[Tr3nton]

You're surreal. The history of computing is mostly men. This isn't a moral judgment or denigration of women, it's history. Even today, women don't pursue tech to the extent that men do, even with aggressive efforts to curtail this. I imagine you see any discrepancy anywhere as proof of some oppresive -ism, and I imagine you want nature to conform to your Lysenkoist utopian ideals. You're a drag.

[dabraham1248]

We read different history books.

In the 40s, the 6 people hired to program the ENIAC were all female. google "ENIAC girls". _Cosmopolitan_ ran articles about how programming was one of the few professional fields open to women. Managers thought that programming was basically just typing, so they hired women.

But then people started to realize it was more than just typing. So as the field started to get prestige in the mid 60s, companies started to look for things like college degrees and "personality tests", both of which were biased towards men.

[erik_seaberg]

“Systems analyst” and “programmer” used to be separate jobs. The former worked on paper, the latter typed what they were told to into a keypunch (not a terminal, because computer time was expensive). Eventually the “programmer” job became obsolete when we could afford to let analysts run their own text editors and compilers.

[jacquesm]

Almost correct.

Systems analyst was the person writing up an extremely detailed specification of what a program was supposed to do, which a programmer then implemented in a particular language.

The two merged at some point, when the demarcation line between the two of them became vaguer and overlapped more. This more or less coincided with more powerful 'frameworks' (if the name even applies) and libraries becoming available, as well as a massive increase in computing power which allowed for a near real-time edit-compile-test cycle which made programmers so much more productive that they suddenly weren't the bottle-neck in the process any more.

Another factor was that plenty of 'hobby' programmers found their way into professional IT jobs and they'd been doing this 'programmer/analyst' hybrid thing all along so for them it was a natural to continue to do so.

This happened somewhere in the mid 80's.

Then the web happened and the analyst job eventually became much more high level, nowadays we'd call a person that does work related to what an analyst used to do product owner or similar.

All of these definitions have meant different things at different points in time.

[mixmastamyk]

WWII did significantly boost the number of women in the workplace for obvious reasons. "Top Secret Rosies" is a good doc about this era.

Some permanently some temporarily, but the boost was mostly gone in computing by the 80s... the cohort we're talking about here.

[schiem]

What an odd rebuttal. "This field isn't sexist, it's just so toxic towards women that none of them want to be a part of it."

The gender gap isn't inherent, both India and China have a nearly equal percentage of men and women in computer science. The gap seems to be a mostly western phenomenon.

[rajin444]

How do you know a 50/50 split is correct?

Given the genetic differences between sexes a 50/50 split seems very unnatural and forced to me.

To put it another way, why don’t we have an issue with the number of men and women in the NFL?

[Kaze404]

There sure is a lot of imagining going on here, that's for sure.