News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men. Parent comment

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]