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0 pointshardtke4y ago0 comments

> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all

Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40 female/male now) the "college grad" professions are having a declining wage premium compared to non college grad jobs.

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12 comments · 3 top-level

serverholic4y ago· 8 in thread

Source on programming starting out female dominated? Also, I'm curious what a programmer's job looked like in the beginning.

bluGill4y ago

Back in the 1930s - before computers existed it was considered boring women's work (sexism intended). There wasn't much demand because of course computers were a room full of people running this by hand. In the 1950s when computers were invented males discovered programming was interesting and took over.

As such it is more the image is programming will be women's work than a reality because the reality is there weren't many programmers.

giaour4y ago

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-... is a bit superficial but gives a decent summary

0xcde4c3db4y ago

I don't know of a solid source, but I've heard anecdotally that computer programming and operation roles in major corporations of the '60s and '70s tended to be dominated by women, partly because the kinds of tabulation and collation that big business wanted were extensions of existing secretarial work, but also for the more immediate practical reason that the average female office worker of the time was far more likely than her male colleagues to already be an experienced typist.

erik_seaberg4y ago

“Programmer” used to be the name of a job turning flowcharts into punch cards, because hiring someone to use a keypunch was much cheaper than computer time. They were replaced not by men but by compilers.

“Systems analyst” used to be the name of our job.

michaelscott4y ago

Not in direct answer to the question, but as an interesting aside, the conditions of space didn't allow for normal memory implementations in the Apollo missions back in the 60s. An alternative form, called core rope memory [1], used the placement of copper wire along a rope to encode ROM-style instructions into blocks of memory. This memory was literally woven by a team of older ladies for the purposes of use in the guidance systems. Great anecdote from the annals of comp sci history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

MrsPeaches4y ago

A women (Ada Lovelace) is "often been cited as the first computer programmer" [1]

Also the term "Computer" was actually an occupation (that was dominated by women) before the modern usage [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

pyuser5834y ago

Is there any evidence for a grammatically feminine version of “computer?” “Computress?”

Edit: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/computress

ipaddr4y ago

I've met many trained by IBM COBOL developers.

glasss4y ago· 1 in thread

Would love to read more about this phenomenon, do you have links to articles or places to start?

Edit: Found an article[0] that links to a study[1]

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over... [1] - https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...

klipt4y ago

Correlation is not causation. It's possible that as fields pay more, they attract more men (because due to gender roles imposed on men, men lose more status from low income than women do) and conversely as fields pay less, men abandon them for other higher paying fields.

chongli4y ago

Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down

How much of this is just labour side supply/demand? If you have an all-male profession suddenly open up to women then that effectively doubles the pool of candidates. You would expect wages to go down (a lot) in that case.

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