How Women’s Work Became a Man’s World
Would it surprise you to learn that women once dominated the entire field of computer science? Modern computing grew from the need for ballistics calculations during World War II. At that time, “computer” was a job title—people who performed the sets of calculations. Men who may have otherwise taken these jobs were busy with the war effort. Plus, the work wasn’t regarded as “intellectual.” It was seen as repetitive and focused. So women were hired for their mathematical abilities while the men who designed and created the machines took most of the credit for the work.
Programming seemed menial, even secretarial. Women were employed to do the scut work of doing the calculations. The job was a ‘pink ghetto’—underpaid and undervalued. Following the war's end, the US military ramped up its electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC) project. Initially utilized to support the Manhattan Project, ENIAC would evolve over the next few years to become the first operating, stored-program computer. Six women, whose names you probably don’t recognize, were critical in the project’s success. Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Jennings, Frances Snyder, Ruth Lichterman, and Marlyn Wescoff were hired to program the computer to execute the instructions of the design engineers.
In the following decades, computer programming continued to be a job held primarily by women. Women worked as punch-card operators at IBM and were “career programmers” at MIT’s Lincoln Labs. The field required mathematical aptitude, analytical acumen, and an ability to recognize patterns. Applicants were simply given a test and hired if they passed it. The general feeling at the time was that women were especially adept at this because of their expertise in sewing, knitting, crocheting, etc., as all of those require similar skills as programming. This was not high-status work—yet.
What changed? When did it happen? Most historians agree that a shift came in the early 1980s. In 1984, 40% of all computer science graduates were women. (Today, that number is a mere 18%.) Home computing began to rise during the 1970s and 1980s. However, computers tended to be regarded as something “for boys.” In the past, boys played with toy cars and construction equipment while girls had dolls and play kitchens. This was merely an extension of that gender-biased mindset.
During their formative years, girls got the message that computers were for boys, for geeky boys. The movies of that time capitalized on this—think Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Real Genius, and War Games. Computer programmers were male and antisocial, and the women who pioneered the field were largely forgotten. Young coders today are shocked to learn that women were the innovators who created the field.
During the 1990s, the emergence of “culture fit” changed the hiring process. Managers began picking coders less on the basis of aptitude and more on how well they fit a personality type: the acerbic, aloof male nerd. Correspondingly, the field became known for its high-paying jobs. Long gone was the menial compensation paid to women. It became a man’s game, and its compensation rose accordingly, becoming a critical and lucrative sector of corporate America.
Today, women hold only 25% of all roles within the tech sector, despite the industry promoting itself as a meritocracy. In 2011, Google pondered why such a low percentage of their programmers were female. They arrived at the answer that Google hired only the best — that if women weren’t being hired, it was because they didn’t have enough innate logic or grit. In actuality, most women leave the field entirely due to its well-documented misogyny. Women developers leave the field at two times the rate of their male counterparts, and ample scholarship on the subject concludes that it is not the work that repels the women but rather the caustic workplace culture.
Up until the early 1900s, teaching was considered a man’s profession, and teachers were respected and compensated competitively. Once education became dominated by women, all of that changed. Masculinizing a field has the opposite effect. The computer science industry is drastically more male than decades ago and far more male than the workplace at large. It is also more well-paid than it ever was, coinciding with fewer and fewer women working in the field.
For more reading on this subject, check out these excellent resources:
Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer