Secret History of Women in Coding
One thing to note about this downward trend of women in CS: its unique. If you look at the trends for women in law school, med school, physical sciences, and computer science, they all gradually increased to ~30% until the time highlighted in the article. After that, all of the fields kept growing to 40-50% ... except computer science, which sits at ~20% nowadays.<p>One thought I have: of those 4 fields, computer science has changed the most in our culture. Nintendo happened, the internet happened, the personal computer happened. Majoring in CS can mean money and status now.<p>A lot of these pictures ... women moving cords, operating keypunch machines ... it doesn&#x27;t seem great. It looks like men relegated women to tedium. In the same way that women were typists back in the day. Now I realize those photos are much older, but maybe these sexist attitudes persisted back in the late 70&#x27;s and early 80&#x27;s and CAUSED more women to be in CS? Women did the &quot;busy work&quot; for the fancy new &quot;computer machine business&quot;, while the men ran the business.<p>Is this a bad take? I just have a hard time believing the 70&#x27;s&#x2F;80&#x27;s were a better time for women in CS. Granted, they didn&#x27;t have YouTube videos like &quot;Mr. Conservative DESTROYS SJW academic in CS debate&quot;, but still...