WIRED

The world is full of professions and industries in which men dominate. But there’s only one job that used to be completely dominated by women, and has since been taken over by men. That’s computer programming.

In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, some 90 per cent of computer programmers and systems analysts were female. IBM talked about ‘girl hours’ rather than ‘man hours’ when it negotiated wages. Men were interested in the hardware of computers, but thought software – a word that had barely been invented – involved drudgery, boring calculations and a worker bee mentality. So it was classed as clerical work, despite its complexity, and farmed out to young unmarried women with a talent for maths and logical thinking – who were then forced out of the profession as soon as they got married or had children.


But while this story has been told, not least in Dame ‘Steve’ Shirley’s excellent memoir, Let It Go, far less has been written about the second exodus of women from computing, which took place in the 1980s. It was when I first saw a startling graph by the National Science Foundation showing the declining number of women in coding that I decided to pitch a programme to BBC Radio 4 called A Job for the Boys.

As recently as 1984, women made up nearly 40 per cent of all computer science majors at US universities. But instead of that percentage continuing to grow, as it did in law, medicine and science, it halved. Now women make up just 17 per cent. Why?

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One reason seems to be the advent of the home computer in the 1970s and early 80s. Before then, most students had never worked with a computer until college. But when Acorns and Amstrads and Commodores came out, parents started buying them for their children – well, their male children.

As the academics Allan Fisher and Jane Margolis discovered, when they were trying to figure out why female enrolment at Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science course had dropped so dramatically, the first-year boys were more than twice as likely to have been given one than the girls. And if parents bought a computer for the whole family, they tended to put it in the son’s room, not the daughter’s. Then the fathers were much more likely to team up with their sons to teach them basic programming. Nearly every female student told the researchers that their father had worked with their brother, but that they had had to fight to get any attention.


The same pattern played out at school. Geeky boys set up computer clubs and excluded girls from them. The result: when girls showed up for their first year of computer science classes at university, they were often ten years behind the boys. No wonder many girls would lose confidence and start dropping out – despite, according to the Carnegie Mellon study, many getting good, sometimes top, grades. The ones who stayed on caught up with the boys by their third year.

But the prevailing culture was that if you hadn’t spent most of your childhood and adolescence in front of a screen, you didn’t belong. A report prepared by female computer science graduate students and support staff at MIT in 1983 about the sexism they encountered has chapter headings like Patronising Behaviour, Invisibility, Unwanted Attention and Obscenity.

It is possible to turn these things around, though. Carnegie Mellon eventually raised the female entry rate to its computer science programme from seven to 48 per cent. How? It grouped classes by experience, so novices didn’t have to learn alongside obsessive programmers. It emphasised the real-world impact of programming, to appeal to more practical-minded young women. And the admissions process was changed to no longer reward teenage coders. Another US university, Harvey Mudd, has had even greater success: 54 per cent of its computer science majors last year were women.

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The worry, though, is what they encounter when they hit the world of work. The tech industry, especially in the West, is still notoriously sexist, as the Google walkouts last year showed. Even at the most senior level, women still have to fight to be taken seriously, as Shubhi Rao, former Treasurer of Alphabet/Google, tells me: “I experienced the highest level of sexism in the Valley. It is just rife with macho behavior and very passive aggressive. There’s a huge ‘bro’ culture.”


We’ve heard a lot recently about the bias that creeps into algorithms when women aren’t around the table. That’s not going to change unless and until tech companies change. If they want to do something about sexism, they could take a leaf from Carnegie Mellon’s book. It can be done.

Mary Ann Sieghart is a journalist and radio presenter, who is currently writing a book about women’s authority. A Job for the Boys will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11:00 on April 1.

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