> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession.
I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.
Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)?
> There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.
- 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.
- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.
In the early days doing basic arithmetic to count up data was woman’s work because it was a low skill job that only required a person to sit down and know basic 4th grade math.
Female programmers where just people who would rewire the computers do to arithmetic that the mathematicians "programmed". They did not write the algorithms nor did they know anything more than the basics of "this plug does this". their job was taking a work sheet and making the machine do what the work sheet instructed them to do.
as computers automated this the female "programmers" where no longer needed to do this low skill job
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Two_wome...
You're extrapolating from a few select examples.
ASCC and many other computer precede ENIAC, and their programming was absolutely not a "women's work".
The history of practical computing is really labour intensive. The mass of the work has been done in counting paychecks of megacorps, census, taxes, and weather simulations. Unfortunately I have no statistics that would say that women did most of the jobs there but based on historical precedence it sounds plausible to me.
Programming as a field has historically two or three subcultures - the corporate, the academic (and finally, the personal).
The academic branch is where the new stuff has been imagined. The corporate branch is where the work that added value to society in form of financial income happened. Think of huge accounting machines, and extrapolate from that to modern computing. Taxes, census etc.
The corporate branch had several tasks that were labour intensive. Usually this labour intensive part was reserved for women (they are more keen on details on average or other such rationalization). Also, historically, women did not get paid as much as men so more labour for the same amount of money...
Women were also extensively hired as data entry clerks.
In the age of the mainframe, a typical division of labour was that the software designer wrote the program on paper with pencil, and then the data entry clerk encoded it into the computer (using punch cards or later terminals).
The integrated software designer / data entry thing probably originated in the universities and other research setings (i.e. Knuth typing his Tex from his notebook the the terminal at his Uni. and so on).
I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.
Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)?
> There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.
- 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.
- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.
[1] Two links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science
[2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s