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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 5,181
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And before she could wonder if I was trying to turn her into a boy or something, I pointed out how much her girl peers loved doing some of those things, and there's nothing wrong with women liking things that are fun. lol loved the whole response but this part really made me smile. My sister and I (both engineers) have joked that we were both the sons our father never had. I remember one Monday morning when one of my coworkers said he wished his wife would fix the brakes on his car like I had just done for DH. I commented that while I was doing that DH was cooking a 4 course meal while dealing with a cranky baby. DH and I both thought we were the ones that got off easy that day so it was a perfect solution. There are lots of things at play but our parents (and extended family for that matter) broke many typical gender roles and stereotypes. It wasn't until I was older that I realized that many things are supposedly girl things or boy things. They certainly weren't in our house. Both my sister and I have a fierce streak of "oh, you don't think I can do x, I'll show you" in us which I feel was encouraged if not actually taught somehow but don't ask me how. I'm still trying to figure it out so I can somehow pass it on to both my DS and DD. I have encountered some mostly minor sexism in the workplace. However, for the most part I've been lucky that most of my career has been in places where skills and competence were valued and rewarded above all else. Speaking with friends in more female dominated professions, politics and other horrific behavior isn't just limited to men being sexist towards women. Many of their stories are completely foreign and shocking to me and IME men don't have a monopoly on sexist and/or nasty behavior. It has really made me appreciate the workplaces that I've been lucky enough to be a part of. This is our household, too-- we don't really follow traditional gender-norming at all, and there is nothing that is "well, you're a girl, so...." other than stuff that is truly biological. (I wouldn't be having a talk about how to fit bras with a son, after all.) So I don't think that my DD ever realized that some things were "male-dominated" until she WAS in college. That was a bit of a shock, I think-- to walk into her first CS class and realize that she was one of four women in a room of 160 students.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Mar 2013
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I find their splitting of the intro CS classes up especially interesting. My D hadn't coded much at all before college, and it was great for her to have an intro course where she wasn't trampled by kids who had been loading Linux on their machines at age 11. And after the first semester, the tracks merge and she has done fine in her CS courses. My DD had the same experience in her CS major-- the real problem was that there was such incredible hostility from fellow (98% male) students-- and from first year faculty advisors, who were also male and dismissive of anything resembling "well-rounded" interests. In fact, the two different advising specialists that she saw openly SCOFFED at her interests outside of engineering/CS. She was treated like a space alien in her CS and engineering courses-- a highly desirable one, to be sure, being a Real Live Girl and all-- but it was lonely and marginalizing. It was such a huge turn-off that my DD just couldn't take anymore of it and bailed on the major. She looked around and realized that if that was who she was going to be spending all of her time with-- no thanks. This is so disheartening. I was pleased as punch to find out a classmate of DS's was going to on of Intel's 'Girls Who Code" summer program this summer. It really sounds like a great program. There are a number of groups in the Bay Area that are really trying to get women back into coding. I say back into because my first programming class back in college wasn't exactly 50/50 between the sexes but it was WAY better than 2% you describe. Although being one of the few women in a class never turned me off. It seems that programming has become MORE sexist of late. And I do know many universities are taking this problem of women not being very well represented in computer science a big problem. Part of the issue is women aren't even applying to their programs. Our local university girls in CS has been running Coding workshops for 12-18 year old's for example. I keep thinking this is something I'd like to get involved in.
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Joined: Oct 2011
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There are a number of groups in the Bay Area that are really trying to get women back into coding. I say back into because my first programming class back in college wasn't exactly 50/50 between the sexes but it was WAY better than 2% you describe. Historically it's been quite a pendulum shift, because in the 1960s, programming was considered women's work. Hardware was where all the manly-men worked. Men are hard, and women are soft, right? Also, programming meant typing. See: Apollo Guidance Computer.
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Historically it's been quite a pendulum shift, because in the 1960s, programming was considered women's work. In the 1960s the two big programming languages were COBOL and FORTRAN, the latter used by engineers, scientists, and statisticians for FORmula TRANslation. I doubt that there has ever been gender parity among Fortran programmers -- the Real Programmers  Real Programmers Don't Use PascalWhere does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no Real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in COBOL, or sorting mailing lists for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!).
Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers.
Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions.
It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies.
The computers in the Space Shuttle were programmed by Real Programmers.
Real Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operation systems for cruise missiles.
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As a former FORTRAN geek myself-- the disparity has grown since the 1980's-- shockingly so. I was astonished that it was THAT large a difference, and while it didn't bother my DD that she was the only female in her lab section of 48, it did bother her that she was treated the way she was by virtue of being female and not being obsessed SOLELY with coding. She was taken less seriously by everyone around her because she also has interests in the arts. Apparently-- polymaths need not apply.  That particular attitude worries me in a much larger sense, honestly.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Sep 2013
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There are some interesting articles on this topic of coding as culture, its bizarre hiring practices and how it affects things like business performance, etc. over on LinkedIn.
My instinct is that some of it is a defense mechanism by those on the inside.
I'm betting this strangeness fizzles sooner or later.
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Joined: Aug 2013
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Love it. They stopped teaching fortran the year after I took it in University. I stopped putting it on my resume years ago because I figured it was too dating Your daughter's story makes me so very, very sad. I graduated EE as one of 4 in a class of 80 some in the late 90's. I'm now surrounded by polymaths and love the bizarre topics of daily discussion. Most hiring managers I've encountered are looking for people that can not only code but that have interests outside of computers and can hold a conversation. It's sad that these kids are being turned off before they even get started. Bostonian - your story reminds me of my first day in the computer lab in first year. I had NO CLUE about computers, like none - hilarious considering where I've ended up. I was following the instructions line by line which walked us through using vi to write a fortran program (complete with escape :wq in the instructions). I was seriously in WAY over my head but doing my best not to show it. This guy walks behind me looks at my screen and screams "you're using vi? vi is for babies, real programmers use emacs!". Luckily it was obvious he was a complete dork so it was more entertaining than insulting. Luckily I have yet to encounter someone so..... um, special in my career. I think it's a problem when kids feel they have to eat, sleep and breath one thing in order to be a success at it. The post secondary arms race probably isn't helping things - they are trained in high school to keep their eyes on the singular prize and maintain focus on it alone - interested in ..whatever..? Will it help you on your college application? No, well you need to find a better interest that does. All of the success stories of tech founders that came up with their big idea and started companies as teens or really young adults probably isn't helping either. They think they can be the next Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg/etc if they ignore all else and become a coding fiend. A little eccentric? Lack people skills? No worries as long as you can code or at least that is often the narrative in the media (although less so IME IRL). Never mind the failures, detours, timing, luck and/or genius that helped many of the success stories actually become success stories.... ok enough rambling but hopefully some useful tangents in there.
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the disparity has grown since the 1980's-- shockingly so. I've been made aware of this also, and have wondered whether it was due to the shrinking of the economy over the past decade or so... analogous to the aftermath of the " Rosie the Riveter" campaign of the 1940's, when women were temporarily called to work in factories when men going off to war created a labor shortage... and then were expected to remove themselves from the labor force when the economy no longer needed the "excess" human capital.
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Historically it's been quite a pendulum shift, because in the 1960s, programming was considered women's work. In the 1960s the two big programming languages were COBOL and FORTRAN, the latter used by engineers, scientists, and statisticians for FORmula TRANslation. I doubt that there has ever been gender parity among Fortran programmers -- the Real Programmers Real Programmers Don't Use PascalWhere does the typical Real Programmer work?
It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. The lead software engineer for Apollo 11, whose team is credited with software heroics that saved a nearly aborted landing, was Margaret Hamilton, a woman. Enrollment of women in undergraduate degree programs in computer science peaked in the mid-80's at over 40%, and then has since declined by about a factor of 2.
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Historically it's been quite a pendulum shift, because in the 1960s, programming was considered women's work. In the 1960s the two big programming languages were COBOL and FORTRAN, the latter used by engineers, scientists, and statisticians for FORmula TRANslation. I doubt that there has ever been gender parity among Fortran programmers -- the Real Programmers Real Programmers Don't Use PascalWhere does the typical Real Programmer work?
It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. The lead software engineer for Apollo 11, whose team is credited with software heroics that saved a nearly aborted landing, was Margaret Hamilton, a woman. Enrollment of women in undergraduate degree programs in computer science peaked in the mid-80's at over 40%, and then has since declined by about a factor of 2. It wasn't just that a woman was the lead software engineer (a term Margaret Hamilton coined, btw, in an effort to gain some well-deserved respect from the hardware folks), but the programming team was woman-dominated. They wrote it in assembly language. The man who invented FORTRAN did so, he candidly admitted, because he didn't like programming, and coding in assembly was too hard.
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