35 years ago MIT was less than 20% women and significantly more unbalanced in software classes (and it was actually a huge accomplishment that the number was that high given the low numbers of women who even applied in those days). Of the badass women who were writing code in the mid 80's, most were pushed into people management early in their career due to heavy implicit bias around people skills. There were vanishingly few women who entered the top of the funnel with the potential to become 35 year hands on coders 35 years ago, and the pressure they were under to jump out of that funnel during those 35 years was far higher than it was on men (and there are hardly any men who stayed in the funnel to reach that 35 year mark). We're probably talking at most 2 orders of magnitude fewer 35 year women coders than men at this point, probably less, given a handwaving calculation.
Eventually, hopefully, we'll have significant numbers of them and need a new term, but it's hard to go back 35 years to fix the top of funnel and funnel leakage problems that existed then.
At risk of not being overly defeatist here, every programmer who follows the SOLID principle should know Barbara Liskov (the L in SOLID) who definitely stayed hands on long enough to be a conceptual graybeard.
I've been fortunate to know a number of women who stayed in extremely technical engineering management to the 35 year point, but the longest lasting hands on woman coder I know is probably 20 years in the code every day, and even her title is a management title now (though she stays hands on in the code) so that's going to get progressively harder for her to sustain, just as it is for guys who take management titles. Like 35 year graybeards, she's a total badass, but she still has quite a few years to go before her hair starts to gray.
Yes, we'll one day need a new term for 35 year hands on coders, but let's not let virtue signaling blind us to the problems of the past.
This reply is so surreal. Pointing out blatant sexism is "being offended by everything all at once", but old men being discriminated against isn't? Not to mention the amount of condescension that just proves the original point.
> Pointing out blatant sexism is "being offended by everything all at once", but old men being discriminated against isn't?
A more charitable reading is ~ "This discussion is about one problem; let's not drag another one into it".
I just recently saw the same thing on LinkedIn[1]: a Finnish guy complaining about how, in another thread he had started on how his dark-skinned wife had been racially abused in Poland, some (Finns, apparently) had whatabaouted the discussion into "there's racism in Finland too!", and when he'd tried to explain that "Sure, but this thread isn't about that", he was accused of "derailing the discussion". No, he wasn't: they were.
And so, IMO, are you here.
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[1]: That really has become much more "typical social media" recently, hasn't it? Can't recall seeing such general -- i.e. not directly work-related -- discussions there even a year or two ago.
Asking for a discussion to be focused on one particular problem is fine in my opinion. But I think we can both agree that "Don't you find it exhausting being offended by everything all at once?" isn't exactly the best way to say that, to put it mildly, without even taking into consideration the condescending and infantilizing comment that came right after.
You're surreal. The history of computing is mostly men. This isn't a moral judgment or denigration of women, it's history. Even today, women don't pursue tech to the extent that men do, even with aggressive efforts to curtail this. I imagine you see any discrepancy anywhere as proof of some oppresive -ism, and I imagine you want nature to conform to your Lysenkoist utopian ideals. You're a drag.
In the 40s, the 6 people hired to program the ENIAC were all female. google "ENIAC girls". _Cosmopolitan_ ran articles about how programming was one of the few professional fields open to women. Managers thought that programming was basically just typing, so they hired women.
But then people started to realize it was more than just typing. So as the field started to get prestige in the mid 60s, companies started to look for things like college degrees and "personality tests", both of which were biased towards men.
“Systems analyst” and “programmer” used to be separate jobs. The former worked on paper, the latter typed what they were told to into a keypunch (not a terminal, because computer time was expensive). Eventually the “programmer” job became obsolete when we could afford to let analysts run their own text editors and compilers.
Systems analyst was the person writing up an extremely detailed specification of what a program was supposed to do, which a programmer then implemented in a particular language.
The two merged at some point, when the demarcation line between the two of them became vaguer and overlapped more. This more or less coincided with more powerful 'frameworks' (if the name even applies) and libraries becoming available, as well as a massive increase in computing power which allowed for a near real-time edit-compile-test cycle which made programmers so much more productive that they suddenly weren't the bottle-neck in the process any more.
Another factor was that plenty of 'hobby' programmers found their way into professional IT jobs and they'd been doing this 'programmer/analyst' hybrid thing all along so for them it was a natural to continue to do so.
This happened somewhere in the mid 80's.
Then the web happened and the analyst job eventually became much more high level, nowadays we'd call a person that does work related to what an analyst used to do product owner or similar.
All of these definitions have meant different things at different points in time.
What an odd rebuttal. "This field isn't sexist, it's just so toxic towards women that none of them want to be a part of it."
The gender gap isn't inherent, both India and China have a nearly equal percentage of men and women in computer science. The gap seems to be a mostly western phenomenon.
I'm actually pretty middle of the road. So, no, not exhausted.
What is exhausting is reading about all these people trying to get more women into CS, but then not realizing how many subtle signals there are saying "you don't belong." If you don't think that has an effect on people (women, in this case), well, you haven't spoken to a person affected by such things...
