We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem (opens in new tab)

(theguardian.com)

3 pointsmagnetised7y ago4 comments

4 comments

"In fact, computing was originally the province of women. Innumerable articles and books have pointed this out, but it still seems to surprise everyone every time it’s 'revealed'."

I've noticed lately a number of people trying to write men completely out of the history of computing. Does anyone understand the thinking here?

Everyone should know about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, and it is interesting to learn more about how many women were involved in the early practical aspects of the field. But "province of women"? Turing? Hamming? Perlis? Dijkstra? Knuth? McCarthy?

metabagel7y ago

I think the idea is that, early on, men tended to be more interested in the electronics aspect of computers, and the job of programming itself was considered to be in general less interesting to men and more suitable for women.

lizmat7y ago

In the late 80's I had to give a 3-week programming workshop to a group of 8 people in Bombay, India (now Mumbai). The group consisted of 7 women and one man. I was not used to such a demographic in a teaching group. So I asked: "Why are there so many women in this class". They looked at me with amazement: "Well, that's obvious. For programming you have to be able to use your brain!"

joeblow99997y ago

"Women are typecast as front-end developers, while men work on the back end – where they generally earn significantly more money than their front-end counterparts."

I'm guessing they don't understand the difference between front-end coding and front-end designing.

There ARE more women in UI and UX design. But I haven't seen a significant difference in the sex ratios of Angular/React vs. Python developers. It's mostly men across both.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse