cartesian product … stuff about computing mostly

“Hacker culture” drove out women from computer science

I have no difficulty for even a second in believing this:

There were many reasons for the unusual influx of women into computer science. Partly, it was just a result of the rise of the commercial computer industry in general. There was a tremendous need to hire anyone with aptitude, including women. Partly, it was the fact that programming work itself was not yet fully defined as a scientific or engineering field. In fact, many computer science programs were first housed within a variety of departments and colleges, including liberal arts colleges where women had already made cultural inroads. Not least of all — and you knew this was coming — women quickly noticed that some programming work could be done at home while the children were napping.

And then the women left. In droves.

From 1984 to 2006, the number of women majoring in computer science dropped from 37% to 20% — just as the percentages of women were increasing steadily in all other fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, with the possible exception of physics. The reasons women left computer science are as complex and numerous as why they had entered in the first place. But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” Women found computer science less receptive professionally than it had been at its inception.

You don’t have spend much time reading the collected works of Chairman Eric S Raymond to understand why “hacker culture” turns so many women off.

Though perhaps the one thing that the article misses is that women were employed in computing, and lots of other “new industries” of the 1960’s, because they were cheap. That drive into the suburbs, tapping the large reservoir of skilled, but lower-cost, labour, profoundly shaped American (and to a lesser extent, European) society and we are still living in a world that has been shaped by it, even if women have given up on geekdom.

The article goes on to say more women are now entering computing than for some time, quoting one of Google’s VPs, Marissa Mayer – but her posed photograph just reminds me of all the reasons to be deeply suspicious of Google – they are just a more socialised version of ESR and another sign of how the right have colonised the libertarian legacy of 1968.

See for yourself…

 

(As spotted via here)

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Adrian McMenamin

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