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In the early years of computing, the area that garnered respect was hardware development, which was thought of as manly work. Meanwhile, the work most women performed, programming, lacked prestige. The gender makeup of programmers and the status of the job were mutually reinforcing. Women were hired because programming was considered clerical work, a bit of plug-and-chug labor that merely required women to set into motion preset plans.

Programming was later recognized to involve complex processes of analysis, planning, testing, and debugging. Initially, though, the job was poorly understood. Janet Abbate, a professor of science and technology in society at Virginia Tech, explains in her book Recoding Gender that, in the absence of a concrete grasp on the job, “gender stereotypes partially filled this vacuum, leading many people to downplay the skill level of women’s work and its importance to the computing enterprise.” Notably, where more egalitarian gender roles prevailed, so did the job options available to women in computing. While American and British women were effectively barred from building hardware during the mid-20th century, women in the relatively more equitable Soviet Union helped construct the first digital computer in 1951.

By the time Cosmopolitan was interviewing Grace Hopper, the field was already taking a masculine turn. Aptitude tests and personality profiles, which were the primary mechanisms used to screen and rank job candidates in programming in the 1950s and 60s, helped accelerate the profession’s shift from female to male. These measures, which hiring managers considered to be objective, often told employers less about an applicant’s suitability for the job than his or her possession of frequently stereotyped characteristics. Tests like the widely used IBM PAT primarily focused on mathematical aptitude, even as industry leaders argued that such skills were becoming irrelevant to contemporary programming—the conclusion of a paper presented at a 1957 computing conference was that the correlation between test scores and performance reviews on the job was not statistically significant. The type of math questions on these multiple-choice exams—requiring little nuance or context-specific problem solving—were often testing skills that men were more likely than women to have learned in school at a time when girls were more likely to be steered away from STEM subjects.

A growing reliance on personality profiles—exams intended to identify the less tangible qualities that adept programmers possess, like ingenuity—only added to this effect. After two prominent psychologists noted that programmers shared the “striking characteristic” of “their disinterest in people” companies began seeking out antisocial applicants. A feedback loop ensued. The historian Nathan Ensmenger writes in The Computer Boys Take Over that these multiple-choice assessments spurred the overrepresentation of workers with these stereotypically masculine characteristics, which “in turn reinforced the popular perception that programmers ought to be antisocial and mathematically inclined (and therefore male), and so on ad infinitum.” Over time, the gender balance tipped further in men’s favor. In the 1950s, women comprised between 30 and 50 percent of programmers. As of 2013, women made up about one-quarter. Accompanying men’s takeover of the field in the late 1960s was an immense climb in pay and prestige.