NYT: Women and Coding
 

The New York Times Sunday Magazien has a long article exploring this: When computers first came about, a significant--at times a majority--of persons writing code were women. As we know, that changed.

The article pins that change to the advent of the personal, that is, home, computer, and examines the reasons for the change, and finds that it has nothing to do with aptitude and everything to do with sociology. To make a gross over-simplification, when computer came into the homes, parents tended to encourage boys to use them more than they encourage girls. The boys then went off to college familiar with computers, the girls did not, so colleges assumed that boys had aptitude and girls did not. (Follow the link below to see how gross that over-simplification is!)

It's long read and you may find yourself skimming parts of it, but I think it's a worthwhile read, especially in view of GamerGate and similar paroxysms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/m...ogramming.html

It is a good read. I had the opportunity to listen to Grace Hopper give a lecture many years ago (kind of gives an idea of my age...)

This is another example of women proving they can do the job as well as men then, when men want to do the job, they take it away from women. If women stopped putting up with it it'd stop happening.

I agree that it is a good article, and fully concur that women have the abilities to perform any of the same feats as men.

Fact is, they can do one thing men can never do, bear children.

I received this link to an NPR earlier story on the same topic via PM; I must confess I haven't read it through yet.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2...stopped-coding

The sex bias re:coding is largely as illusion. From the beginning there were as many brilliant female coders as male coders in the industry as a percentage of that sex in the workforce. In other words, there was parity. That appeared to change when coding AS A HOBBY gained popularity and "hacker" went from a term denoting knowledge and skill to a reference related to cyber criminals (and I still hate that stupid movie). Computers as a hobby arose with a huge male sex bias: there are social, economic, and psychological reasons why this might be true based upon social factors unrelated to skill or ability.

The hobby based bias resulted in a pre-workforce leaning toward one sex, and the appearance of a leaning in the workforce. The actual number of truly exceptional coders was still reasonably balanced for a few years. The "preparation bias" did result in some level of bias in the workforce, see discussions of "self fulfilling prophecy" and negative reinforcement results in the industry elsewhere.

There are certain gender based differences in creative coding that do not lend themselves to easy analysis, and that do not suggest superiority of one gender over the other. There is no absolute difference in brilliant coding between the genders.

An excellent brain is an excellent brain, and an excellent coder is and excellent coder, not matter in what package it resides.

wpeckham, I'm confused. Are you saying that the idea that men are inherently better coders than women is an illusion, or that the notion of bias involving coders and coding is an illusion?

I think you are saying the former, but, if so, the message does not come through clearly.

This is not related to coding, but it is related to stereotypes. The best boss I ever had was a woman; working for her did not even seem like work. The close second and third were both men. The worst two bosses I ever had were men; working for them made me miserable. In my experience, the bossing ability was certainly independent of the chromosome count.

i'm not very interested in these articles; there's no job in the world that has an exact 50/50 percentage of men/women, and where would that leave hermaphrodites and all those "other" genders anyhow.

nobody is bothered where construction workers or nurses are concerned, but somehow it seems to matter a lot more in IT... :shrugs:

i personally don't believe that any one sex is more suited to perform a certain type of work; i think it's all in the socialisation, like the article seems to prove. gender stuff. and yes, there's work to be done. consider how hard it still is for a young man to be interested in work with small children.

nevertheless, i need to ask:
writing code or writing programs?

i skimmed, and didn't see that distinction made anywhere.
this still matters a lot to people working in that area (regardless of gender), and i guess the distinction and separation was almost absolute in earlier days.

The different sexes have equal value but different strengths - that's what makes them so fascinating, so compatible and so incompatible. Anything else is just politically correct claptrap. Men are generally better at construction work because they're physically stronger and women are generally better at childcare because of the psychological and biological understanding that comes from being female and being able to bear children. That's not to say that a group of women couldn't be decent roofers [or a group of men run a creche], but if I were presented with a group of women roofers versus a group of male roofers I would choose the men. I would also choose a group of women for childcare rather than a group of men because I want the group most likely capable of doing the job well. If people want to call it sexist then yes, it's sexist. I care about the job.

There is something innate and inherent to our biology which governs how we think [see Simon Sinek's talk on Why, How, What on TED] and this affects how we perform and the choices we make. I don't know if it's possible to say that men code better than women or vice versa, but I'm not ruling either out given extensive research. The danger comes when companies start employing women for no other reason than because they are women in order to fulfill some ambiguous and arbitrary diversity policy. If a woman can code well, then of course there's no reason for her not to be a programmer.

Did you happen to get a nanosecond of wire ?.

go and watch the movie "Hidden Figures" that is a real eye opener. Women and the space program...

I've always considered the life game is rigged against girls world wide.

So I take studies and articles about female limitations with a grain of salt.

Edit: Where is hazel?

The tables are turning and it's men who are getting more oppressed these days because the media [and the courts] have the back of the fairer sex. Just look at male suicide rates: there is a lot of pressure to "man up" and not talk about problems which in reality is more damaging.

Look, for instance, at this absolutely rubbish article from the BBC:

Suicide rate among UK men at lowest since 1981

Sounds great until you read it:

All I can say. For the UK suicides. Move out to the sun.

You will have a grin on your face in no time.

Edit: Tables turning? Ya don't say. My problem. Being a huge dude. I am quite comfy in my manhood. I see no over turned tables yet. Worldwide.

Women need to stop playing the game.

i suspect this could be misread as if i would not acknowledge that there's still a lack of gender equality in this world.
that was not my meaning; there's still glaring discrepancies everywhere, and the fight for said equality is not yet over.
But I do not believe that winning this fight would mean to

• have a 50/50 quota everywhere, every job, every social situation... how would that even be possible since according to many there's more than 2 genders...
• treat people gender-neutrally in every conceivable situation - not being neutral is not the same as demeaning!

i don't want to end up in a bland, eventless and emotionally empty society painted in perfectly neutral tones.

oh and btw, i differentiate between sex (biological) and gender (social identity). These are two separate things imo.

so, what about coders? are they just typists, or are they programmers?
the articles did not specify...

I've never understood this whole "it takes a certain gender to do a certain job", it really is an attitude that belongs in the distant past. I can understand that a certain gender might be more adapt at a particular job, but there is no reason why women can't do programming - or pretty much, if not, anything else. I think the first person considered to be a "computer programmer" was a woman. There are women bodybuilders, boxers, etc.

There is nothing that says that any gender has anymore brains than any other gender. To me personally it's just sexist to say "only men can do x, y or z", whatever job it is. In some countries, women can even join the army...

I try to avoid getting into controversies like this because they tend to lead to ill feeling. I certainly don't think there's anything specifically masculine about coding. But historically girls at school have been put off this kind of career and steered towards more people-oriented jobs because women are thought to be better at that kind of thing. Also there is a perception (a hangover from the machine code age) that coding is some kind of mathematical process and men are believed to be better at maths. I think the "hobbyist" atmosphere of modern coding also puts women off, as mothers seldom have time for hobbies.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of great coders are on the autistic spectrum, and autism is commoner in men than in women.

I once pointed out to my mother that her talent for conjuring up knitting patterns out of her head was closely akin to programming a computer. That's probably where I got it from ;).

NOOOO!!! You can't do that: you're our only woman!

I certainly am not! There are plenty of women around here, Celtic Yokel for instance.

^ yep, unless you really know 100%, do not assume anyone's sex on the internet.
___________________

i asked this twice now, maybe hazel can help:
i recently talked to a man who came to our so-called western country from india to work in an it company.
i asked him if he was a coder, and immediately realised i made a mistake. i don't remember his exact answer anymore, but he said: no, he's a programmer. although they do have coders in that company, too.
interesting.
makes sense, just like some executive in any company actually thinks up strategies, and the secretary types them up. or like the almost absolute division between composer and performer in classical music nowadays.
also makes sense that this role division was more pronounced in the old days, where the actual code input was a tedious, repetitive task, just like a typist's, and probably required sitting in a noisy room at a clunky terminal.
am i right there?
it would put a new perspective on the original article.

oh and btw, i'm totally happy that the FLOSS world i live in does not really make that distinction, just like i believe in the unity of creator & performer in all arts.

When I first started to use computers, "programmer" was used for people who did donkey work. The people who actually designed programs were called "systems analysts". But in those days, all computer programming was done within big companies, and their organisation was probably more hierarchical than would be tolerated now. The kind of hobby and community coding which we are so familiar with didn't exist. Maybe that's why people nowadays prefer to call themselves coders or hackers, not programmers.

Jacquard?

Good parallel! The point is that my mother could imagine a pattern in colours or with cabling and then work out the sequence of knitting operations needed to get there. That's an algorithm.

thanks hazel, that certainly puts some perspective on things.
so the programmers did no creative work at all, just put into machine code what was handed down to them?
one more time i find out that the real news is just below the level the article dares to touch.

I once had an artist friend say that writing html code was like painting with her eyes closed...which is, I thought, a pretty good description of coding.

I spent most of my career as a "programmer/analyst," which I always knew was a way to get system (or business) analyst work for programmer pay. My pay certainly went up when I began getting work as a "business analyst"...although I still had to do the donkey work. :)

An interesting addition to the topic:

http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/02/...g-decades-ago/

Also great, but NSFW:

https://flashbak.com/computer-magazi...nd-80s-385222/

I can write XHTML and CSS by hand but that's usually considered markup. It's code to me and if you can read this you can read my code. I see XHTML as structured language and I see it as it should appear as written. I never thought one gender was better at using computers in any sense and always glad to see new female forum members.

Programming to me is using Behavior Modification techniques to change behaviors in people and what it was considered to be in the State Mental Health facility we learned and used it. All my Supervisors there were female and I never felt it any threat to my toxic masculinity or questioned their authority.


I was a Union Laborer at an Iron Foundry in my 20's on a night crew of 6 and one of those a woman. It was hard dirty work scooping sand or swinging a sledgehammer all night. A gray powder called "seacoal" was mixed with the sand that would stick to you and the air get so dusty you couldn't see the light bulb 6 feet away. 2300 degree F molten iron was poured feet from where we worked and suddenly be surrounded in a shower of sparks at any time.

She worked just as hard and got just as dirty as any of us and worked harder than one guy. We were all about the same age but us guys had muscles in places some people don't have places. She was about 6 foot tall and lucky if she weighed 120 pounds.

She would take her shovel and cut 25%-30% off the front so she was carrying less sand than us but working just as hard. Every morning before we got off she would hide it and every time we found it would break it. She's be standing there holding her broken shovel looking at us and we'd stand there smiling. Then she'd go make another one just like it and we'd get to work.

It was only fair because she had just as much heart as us but didn't put on muscle like we did. She was every bit as tough as us just not Krypton strong as we were. We would usually work the sledgehammer job because it was hard work for us let alone her but she could do it and not hesitate if asked. If we didn't all respect her we wouldn't have given her a hard time like we did each other.

i like that.
or like beethoven, who continued composing after he became deaf...
but it wouldn't work if he'd been deaf all your life (if she'd never seen a rendered HTML page).

btw, interesting how in english language, using the small word "her" just once polarises your sentence.
that's why some people like to use "their" instead (esp. since sex doesn't seem to have any impact on what you described).

The use of "her" in this instance is no different than when using "him" to refer to a male. Using "their" would not be seen as appropriate use of English language to anyone fluent in its use:


It is the context my original use of "let alone" when referring to "her" that is relevant in comparison of strength. If I had chosen to use "much less" in reference to "her" it would been demeaning and not have reflect the respect I hold for "them".

Interpretative use of the word "her" as polarizing my statement a judgment personal in nature.

Excellent example, Trihex. I disagree with your comment, ondoho, it's politically correct claptrap which I thought you were above. As Trihex has shown, there is no suitable replacement for the word him/her in his sentence and not only that, but specifying the sex is not only relevant, but vital in comprehending the context and value of his story.

Unfortunately not.

Marketing convinced people that pink is a girl color and blue is a boy color...

My mother was dissuaded from becoming a Certified Public Accountant by her brother because of gender bias and that customers would not respect her for being a women similar to the article that a women lawyer would not be able to try cases in court. My mother became a teacher instead.

I think you meant

IMO, singular they is usually fine, but it's silly in this case where you talk about a specific person with a known gender.

It did sound silly in my example and that was the point.

I meant it as it appears in my OP and parsed my words carefully when "she" was the subject in any statement I made in reference to "her" when thinking of "them" in regard to "their" character.


That was back in the day when it wasn't considered bad manners for a man to open a door for a woman, although I still do so as practice despite the odds of being berated for it.

Why, I even stretched the limits of good taste and opened the passenger side door for a girl the other day. Instead of being insulted and commenting on how inappropriate my toxic masculinity was she was surprised and remarked that I was a "real man" in her opinion fo doing so.

She was probably still in shock from my unmitigated audacity and daredevil attitude in risking life and limb by saying I'd be glad to give a lady a ride home from the store.

Not blaming you for this (on the contrary) but I can hardly stand these distinctions when they're leaned on so heavily. I figure that while there are other definitions with greater accuracy, "coding" caught on because people were just tired of typing (and saying) "programmer" all the time.

Then you have very important people who realise that "programmer" sounds more impressive on a resume. RMS has his own distinction between them, he thinks coding is something different (and wouldn't include scripting, which makes his definition historical at least) but everybody wants to "learn to code." With a programming language. That is probably a scripting language.

I have heard, for those leading classes in whatever we call it, that female students are "less likely" to participate in classes with males present. I don't lead any classes with more than one gender present, but I have found that in a tutoring session it is just the opposite.

When tutoring, my experience is that female students engage readily and ask questions and are eager to learn-- while my experience on a limited scale with males is that they lean towards not saying anything that would reveal they don't know something. I'm definitely not impling this is out of arrogance, nor is there enough of a sample to be a statistic. So far, it is easier to teach female students because they aren't afraid to ask questions or tell me when they stop following. For males, it is like debugging a program without error messages. I'm a huge fan of Grace Hopper, and very grateful than she gave us the modern command name.

you do realise that hazel was talking of a time when PCs weren't even a distant idea?
where you possibly had to walk down into a noisy, humming, hot basement to enter the code somebody in a nice, airy office conceived?

I am not taking issue with anything hazel said at all. she had a good guess (as far as I know-- I have to guess too) what the origins of quibbling about terms were.

As I said already, I wasn't blaming any of the quibbling on hazel. I was simply pointing out that I wish there wasn't so much quibbling. We are past any point where people are going to develop agreed-upon distinctions between the terms, and people who qualify to make the distinction don't even agree on the same distinctions. As for the timeframe, I consider the past relevant for context and explanation, and the present quite relevant-- since most people are only expected to use the contemporary meaning of the words.

I was commenting further on this.

well the time frame is very relevant for this discussion, because it deals with an article that is exploring this: When computers first came about, a significant--at times a majority--of persons writing code were women.
see post #1 and from there onwards.

I'm aware of this. Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:G...and_UNIVAC.jpg (note that it's Hopper who gets the keyboard. And why not? She invented the compiler.) Also Ada Lovelace invented the loop. The teamwork of Babbage developing the machine and it taking Lovelace to figure out what it was really capable of repeated many years later IMO, with Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper.

Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTn56jJW4zY (Margaret Hamilton)

Also speaking of weaving / knitting / crocheting, the Apollo Guidance Computer: (1 minute in, look who is weaving the program in)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P12r8DKHsak It was always a collaboration, with women making many of the most vital pioneering advances, to be certain. I would probably not enjoy coding without Grace Hopper's contributions. Thanks to her, (also Kemeny and Kurtz, but those were smaller advances) Linus Torvalds and I both learned coding as kids.

Really? What's polarizing about it? Not arguing, just curious. I used "her" in that case because she was a woman...I use "their" all the time when I don't know the gender or sex of the individual being referenced.

The argument is that relating sex is irrelevant where it doesn't [apparently] affect the actions of the participants. I wouldn't rise to it.

The biggest factor here is that not enough women are applying for computer-related jobs.

It is scary, but I have seen some companies saying that they will choose women over men, purely to increase the number of women. That seems to be an insult to women, but they state that the problem is that the proportion of women applying for the jobs is really small.

So that is the crux of the issue - it seems to start with blaming other people for why the numbers are low, but it is not that simple, nor is it a particular group's fault.

It starts at school mostly, but also parenting and social groups - these three factors will determine what any boy or girl forms in their minds as acceptable jobs. I've seen it from 3 year olds where parents have pushed girls to play with toy ponies, anything pink and have princess birthday parties. What you find is that any child will play with any toys they are given, but if parents push a particular stereotype, it will stick often.

I think that in senior school, the stereotypes can be broken if enough inspiration is shown with good role-models - perhaps for innate reasons, boys tend to follow male role-models and girls follow female role-models. It is important to set the right scene by the time children are teenagers because they will start to choose subjects and look ahead to potentially studying something towards a career.

When I was at university, the student population was 55% girls, but on my computer science course, out of 110 students, there were 4 girls. One girl left in the first month as she found the number of boys too offensive and that clearly she had chosen the wrong subject!

The seeds are sewn at an early age though - I remember buying baby clothes and immediately you see that sleepsuits and fairly generic baby clothing are separated into boys or girls - nothing neutral. So parents are forced into gender stereotypes from the moment their children are born...

IMO the problem isn't that we have genders. I had a friend that was a girl in kindergarten, we had the same kind of computer at home and I don't doubt she is good at computers, even before school. But she is very gifted musically, learning to play the violin with skill at age 7, so her interest in computers is smaller than mine.

The problem is that we use gender as a platform for whatever society expects of people. And this can't be corrected 100%, because it isn't only about what society puts onto gender but I think it's nature AND nurture-- some of the disparity in career choices is due (indirectly, of course) to something innate.

When we make all allowances for equality, this innate preference doesn't decrease but increases. It has nothing to do with ability-- women are VERY capable, it has to do with career choices.

There are other factors, including the ones that happen early on. By age 10, most people have already decided if they're a "computer person" or not. This includes girls, some of whom definitely identify as "computer people." Regardless of gender, and regardless of career choice-- I don't think we can afford a computer-illiterate society anymore, and exposing everyone (including girls) to computing, not just superficial "application training" or abstract "logical thinking" (which coding requires, but also teaches alongside itself) is vital so that the chance to consider the self a "computer person" isn't missed. When paired with the visceral fear of learning that traditional education instills in people with its ham-handed Confucian methodologies, "I'm not a computer person" becomes a badge of iconoclastic honour. At least that's rare with other forms of illiteracy, but it's still costly.

I wonder if the retreat from single-sex schooling has something to do with it. When I went to school, a lot of secondary schools were single-sex. I went to the Camden School for Girls, having deliberately asked my parents to choose a girls' school because I was sick and tired of little boys fooling around in class and interfering with people who were actually trying to learn something.

At Camden, we were frequently told that we were just as good as boys and that not having boys around would make it easier for us to learn. We didn't learn anything about computers because this was the 1950s, but we did learn physics and chemistry and were encouraged to apply for university courses in science if we felt that we had a talent for it. I ended up with a chemistry degree and later started using computers when I got a job in the library of the Building Research Establishment.

So I have no experience of mixed-sex secondary education but I have often read that in modern mixed schools, boys monopolise the computers and girls are unwilling to put themselves forward because they are unhappy about what the boys will think of them.

And if the school does nothing to fix that, it's a problem.

Not to negate the problem, though this is a problem in school in general-- so many people are afraid of being wrong, and looking stupid. There are probably situations where that affects girls more than boys, but as I mentioned, when dealing with one person at a time, males are relatively quiet and females volunteer more. So it's different experience by gender-- but it also depends on the situation.

School should be making certain that everyone is learning, but the blame for that is always in flux-- is it the school, the teacher, the student, the class-- who is doing the most to prevent a good education?

Letting anyone monopolise the computers is a problem-- mediocre teachers routinely pit students against each other in a less-than-constructive fashion (I don't think it's always a bad thing, but it is when you can show the result is a lesser education for half the students.) Schools and teachers are not directly accountable for this, but they may easily be partly responsible. If we can fix it as easily as segregating by gender again, maybe we should-- I prefer to think we could fix it by ending the reenactments of Lord of the Flies in class, made worse by some teachers who lack the skill (or sometimes the authority) to manage a class reasonably. I'm not saying teachers don't have enough to worry about-- I'm only saying that a lot of them aren't very good at teaching.

To go slightly off-topic for a moment, what exactly is coding? It used to mean translating an algorithm into either machine code or a special programming language like C which could then be translated into machine code automatically. But nowadays whenever there is a news item on television about coding, you see kids pushing coloured shapes around and linking them together. How is that coding? Do they actually see any real code and, if they did, would they be able to relate it to their toys?

I understand how creating gui objects and associating code and attributes to them is used in programming, but programming and software development in general is more than coding alone.
You have asked a question that makes me think, and I thank you for that! This could get interesting!

I think code is better as text or numbers, and this goes back to Recorder in Windows 3.1. You can record a series of actions on the computer and play them again later. Like most people, I was younger in those days, and I don't know if there's a way to make it record anything other than mouse movement and keys, but that's a very brittle form of "lead-through programming." If you don't like that phrase, you could call it "automation" instead.

Programming in its simplest form, is describing a series of steps for the computer to follow. You can "program" a VCR. I don't know what software engineers have to say about that, but it's a valid definition. People are always trying to make the basic definition more complicated (or deny it exists.)

I wonder about that too. The truth is that the gui toys are closer to a real language than it probably appears to most people.

https://i.imgtc.com/qkoqemo.png

Recorder would also be closer to programming if it weren't as brittle as the cursor has to be in just the right spot every time. But technically, the result is a "program" of a sort. It's a program that moves the mouse and types in keys.

GUI "drag-and-drop programming" like is all the rage for beginners, really just replaces some of the syntax with boxes. It's not very different from Lisp in that regard, (replace the parentheses with boxes) most of these drag-and-drop languages are inspired by Logo and the MIT Media Lab, and Logo itself comes from Lisp.

The biggest problem in my opinion-- is that it abstracts the code to the point that students may not appreciate that it's actually code. That's why I promote the idea of a compromise-- a text-based version of such coding where you have similar conveniences (such as a similar template for each command) but in a text editor.

Go ahead and make the font larger, use different colours, whatever-- it will be less typing, but the student will understand they're really dealing with text, not graphical boxes.

But making a few syntax elements into graphical boxes doesn't mean it's not code. It means that more people might not realise it's code, and IMO that can also be a problem. If you're going to learn to code, you might as well be able to tell you are coding. Adding a "text mode" IDE or building one for existing GUI program files could help a lot.

A different but related idea is frame-based coding: https://www.greenfoot.org/frames/ again, it replaces some of the syntax with boxes, but on a broader level than each line of code. Not sure that's necessary, but I'm in favour of exploring ideas like this. I think you could just write an IDE like this, and add the relevant elements of the language (like Python) to it.

If I remember my computing history correctly, when computers first came about, the operators were really data entry clerks. Most of them were women, and they punched data and changed tape reels.

As the computers became more flexible, the job of the operator increased in complexity and would eventually involve programming, first by flipping switches and even moving connectors around, and later by writing programs at terminals. The women who held these jobs seemed to have no problems with the learning curve. (My mother did some COBOL programming way back when.)

I started working with computers as a teenager in the early 1980s. A desktop "personal" computer back then was a large, noisy, non-networked box that made the desk literally shake when the hard drive heads were seeking. That is, if it had a hard drive at all. Such machines ran MS-DOS and were mostly used for word processing, accounting and payroll. The user/operator was usually a woman.

Whenever, say, the accounting application had to be upgraded, the vendor would send out a large envelope with 2 or 3 5.25" floppies and typewritten(!) instructions on a poorly photocopied piece of paper. The instructions would read something like "Insert disk 1. Copy all files in the EXE directory into the C:\APP directory."

The operators/users performed these upgrades themselves. There were seldom any issues. It seems it never occurred to anyone that a woman wouldn't be able to do these things.
That seems to be the common narrative in today's media, yes. My experience back in the 1970s and 1980s was quite different.

Here are some anecdotes, which I will afterwards supplement with a snippet of hard data:

I was a young boy when the home computer revolution hit the western world. I remember when my father came back from a trip to Hong Kong (or was it Singapore?) with a box that hooked up to the TV, and we would sit on the carpet and play "Tennis" or "Hockey" (really variations of Pong) until the batteries ran out. It was amazing.

A few years later, and I was busy immersing myself in this new subculture. I did all I could to earn money to buy a computer, software, and later peripherals. It was particularly difficult to save up money for all this, since I also wanted to read every computer-related magazine I could get my hands on.

At school, I'd say more than half the boys were at least somewhat interested in computers, mostly for the games, although being a "nerd" was not cool by any stretch of the imagination.

However, hardly any girls showed the least bit of interest in this new phenomenon, and in fact most were not shy of displaying their utter disdain for what was later to be named "nerd culture". It was a rare occurrence indeed when someone of the fairer sex would join the guys in playing video games or talking about computers. Of course, when they did, they were more than welcome; even back then, "nerd culture" was anything but misogynist. It was just that most of the time, girls chose to engage in other activities.

The parent generation, at least in my culture, didn't really encourage or discourage either girls or boys to spend time playing with computers, which is what they would call it back then.

Some adults were skeptical of these new-fangled things, others were sure this had to be "the future". But most would readily admit that they understood nothing of computers, and they certainly didn't approve of their children spending hours playing Space Invaders, or typing in programs from magazines, or racking up phone bills on BBSes.

In our household, my younger siblings eventually got to use my computers. My brother soon wanted his own, while my sister was content with borrowing one of ours on occasion. She used them quite a lot, and to this day she loves the video games now referred to as "retro". But she certainly was the exception; none of her friends were the least bit interested.

If you want to know if my experience is in any way representative of the era, I suggest you look to computer magazines, comics, movies and other representations of pop culture from that period. Spoiler: You'll find portrayals of socially inept boys with coke bottom glasses behind every computer, while the popular boys usually engaged in sports. And there's no prize for guessing in which environment the girls would be found.

It's such a stereotype because it was mostly true.

I don't think the divide between the sexes we see today in the computer industry can be adequately explained by social norms or pressure from the parent generation, and here come the hard facts I was talking about earlier:

• In the Nordic countries, where there's as close to complete equality between the sexes as one could possibly have, and just about every woman works full time and is free to choose any career she wants, there are almost no women in IT: Hardly any female programmers, consultants, systems designers, security specialists etc. Notable exception: Quite a few women work in database design.
• In poorer countries, where one has to choose one's career carefully in order to support one's family, there are quite a lot of women in IT, especially as programmers/computer scientists. Just Google for "women in tech" and "India" or "Malaysia".

Why would we find almost 50% representation of women in Computer Science in what are arguably patriarchal cultures, where the societal norm for women is actually to get married and be a housewife, while in the Nordic countries where women seldom marry before 30, almost all the women flock to nursing, teaching and other decidedly non-STEM fields?

It's such a stereotype that "men are from Mars and women are from Venus". Perhaps it's because it's mostly true?

I'd say that's a good definition.

Traditionally, programming was about being able to design an algoritm and then formulate it within the constraints of a given programming language. The language constraints exist because the languages (to varying degrees, of course) reflect the underlying limitations of the actual computer hardware: The better you are able to express your algorithm, the more efficient the program will make use of the computer.

I remember Logo back in the 1980s. Great, you could move a triangular shape around the screen and make lines and dots. Sure, you learned how to turn a desired shape into an algorithm consisting of a sequence of instructions, but that's only a very small step on the way to teach programming. I can't remember ever seeing any wanted ads for Logo programmers. :)

I guess the idea behind the Logo classes was to make children comfortable with playing with a computer. After all, back in the 1980s, parents would be likely to tell their children not to type just anything into the computer, in the event they might break it. That hasn't really been an issue for the last 20-25 years.

I'm all for making computers more accessible, but in cases like the one you mention, there are so many layers of abstraction between the "program" and the actual computer that the "programming" exercise teaches very few (if any) skills that are useful outside of that particular environment. I would certainly hesitate to call that "coding".