[zztop44]

But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?

For the record, I also don’t think it’s about “differences in capabilities”. I think that amongst other things, as personal computing came of age different types of men became attracted to computing, and changed the culture around computing to one which excluded women (in most cases probably unintentionally). If that’s true, there might be parallels with the software industry today and race.

[gruez]

> But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?

Early computer "programmers" were doing something more akin to data entry than churning out CRUD apps using the latest js framework. Comparing the programming jobs of the 70s or whatever to the jobs today therefore makes little sense.

[kesor]

Early "computers" were also women. Because the engineering work was done by men and the computational "menial work" was done by women. These same women were replaced by digital computers later on, and some of these women felt "at home" with the new medium since they had better familiarity with what is going on in there than men did.

But that was the 60s and 70s, and the women at the time were in their 20s and 30s.

Many of those women remained "computers" and did not go into "engineers", and there is a big difference between the two. A computer is great at solving equations and doing the menial work of data calculation, similar to what we use spreadsheets for today.

Engineers on the other hand is a more creative approach to problem solving, when presented with various problems (not just of math) that need some solutions, an engineer would try and find that solution by being creative.

About 20-30 years ago, there was a large population of engineers around the world who are the parents of today's engineers who are 20-30yo right now. Those engineers were white men, and women, and asian men and women. Not many of them were black families, so today's 20-30yo black men (and women) are not only a small portion of the world population, they are also heavily underrepresented in engineering. That is not to say they are incapable, as I mentioned above, it is more influenced by the "environment" where these people grew up in.

Also, early women programmers does not mean that today's women had the same upbringing and attraction to the same professions as the women in the 60s and 70s. Back then being a "computer" was similar to being a secretary, it involved a lot of menial work and precision. Today's secretaries might be required to be good with spreadsheets and document writing software, quite a leap away from programming.

The above are generalizations, since there are absolutely definitely amazing women software engineers today, as well as black men software engineers. It is just that they are barely a minority in the software engineering industry, there are just very few of them - which makes sense why the software engineering jobs don't have any significant representation of these people working there.