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by sthnblllII 2094 days ago
> Computing was originally a female dominated field

From allyshack's source:

> sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand

Yea thats not computer programming or electrical engineering so please don't conflate that with modern computing.

> as computing became a more prestigious field more men entered it

No, as men invented electronic computers the armies of female laborers were replaced with a smaller number of overwhelmingly male engineers and programmers.

> Girls are socially discouraged from showing interest in stem

And now we get to the patriarchy arguments. No; women have much easier and more personally fulfilling life options than sitting behind a computer screen all day, and so they chose not to.

All of these feminist arguments have been made and rebutted hundreds of times here on hackernews and anywhere else that allows critical discussion of feminism so it gets very tiresome after a while and should probably fall under flamebait at this point.

1 comments

Programming was female dominated in 1967. IBM hired the first generation of programmers based on aptitude tests because there weren't really any university CS degrees yet.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-the-compu...

Does anybody know how successful this aptitude test was in hiring women? The (sponsored by IBM) article mentions that 349 companies hired 20,000 women based on this test, but they do not mention how many programmers in total were hired based on this test.