Electronics Weekly
Today a flair for computer science is characterised by what are seen as male characteristics: categorising and recognising systems, for example. In fact, it can require what are considered female traits, such as preparation and collaboration. Yet, at its start, computer programming was seen as suitable work for women and was sidelined by the male workforce. How did this discipline transform from women’s jobs to a well-paid career path dominated by men?
Originally programming was seen as a clerical or admin job, with the majority of positions filled by women who matched the job specs. As computing technology advanced the value of programming and the ability to improve a company’s operational and financial success meant its status rose. Salary increases followed, which attracted the interest of men seeking employment in the global economic recession of the 1970s and women were edged out of that particular workplace.
When John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert created the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) to calculate the trajectories of ballistic missiles in the second World War, a team of six women was charged with the job of coding the machine. There were no programming languages in the 1940s, instead the women worked on logic diagrams of the machine. Ironically, they did not have the necessary security clearance to be in the same room as the ENIAC.
Job description
“In the beginning, there was a general sense that the computer itself was doing the work, and building the computer was the really important thing,” Janet Abbate, a professor of science and technology in society at Virginia Tech and author of Recoding Gender, told History.com. Women continued to be employed in computing during the post-war computing boom when there were more job vacancies than there were people qualified to fill them, Abbate added.
One of the early computer scientists, Grace Hopper, believed women were naturals at computer programming because it requires patience, extensive planning and attention to detail. These ‘female’ attributes meant the role maintained an admin-level status and the correspondingly low salary. Finding systems and planning are now viewed as male traits. In 2017 a leaked memo by a Google employee discussing the gender pay gap said: “Women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within [software engineers], comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.”
In the same History.com article, Jane Margolis, a senior researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, described how early home computers were depicted as being for boys, reinforcing early on the notion that computing, and later gaming, were not for girls. This subliminal messaging may have deterred some girls from using the early computers.
Home computing is one thing, but today there is still a feeling that women are exceptional visitors in some male-dominated workspaces. Recruiting the right people relies on attracting them to the selection process in the first place. Much can depend on the job advert. An internal report by Hewlett-Packard found that women do not tend to apply for a position unless they can meet all the essential criteria listed, whereas men tend to apply if they meet 60% of them. Wording a job spec differently could mean a wider pool of candidates to select from for each vacancy.
The potential employee pool can be widened, even further if we look at education. Creating the right learning environment can be the difference between actively encouraging and subtly discouraging some people from continuing their studies. It is, however, important not to focus solely on encouraging girls to shine to the detriment of boys, but the aim must be to increase numbers all round with an approach that does not repel one gender or the other.
Student stereotypes
In a 2016 piece of research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Allison Master, Sapna Cheryan and Andrew N Meltzoff claimed that computer science has one of the largest gender disparities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “An important reason for this disparity is that girls are less likely than boys to enrol in necessary ‘pipeline courses’ such as introductory computer science,” they said.
They conducted two experiments to investigate whether high school girls were influenced by stereotypes, which lowered their interest in enrolling in computer science courses. They showed students who had expressed an interest in computer science two small computer science classrooms. Both had 12 desks, but one included stereotypical objects, such as Star Wars/Star Trek items, electronics, software, tech magazines, computer parts, video games, computer books and science fiction books. The other classroom had non-stereotypical objects: nature and art posters, water bottles, pens, a coffee maker, lamps, general magazines and plants.
Students were told that both courses covered the same material, had the same amount of homework, the same (male) teacher and an equal split of male and female students. They were then asked about their interest in enrolling and asked if they had any concerns.
The girls’ interest in enrolling in an introductory computer science course was “significantly increased when the classroom environment… did not fit high school students’ current stereotypes of computer science. In contrast, boys’ self-reported interest in computer science did not differ across the two classrooms.
“The fact that boys’ interest in the course remained just as high in the non-stereotypical classroom is encouraging because it indicated that changes to the physical classroom environment could be used to attract girls to computer science without deterring boys in the process.
“Interestingly, the stereotypes exerted an effect on girls even though half of the students in the class were female, suggesting that these stereotypes are a deterrent to girls even when their gender is well-represented in the environment.
The stereotypical classroom also increased girls’ concerns about negative stereotypes about their gender; however, negative stereotype concerns did not predict girls’ enrolment interest, reported the researchers. They said: “Classrooms that communicate a greater sense of belonging to girls may be particularly effective in encouraging them to enter those courses.”
Adolescence is a critical time for both personality development and exam subject options and this research shows that small, practical measures can reduce gender disparities in STEM subject choices without deterring boys wanting to study them.
In the workplace, implementing the same considerations can ensure less antagonism towards women when they are appointed to lead a team, which requires respect rather than negativity through being seen as a ‘diversity hire’.
Fact file
In 1937 the Government Code and Cypher School moved into an English country house, Bletchly Park, in Buckinghamshire.
* Here the Colossus computers helped decipher teleprinter messages sent by German army personnel and where the electro-mechanical Bombe helped decipher the Enigma code.
* Women made up 75% of the 10,000-strong workforce at Bletchley. They were debutantes, school leavers and university graduates, linguists and mathematicians.
* Code-breaking at Bletchley Park continued until 1946, although no one knew about its wartime activities until files were declassified in 1974.
Fact file
The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) describes her as the first computer programmer*Ada wrote the instructions for the Analytical Engine designed by British mathematician Charles Babbage
*The word computer was first used in the 1640s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to describe “one who calculates”, from the Latin verb ‘computare’
* The job title for early programmers was ‘computers’, before the noun was adopted for the calculating machine itself
