls I don't know.

I think it's true that there's a lot of sexism in the industry, though often hidden as it's not overt anymore. And that's worse, as it's harder to call out.
Definitely this.

I don't see much being done on the harder stuff of culture change within tech organisations.

We've had quite a lot recently like training managers about unconscious bias (they haven't gone far enough IMO, but it's a start, and at least they're acknowledging it's an issue.) I don't know how unusual it is for there to be training on things like that. There is also quite an effort to improve the culture (my previous commends about twattish bullying departmental manager are related to my involvement with the culture team which was set up to combat some of this; he is why I felt the need to get involved. He tried to block me, which only made me more determined.) All this happens because they've decided it's good business sense, because there have been various reports about how more diverse workforces tend to be more profitable, so things could change again, but might as well make the most of it while it's in favour.

I think that people often don't know what skills it takes to become a software engineer.

This too - that's part of the image problem the industry has.

I know that this is not helpful but....today my daughter went on a girls' programming course at Sheffield Uni. (year 9)

She thought it was really boring though as it was HTML. But her dad was a low level engineer.

In my very humble opinion, talented engineers are born and not made. Through my past husband's work I have met many female engineers.

I think I could have got into it although in my day we were only just getting the first computers and am happy enough to advise the industry instead.

I don't know if girls' schools help. My daughter's old school North London Collegiate is all girls and they have an awful lot of girls doing maths, engineering etc. She did science A levels and a BSc.

The unconscious bias training is interesting, I've never come across training in my career, though I hear people mention the term. How does it work out? Does it help? I think it comes down to the fact that people think I can't do my job unless I prove to them otherwise, while people think my male colleagues can do their jobs unless they prove otherwise. Yet everyone I talk to says "of course we don't care about gender" in a department that's >95% male.

Sorry about the twatty manager ebearhug :(

Tesla HTML is kinda boring, and I don't think that all girls are (or should) be interested in CS. Just more than already are.

talented engineers are born and not made.

I think there's an element of this, but I also think people need to have the opportunities to see if that's where their talents may lie. And there's a lot of IT work where you need to be thorough and logical, but not necessarily a talented engineer - and also a lot of IT where you need to have some understanding of how people think. A fair bit of programming is around user interfaces, and you need to think about how people use things in reality, not what you would like them to do.

HTML can be dull, though to be fair, I only tweak bits rather than do anything major.

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The unconscious bias training - well, I haven't been on the course myself, as I don't count as management, but I did quiz my director mercilessly about it when I heard he was coming over for it (he's usually based in another office,) and told him some of the things he had to look out for, and it sounds like they did cover the sort of things I'd expect them to. There's a good link from Google Ventures on - it's about an hour long, but worth finding the time. I think the starting point with unconscious bias has to be an awareness of it, and how everyone of us is affected by it, because you then can start asking yourself if you're judging people fairly, looking at what's been done and how, before you think about who has done it, so you don't end up with situations where, for example, an academic CV with a male name on will get people commenting, "great, he's had three papers published," but the same CV with a female name would get, "well, I'm not sure, she's only had three papers published." As you say, it's assumed women can't do it until it's proved they can, men are assumed to be able to do it until it's proved they can't (and not always then, I'd say,) women being promoted for what they've achieved, whereas men are promoted for their potential.

The training our managers had was only a couple of months or so ago, and I think there will be more to show round annual review time, but just the fact that they've been prepared to make quite a significant investment in it is a good sign to me, but we will have to wait and see. I think they need to follow up with more than just training managers - I think a lot of the problems women in IT experience with sexism and so on is at levels below management and with their male peers - they need to focus on the culture at all levels. Still, starting with managers, it is a start.

It's also quite a long time since our department hired anyone new, so I don't know if HR have changed things, such as hiring managers just get adapted CVs, candidate 1, candidate 2 and so on, with identifiable information taken out where possible, such as names, because then you have to focus on their qualifications and experience. (Mind you, my CV will have a load about things I've achieved for the women's association, such as events I've organised, so there's only so much you can hide without removing all the relevant information as well.)

If I had a daughter, I'd seriously consider sending her to a single sex secondary school (it would depend on what schools were available locally; a good mixed school is generally going to be a better bet than a poor single sex school, if that were the choice.) I went to a girls' school, and I think more of us did science A-levels (I wasn't one of them, mind you - I did languages and history, and my first degree is history - I went back and did CompSci for my masters.) I've mentioned in threads on the subject before that I've noticed that quite a few of the women interviewed on Radio 4's The Life Scientific seem to have been to single sex schools - but that may be my own biases noticing it when it's mentioned, I don't know, as I haven't done a detailed analysis. Sometimes I think I should contact R4 to ask, but I haven't bothered yet. Still, stats do show that girls are much more likely to take physics and further maths and so on to A-level and beyond if they have been in single sex education.

I think BestIsWest shows very fine judgement.

I did a computer science degree, starting in 1990.

In 1st year, out of 300 students, there was roughly a 50/50 split. By third year there were only 4 of us (females) left.

Seems to me females tried programming and didn't like it and instead studied something they liked more. It's not for everyone.

It's def for me though. But I find lots of my choices out of synch with most peoples.

I did a computing degree in 2006. It was a 50/5O split. Male/female. I was actually pleasantly suprised. I has mistakenly assumed I would be in the minority
I do think that maths/it are still preserved as male subjects but that could be fir many reasons. It's suggested through many studies that the male brain is more predesposed to mathematical tasks whereas women's brains are more predesposed to creative subjects. English etc. so perhaps that's why?

Yes, I often found I wasn't part of the crowd when I was growing up, and I think that was good training for being a woman in IT.

It'd be interesting to know why they felt they didn't like it, if it was something about coding itself, or if they found the culture hostile in some way, or there were some other factors.

It's suggested through many studies that the male brain is more predesposed to mathematical tasks whereas women's brains are more predesposed to creative subjects. English etc. so perhaps that's why?

There are also a lot of studies which suggest stereotype threat affect girls' performance in maths, and I think that's got more to do with it than different brains. The bell curve for maths is wider for men than women - meaning they have more at the extremes of very good and also very bad than women do, but you don't have to be in line for the Fields Medal to have a maths-heavy career (which IT needn't be.) One of the best mathematicians I knew was my grandmother, who did maths at Cambridge before they awarded women degrees.

Besides, if you're going to use stereotypes, women are meant to be good at things like knitting, and anyone who can follow a knitting pattern can follow a computer program (apart from needing to learn the specific syntax.) The logic of loops and conditions and so on are all in knitting patterns, just as they are in computer programs.

I am hesitant as to the reason proffered in the podcast - it seems to me back to front.

In 1984 home computing was an incredibly niche market - the first Mac was launched in 1984 and it was expensive. Less than 10% of all households had a computer (and many of those households were without children). Isn't it more likely that as awareness of computing skyrocketed around that time there were many more entrants into CS courses, and most of those were men which effectively diluted the percentage of women students numbers?

i.e. prior to 1984 not many people studied CS at all - it was a specialist niche area. Post the introduction of the home computer enrolment levels rose dramatically and as it became more mainstream enrolments began to more closely resemble levels of female enrolment in other maths based degrees. So the reason for for low levels of participation by women are closely linked to the low levels of participation by women in maths as a whole.

I haven't got UK figures to hand, but I have got US ones. The first computer science department was established in 1962 (at Purdue). There were 89 bachelor degrees awarded across the USA in 1966, but it then rose steeply to a peak of 42195 in 1986. It then fell by 41% to 24545 in 1996 (the year I got my MSc, but that was in the UK). It then rose again to 57405 in 2004 (probably because of the dot.com bubble), but has since been falling, down to 43277 in 2006, which is the last date in the figures (it's the Gender Codes book I mentioned before). Masters and PhDs have obviously been far fewer, but have shown a steadier rise, without the same peaks and troughs. There's no gender split shown. (Well, there probably is elsewhere in the book or online, but I'm not checking now.)

I would assume that UK figures would show a roughly similar pattern, and I'm pretty sure I do have some figures somewhere, but again, I'm not checking at this time of night.

As I've been wittering on about twatty manager here, and it's partly relevant to why some women give up working in IT - I had a chat with HR today, and they've been pretty helpful. Obviously it's going to take a while before we see how much can and will be done, but it was more positive than I was expecting (as HR don't always have the best reputation!)

I was the only female selected to a well known software company summer school, chosen for a direct entry into one of the top 5 companies as a software programmer, completed the graduate programme with flying colours, was voted most likely to lead by others on programme, male and female. Chosen as graduate to inspire and used as a case study to recruit other graduates into the company.
Then I started in the business and was very slowly sidelined, dismissed and ignored. Not given any training, placed into projects beyond my abilities and written off as incapable. Quite funnily, I was actually bullied out in the end by another female.
Reported all to HR on my way out and they fell over themselves trying to offer me something in any department I wanted, given the catalogue of misogyny, bullying and ignorance I had documented. However I was put off working in IT for life, the fear this treatment triggered sometimes still lingers.
I now work in an eduction setting, in a management role. I'm often asked if I have an engineering/IT background and sometimes wonder what could have been. Anyway, all I can do is try and help my daughters if this is an area they are interested in.

In the UK, part of it could be down to the change in qualification from computer science to IT, and then ICT, at GCSE/A-level.

I did Computer Science at GCSE and A-Level in the late 80s/early 90s.
By the time I started teaching the subject in 1996 not all schools were doing computer science anymore, but IT was being taught from Y7 up. By the time I left that first school, at the start of 2000, I was teaching IT and then ICT, and no longer computer science.

Boys were marketed heavily for using computers as gaming machines, whereas girls weren't.

And the computers in homes were used more and more for gaming - the days of copying a program from a magazine were gone.

So, girls were using computers less...boys more and more.

We have now gone full circle and we are now teaching computing in schools...wonder if that will help stats in a decade or so time.

I worked for IBM in the late nineties writing help files for programmes and testing crm software. I really enjoyed it and moved into it sales. Would have loved to have moved into programming, but it was all so very macho and unappealing.

I remember going to big social events with all the huge new tech companies buying up office space I canary wharf and they were all men whooping about strippers and casinos... It was very much like the banking industry. Money had made them all mad and macho and vile.

The tech crash, especially in telecoms around 2000-2002 just killed any desire to stay amongst all of them as if anything they became more competitive and cutthroat.

I only returned a few years ago to the web side and most people I meet now are women - designers who learnt coding later...

Spider girl, that is appalling.

My company have run two intensive courses for new developers in the last year. One took non IT candidates from within the business and trained them up and the other took new graduates from. I was delighted to see that each course is a 60/40 split in favour of women over men. This is definitely swimming against the tide.

I did Maths, Satistics & Computer Studies A levels at 6th form collage in 1979. We never had any computers in my high school (that shows how old I am!!) but I had seen a careers program about computing and thought it sounded quite interesting.

I failed my A levels but still managed to get on a IT training program for a big engineering company. My first boss was a woman and I think there was a 50/50 split in the department for programmers. In my whole 18 year career in computing, I never felt any discrimination as a woman. My main problem was getting promotion to systems analyst because I did not have a degree.
Although there were less woman higher up the management structure, I assumed that it was because so many of the woman married men doing similar jobs, that they generally earned enough for the woman to be able to stay at home when they had a family. Also the hours could be very unsociable, with long days and overnight support required, not really feasible for both parents to do, once you have children.

I was shocked when a friend who currently works in IT told me how few female there were in her department. I am also shocked to here so many of you report how bad it is working in IT as a female today.

BestIsWest, it's really good to hear a positive story like that.

The banking parallel is very true, or has been. I nearly gave up too due to a series of mysoginists/sociopaths and arseholes (all men). Its only because I am particularly obstinate and don't know when to give up, frankly, that I am still working in IT. Saying that I have also made a lot of friends, amongst my peers and I do think the situation has improved in recent years. A knock on effect of the latest recession was the rise of flexible working and massive increase in home working (companies and arseholes were forced to embrace it more due to financial constraints on desk and office space). I do think that has benefitted women somewhat as you become more faceless (and less of an obvious target) as its just about the person at the end of the phone getting the work done. It has been a long old struggle but, I have to say, has made me pretty strong and fearless.

Its only because I am particularly obstinate and don't know when to give up, frankly, that I am still working in IT.

Definitely identify with this.