History of Women in Computing

The lack of diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education is a well-known issue. The issue is worse in computing fields (i.e., Software Engineering or Computer Science) than within STEM overall. This lack of diversity in academia extends to STEM fields in the workforce. For example, overall, women hold 57% of professional occupations, while in science and engineering, they represent only 26% of the workforce.

It has not always been this way. Once upon a time, women were well represented within computing. When software engineering was first invented, a computer was a person who performed calculations. As in, originally, women *were* computers.

https://www.ncwit.org/ncwit-fact-sheet

The history of majoring in Computer Science began in 1962 when Purdue University became the first university to create a Computer Science department. At that time, women were as well represented there as anywhere else in universities.

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/history/

By 1967, computer programming was so popular as a career for women that Grace Hopper was featured in Cosmo magazine talking about it. https://bit.ly/3fLJ3Ye

For an article titled “The Computer Girls,” Hopper stated, “[Computer programming is] just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything, so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.”

Dr. Hopper talked about the detail and logic required to be a computer programmer as the reason women were qualified to be computer programmers. When Dr. Hopper said this, women were actively recruited as computer programmers with little to no experience by taking an aptitude test that tested for logic. Coding jobs were exploding as corporations began rolling out automated processes, and employers looked for logical, meticulous candidates. Employers sought out women because gender stereotypes dictated that women possessed those skills. https://nyti.ms/3wWNRjp

Also, note that the salary of $20,000 mentioned is equivalent to about $155,000 today. The entry requirements for jobs were based on aptitude testing, not CS degrees. Most of the women we've read about did have degrees with some element of formal logic training. As the degree and career became more popular, women began to earn a greater share of the CS degrees. Women continued to gain a share of the programming industry until 1984.

Since 1984, the representation of women in both computer science departments and in the industry has declined, while women's representation in other challenging fields has increased. Women in CS degrees peaked in 1983 and began to decline after that. What has driven this decline and why are women not choosing to pursue computer science?

Despite the earning potential of a CS degree, Computer Science doesn’t even make the list of women’s top 20 most preferred majors. While men's list of 20 most preferred majors includes Computer Science and Computer Information Systems.

One theory reiterated across the published literature (and the internet) is that the rise of the personal computer initiated the decline of women in computer science. To examine this theory, we need to understand how the first PCs were marketed.

When personal computers came on the scene, they were not as essential to everyday life as they are now. When the first PCs were available, for some, they were work machines. But for the majority of people, they were a luxury or a toy. To understand early PC marketing, we need to understand early video game history and early video game marketing.

In the 1970s, video games started to take off in a mainstream way. http://www.simfluent.com/tie-world/tie-games/how-video-games-went-from-geek-squad-to-mainstream/ In the early days, video games were marketed to families, and there wasn't quite such a gender imbalance. Check out this ad for the first home video game for a visual reference. https://youtu.be/0MnRkPvIjKE

But in the 1980s, the market had become saturated with low-quality games. This market saturation and other factors brought on the video game crash of 1983, and with that, the strategy changed. Ultimately, video game marketers decided the best way to sell video games was to market them in the toy aisle and to focus on one demographic to sell them. This switch made sense because stores already sold other toys in this very gendered way. This qz article lays out this history very well.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/

To understand the environment in context, let’s take a look at some advertisements from the ’80s. https://youtu.be/J2jRuh1bAxw https://youtu.be/rxNjx_VWJ8U As PCs became available, video game makers marketed them to boys, similar to how they were selling video games at the time. Here’s a local news piece from the early ’80s with a focus on computer education. Notice the teacher is a woman, but all of the students are boys. https://youtu.be/9I8R46hCiD8

In this era, families commonly purchased PCs for their sons. As gaming became more popular, this only became more entrenched in the marketing gender imbalance. This Adam Ruins Everything clip explains this quite well. https://youtu.be/i08CVkBxvBM

The impact of this in the short term was already strong. One anecdote shared by NPR is a mathematically talented female student who dropped out of Johns Hopkins University’s CS program after her first introductory course. She shared that the men in her class came in with a level of understanding she didn’t have. The instructor belittled those who came into the class without knowing the basics, even though it was an introductory course. It took her ten years, but she did eventually earn a Ph.D. in computer science. https://n.pr/2RgQ8Xj

Many others through that era echo her story. Before the PC boom, instructors expected that students came into their classes with no prior knowledge. As student experience began changing in the 1980s, professors changed their expectations, leaving those without that experience at a disadvantage. A home PC gave a student an incredible advantage.

As women began to disappear from CS classes, the lack of gender diversity became self-perpetuating. Despite the changing commercial environment for computers – they are now ubiquitous -- women didn’t see themselves portrayed in the profession, nor did they see themselves in CS classes, so they didn’t see those as goals for them. With this context, it starts to make sense that CS doesn’t top the most desirable majors for female students. https://bit.ly/3vYmeGF