There’s just-so stories all through the hard sciences. In Fran Allen’s day, programming at IBM was considered work for women, owing to their evolved nurturing and household management abilities, etc., etc. Ms Allen attributes the masculinisation of programming to people from male-dominated engineering faculties moving in on the field in the late ’60s. (Allen’s opinions sourced from the interview with her in Coders At Work.)
IIRC, programmers are about 50-50 in a number of post-Soviet states. Not sure if this is due to commie educational policies, regional culture, or something else.
Among European countries the greatest proportion of female physicists, by a significant amount, are in France and Poland, so the mere existence of national heroes seems to make a difference as well.
However, these were the days before compilers. Programming back then was a very different affair from nowadays, involving a lot of office work, as well as other kinds of semi-skilled work that were back then (and would likely still be to some extent) perceived as typical women’s work. I’d be wary of any generalizations to today’s situation in computing without studying the issue in much more detail.
There’s just-so stories all through the hard sciences. In Fran Allen’s day, programming at IBM was considered work for women, owing to their evolved nurturing and household management abilities, etc., etc. Ms Allen attributes the masculinisation of programming to people from male-dominated engineering faculties moving in on the field in the late ’60s. (Allen’s opinions sourced from the interview with her in Coders At Work.)
That’s an extremely interesting reminder of how culture-dependent these occupational gender patterns are.
IIRC, programmers are about 50-50 in a number of post-Soviet states. Not sure if this is due to commie educational policies, regional culture, or something else.
Among European countries the greatest proportion of female physicists, by a significant amount, are in France and Poland, so the mere existence of national heroes seems to make a difference as well.
However, these were the days before compilers. Programming back then was a very different affair from nowadays, involving a lot of office work, as well as other kinds of semi-skilled work that were back then (and would likely still be to some extent) perceived as typical women’s work. I’d be wary of any generalizations to today’s situation in computing without studying the issue in much more detail.