🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <xvOTi.62$Aj.19@newsfe12.lga>,
John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:
> blmblm@myrealbox.com wrote:
> > As you may know, this is a perennial topic of discussion among
> > women in the field, and CS educators.  (I am both.)  The thing
> > that's so disheartening to many of us is that the gender
> > imbalance seems to have gotten worse over the years, rather
> > than better.  When I first started doing things with computers,
> > over thirty years ago [1], I was told that it was a good field
> > for math/science/techie women
> 
> 40 years ago, any corporate IT department with more than half a dozen 
> programmers would normally include at least one woman, and those women 
> were treated as peers. (I wonder how many of those women were wiring 
> 402s and 407s in the 40s and 50s -- that's before my time.)

Similar to my experiences in non-academic jobs, about 20 years ago.
So maybe the decline is relatively recent?

> > Perhaps our small, smooth brains
> > also make it difficult for us to program?
> 
> Well, of course, there are some demonstrated mental differences between 
> men and women, but it is just as obvious that a great many women have 
> the mental wherewithal to be programmers. 

In case it wasn't obvious -- my remark was an attempt at humor, an
occasion to throw in a phrase I found entertaining.

> (In my admittedly 
> anecdote-based experience, women are better than men at programs that 
> are simple at the high level [read-write-print-repeat], but horridly 
> complex in detail [if this is the last Tuesday of the month, except for 
> December, and the account is in New Jersey....].)

Hm!  Plausible.

> I think you may be right that it's early adolescence. Almost every 
> single one of those female programmers of the early and middle 60s, 
> after all, must have been planning to do something else with their lives 
> when they were 13.

I'm not sure what point you're making here, and it may not matter.

Maybe a way to say it is that while 40 years ago CS was a new
field with no entrenched prejudice against women, in this respect
as in others the field has come a long way in a short time?
though in this regard, the "progress" has been in a direction I
think is unfortunate [*].  

[*] Why I think that:  Partly it's that it puts unnecessary
obstacles in the path of women who might like and be good
at CS.  But partly it's also that, to paraphrase (and I hope
not misparaphrase) someone well-known whose name escapes me just
now, computer technology might be different, and perhaps better,
if it were less "by adolescent males, for adolescent males".

-- 
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer:  I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.