As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by adwn on Monday November 05, 2018 @08:46AM (#18382244)

> Do you think there is something innate that changed genetically about women that led to them being much less likely to be computer programmers now than they were in the 1970s [...]

Wait – I thought back then (1950s/60s/maybe 70s), "programming" refered to something more akin to data input, i.e., someone designed a program, and the "programmer" entered that program into the computer's memory, using punch cards or whatever [1]. Later, this activity and the designing of a program was merged and done by a single person, as it is known today.

If this is true, then the mystery is not why women's preferences changed since the 1970s, but why their preferences seem to be different from men's, back then and today.

[1] You can still find this terminology in the hardware world. For example, storing the bitstream into an FPGA's SRAM or flash cells is called "programming the FPGA", and the little box which is sometimes necessary to do this, is called a "programmer" – which is kind of funny if you think about it.

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Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by naasking on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:28AM (#18382500)

> Wait – I thought back then (1950s/60s/maybe 70s), "programming" refered to something more akin to data input, i.e., someone designed a program, and the "programmer" entered that program into the computer's memory, using punch cards or whatever

That's exactly right, "programming" was considered secretarial work, and guess what, pretty much all secretaries were women.

Male engagement in programming exploded with the advent of personal computers in the 80s, and female engagement chugged along at the same growth rate as before.

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Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by JoeAltmaier on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:31AM (#18382528)

Not my experience. I was in college when PCs exploded, and programming was already a mostly-male field

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Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by naasking on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:27AM (#18382985)

I never claimed STEM had gender parity in terms of numbers, but if you look at the gender ratios you can pretty clearly see that female CS degrees peaked in 1984 and then fell quite rapidly:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

The "programming as secretarial work" happened in the 50s and 60s which predates this data, so I haven't found a canonical source for that.

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Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by js8 on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:53AM (#18383259)

I didn't really live through that era, but my suspicion is that more well-paid roles (especially in management and health care) opened for women during that era, and so they decided to work in different fields more in accordance with their own preferences. Hence the decline from women in computing. Basically, I believe it is in line with the gender-equality paradox.

It can also be the case that the whole thing is a dynamical system (for example driven by desire to work in a field which already has majority in the same gender), and it somewhat chaotically "oscillates" around the equilibrium. So there really is not an causal explanation as such.

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Re:As women have more equal opportunity, the more their pref... by C1sc0cat on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:10PM (#18384484)

Only really in mainframe shops - though I did in my first job enter a lot of code for a female engineer.

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