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Asked to picture a computer programmer, most of us describe the archetypal computer geek, a brilliant but socially-awkward male. We imagine him as a largely noctural creature, passing sleepless nights writing computer code. According to workplace researchers, this stereotype of the lone male computer whiz is self-perpetuating, and it keeps the computer field overwhelming male. Not only do hiring managers tend to favor male applicants, but women are less likely to pursue careers a field where feel they won’t fit in.
It may be surprising, then, to learn that the earliest computer programmers were women and that the programming field was once stereotyped as female.
The "Computer Girls"
As historian Nathan Ensmenger explained to a Stanford audience, as late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
The "ENIAC Girls"
The world described in the Cosmopolitan article seems foreign to us today. In fact, says Ensmenger, change was already in the air at the time of the article’s 1967 publication date. It’s true, however, that the very first programmers were women and that the field remained open to women for many years thereafter. In the early 1940s, the University of Pennsylvania hired six women to work on its ENIAC machine, which was one of the world’s first electronic computers. These six women, known by contemporaries as the “ENIAC girls,” were charged with “setting up” the ENIAC to perform computation tasks. They are widely celebrated as the world’s first computer programmers.
However, says Ensmenger, the presence of these women did not indicate that managers of the ENIAC project had modern attitudes toward women in the workforce. Rather, managers hired women because they expected programming to be a low-skill clerical function, akin to filing, typing, or telephone switching. Assuming that the real “brain work” in electronic computing would be limited to the hardware side, managers reserved these tasks for male engineers.
The idea that the development of software was less important (and less masculine), than the development of hardware persisted for many years and women continued to work as computer programmers. Employers, says Ensmenger, were in for a surprise when they discovered a truth that we now take for granted: “Programming,” he says with a smile, “is hard.” The women involved in the ENIAC project distinguished themselves by engaging in complex problem-solving tasks and by advising their male colleagues on hardware improvements. For example, Betty Holbertson convinced skeptical engineers to include a “stop instruction” in order to guard against human error.
As the intellectual challenge of writing efficient code became apparent, employers began to train men as computer programmers. Rather than equating programming with clerical work, employers now compared it to male-stereotyped activities such as chess-playing or mathematics. But even so, hiring managers facing a labor crunch caused by the rapid expansion of computing could not afford to be overly choosy. The quickest way to staff new programming positions was to recruit from both sexes, and employers continued to hire women alongside men.
The masculinization of computer programming
In 1967, despite the optimistic tone of Cosmopolitan’s “Computer Girls” article, the programming profession was already becoming masculinized. Male computer programmers sought to increase the prestige of their field, through creating professional associations, through erecting educational requirements for programming careers, and through discouraging the hiring of women. Increasingly, computer industry ad campaigns linked women staffers to human error and inefficiency.
This 1960s advertisement targeted women computer operators for replacement by upgraded technology
At the same time, new hiring tools—including tools that were seemingly objective—had the unintended result of making the programming profession harder for women to enter. Eager to indentify talented individuals to train as computer programmers, employers relied on aptitude tests to make hiring decisions. With their focus on mathematical puzzle-solving, the tests may have favored men, who were more likely to take math classes in school. More critically, the tests were widely compromised and their answers were available for study through all-male networks such as college fraternities and Elks lodges.
According to Ensmenger, a second type of test, the personality profile, was even more slanted to male applicants. Based on a series of preference questions, these tests sought to indentify job applicants who were the ideal programming “type.” According to test developers, successful programmers had most of the same personality traits as other white-collar professionals. The important distinction, however, was that programmers displayed “disinterest in people” and that they disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” It is these personality profiles, says Ensmenger, that originated our modern stereotype of the anti-social computer geek.
Computer programming today
Today, we continue to assume that the programmers are largely anti-social and that anti-socialness is a male trait. As long as these assumptions persist, says Ensmenger, the programming workforce will continue to be male-dominated. Although the stereotype of the anti-social programmer was created in the 1960s, it is now self-perpetuating. Employers seek to hire new recruits who fit the existing mold. Young people self-select into careers where they believe they will fit in—for example, women currently comprise 18% of computer science undergraduate majors, down from 37% in 1985.
By uncovering the history of women programmers, Ensmenger seeks not only to remind us of women’s forgotten contributions to the computing field. More broadly, he is interested in the process of how and why the field became predominantly male. The fact that stereotypes embedded in advertisements and hiring practices had such a profound effect on masculinizing this profession, says Ensmenger, also sheds light on what can be done to reverse the trend, making programming and other computer professions more open to women.
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Nathan Ensmenger is the author of The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. His talk at Stanford was jointly sponsored by the Science, Technology, and Society Program, the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program, and the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Responses to Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “ComputerGirls”
What a fascinating article —I wish I had attended the talk!
My mother was a computer programmer and then trainer of computer programmers in the late 1950s. (She's said that most of her trainees were men even then.) She may just get a book for her birthday…
"But people aren't equals! Stop!"
Why don't you stop too? With a name like Signer instead of Chang or Patel you're no equal of Asians as much as women are no equals of men.
I think women aren't interested in it anymore because it got more complex and less intuitive, and also much wider. The field getting wider and wider is a problem for women as they tend to focus only on one aspect of their passion, if it's not on one only passion when their passion isn't a man.
Also, the "reason girls do BETTER than boys at math and science up until the 8th grade" is simply brains change after puberty, so that you can play your adult role in society. It's a result of more hormones such as estrogens. Go ask a neurologist. Girls' brains become more focused on social interaction, when boys' brains focuses on problem solving, as it was needed once respectively to take care of kids and get help taking care of kids and to hunt and gather.
Women becomes, after puberty, far less likely to weigh out decisions devoid of emotional ties, and then acquire rational thinking only through much discipline. I only met few women who had a "natural"-seeming hability for rational and visual thinking.
Still, it is a good thing, as it has become part of our culture through motherhood. I'm not saying some ways of thinking are bad.
The ration thinking issue comes also from the way the two hemispheres of the brain communicates is different: women have a whole brain experience through more neuroconnectors in a thicker brain membranes when males use only one hemisphere before switching to the other, which makes for a masculine brain, having less connectors but focusing more on visual ideas which makes them good mathematicians and artists comparing to women who plays on the verbal side. In some ways, female brains are still like adolescent brains.
However, some women with Asberger's syndrome are shown to have a more masculine brain, which goes hand in hand with the fact programming searches for people who focuses on interest over people as your article implies.
Men and women are different, but Humanity would not survive if every sex had only what men have, if there were only hermitic geniuses... To put it in an exagerated way. You need the complementarity.
Fantastic, girls are covering all sectors these days even in computers they are giving their best.
Anyways, the article was fantastic. Point to point description makes makes it readable.
I'd like to add that to some extent the reverse process has begun. In fact, now the IT field is much more different vs 1960 - early 90s. There have appeared a lot of new niches and specialities such as HTML/CSS coding, testing (including automated testing which implies some programming activities), let alone graphic and web design. And if in case of Java or C++ all programming 'seats' are closely 'occupied' by men :) then in HTML coding, testing or even PHP programming, as well as as business analysts, project managers, women are becoming more and more usual. Also, it should be taken into accont local peculiarities, e.g., in the Eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine the share of women on IT jobs is seemingly larger, maybe because there the average age of programmers is lower than, e.g., in the USA (i.e., the influence of previous hiring practice and stereotypes is less), the vast majority of local women are highly educated and IT professions are quite popular and prestigious.
"There isn’t a hive mind dictating a set of 16 strategies to keep the woman down… at least, if there is, i missed the memo. "
It always strikes me as astonishing when I read or hear a man say this. Not only do you need to be oblivious to history but you would need to be completely ignorant of all aspects of culture to believe what you are saying there. Open your eyes. Look around. The hive mind is called society.
all part of the vast masculine conspiracy to take over the world.
(Not doubting any of the facts in the article, my mother was the technical genius between my mom and dad, and they both learned to write rudimentary code in the 60's. )
I would just caution against anthropomorphizing the behaviors of a collection of people. Each person acts for their own reasons. There isn't a hive mind dictating a set of 16 strategies to keep the woman down... at least, if there is, i missed the memo. But collectively, lots of individuals can take action that feels like it is being directed, each for their own selfish or self-motivated reasons. Just as, collectively, a lot of women who learn to code choose not to do so in their profession afterward for more than a year or two, and instead veer toward management. There were at least half a dozen CS majors when i graduated. To my knowledge, none of them are still writing any code 15 years later. Or even 5 years later.
My mom was a computer programmer!
She retired in the 1980s, I believe.
Oh well - true that groups of people act for complex reasons. But that is true of any sort of societal discrimination. It isn't people meeting in a secret room to plot a conspiracy, it happens in lots of little ways over and over every day.
I'm thrilled to read this, as my partner and I have been planning on launching a program to get girls into game programming and set up mentorships for them along into college. Awesome to see that women and girls were, of course, great at programming way back in the early days.
There is a reason girls do BETTER than boys at math and science up until the 8th grade (read School Girls by Peggy Orenstein for a great analysis of the complex reasons why that changes) - it's because girls and women are great at science and math. They have "natural" aptitude.
I really think men as programmers is entirely cultural and has no basis in genetics. So about time we started changing that so we can get the full benefit of all the talented people out there who don't go into the fields that would best suit them.
Women became less interested in programming because it became full of men who sexually harassed them, especially in educational programs. Even if they made it into the field, research shows they are more likely to quit because they aren't offered the same opportunities for career advancement, they aren't paid as much and are punished for attempting to negotiate in the same ways men are, and are subject to social ostricism because programmers were explicitly hired for their "social ineptness", which too often is an excuse for "blatant misogyny". Those reasons completely explain the rise and fall of female interest in the profession.
Men and women are different, but not that much and the bell curves mostly overlap for non-directly sexual characteristics. Gender dimorphism is expensive, evolutionarily speaking, so in most cases it is much more likely to observe variation across all members of a species than it is to see truly gender dimorphic behavior. Behaviors then rewards or punishes, encourages or censors those traits differently in males and females to produce the observed dimorphism.
However, new research suggest that humans are hard-wired to divide the world into male and female. Children as young as 10 months attribute masculinity and femininity to ungendered objects. It is far more likely that all humans are programmed to see men and women as inherently and dramatically different than it is that they are actually inherently and dramatically different, especially when those supposedly-innate differences vary so much across time, culture and society.
I came back, it's like teenagers arguing they should be treated as adults even through their brains aren't fully developped and works differently, because it's "unfair" and people should be treated as/are equals.
Now, it's true people should be treated as equal because of some individual variations that makes them not need the same things as their peers, or be better at computing than some individual variant of men. Some teenagers are more mature than others, some female more able to handle visual-spatial problem better than an individual man or at average men level.
But people aren't equals! Stop! Men and women are biologically differents, like in childs some parts are less developped than adults' male. Now, you have the same rights, because the parts about decision making and such things needed as adults are fully developped, but stop bitching about distinctions coming from biological differences.
Obviously women being more teenage-like than men would use the same arguments as antischool sprogs...
Also: when someone tell you it's rare to see a woman in some circle or conference, they mean it well... Stop acting like a 13-years-old who've been told she is good for her age and taking it as being condescending! They are nice, thanks them and be happy there are quotas.
If you want to claim to present a "scientifically" factual argument, you really should try to be coherent enough so that the reader can attempt to follow your train of thought.
Perhaps spelling mistakes and jarring grammatical errors are acceptable in your casual e-mails or text messages. However, if you are trying to pass yourself off as an authority (as you "seem" to be trying here) you might want to sharpen your style.
Similarly, your reliance on weak insults and exclamation points undermines your already unclear position.
If you harbour the faintest hope that people will read your work as the efforts of an educated adult, you really must improve your presentation beyond the level of a poorly educated 13 year-old boy.