Silicon Valley’s Safe Space

Re:Silicon Valley’s Safe Space by vinceguidry on Saturday February 13, 2021 @06:25PM (#26128034)

Maybe you just haven't been around long enough. Many of the earliest pioneers in the field of computing were women. It was "women's work" until all of a sudden it looked interesting to men and it magically became "men's work." A story as old as time.

Kathleen Booth invented assembly language. In 1947.

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Re:Silicon Valley’s Safe Space by manfredo on Saturday February 13, 2021 @08:46PM (#26128927)

The peak of women's representation in computing was ~33% in the early 1980s. Not that much higher than the ~20% we see today. And many of these women in early computing not because it was their first choice, but because the jobs they wanted weren't open to women. Mary Allen Wilkes, for example, wanted to be a trial lawyer but went into computing because no firm she contacted would let women be trial lawyers [1]. This isn't unique to the US, but part of a broader trend of more gender equality being associated with lower rates of women in STEM fields [2].

1. From Clive Thompson's "Coders" chapter 2.

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

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Re:Silicon Valley’s Safe Space by tomp on Saturday February 13, 2021 @06:48PM (#26128198)

We were kids. It wasn’t even work. Just playtime, doing what we were interested in.

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Re:Silicon Valley’s Safe Space by robin21 on Saturday February 13, 2021 @08:03PM (#26128684)

So what precluded women from continuing working in the field?

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