🚀 go-pugleaf

blmblm@myrealbox.com wrote:
> Maybe a way to say it is that while 40 years ago CS was a new
> field with no entrenched prejudice against women,

Well, my real point was that just about everyone in the business back 
then had stumbled into it by accident. No child born in the 30s, male or 
female, grew up saying, "I'm gonna be a 'puter programmer when I grow 
up," although I suppose some of the later-born ones may have been 
fascinated by the occasional use of CBS's Univac on the news -- or on 
Art Linkletter's "People are Funny" -- or by the SSEC (the one-off 
electromechanical machine that occupied IBM's Manhattan show window from 
1948 to 1952 and defined the "look" of computers in the public mind for 
decades), but even they would have been a minority. I was born in 1948, 
and was of the first generation that had any sort of toy computers (the 
GENIAC/BRAINIAC family and the Digi-Calc). We are only now seeing the 
movement into the profession of the first generation of kids who can't 
remember not having a family PC. Soon we'll be seeing the kids who had 
PCs of their very own from childhood.

Between those generations, I'd say, came one other problem. It was in 
the 80s or so that you first began to see "girly" women turning up as 
programmers -- the ones who, instead of being "one of the boys" (I do 
/not/ mean "butch" here, just professional), tended to be just a little 
flirtatious, just a little inclined to go all Blanche DuBois on you when 
things got difficult -- the women who spoil things for other women. I 
suppose that tracks with the newer sort of "Computer Science" programs 
showing up in colleges, programs that emphasized COBOL over Runge-Kutta 
and databases over compiler-compilers.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The pathetic hope that the White House will turn a Caligula into a 
Marcus Aurelius is as na�ve as the fear that ultimate power inevitably 
corrupts."
   -- James D. Barber (1930-2004)