Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory

https://www.quantamagazine.org/hidden-heroines-of-chaos-ellen-fetter-and-margaret-hamilton-20190520/

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

94 71 7 years ago

The headline "Two programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory" would have done a lot more to further the right of women to be in the STEM fields.

Pointing out they're female only further makes it look like most women are too incompetent to do math or science.

chapium• 7 years ago

Except that it doesn't. Really interesting article too.

bsdetector• 7 years ago

Yes, I expect it was very interesting indeed - I mean, who programmed these women and how did they even do that? And what did programming the women have to do with chaos theory, was chaos theory part of that process?! That sounds like some weird offshoot of MK Ultra.

Or did they mean "two female programmers", because that sounds like a much less interesting story.

edit: in case downvoters didn't get it, "woman" is a noun and when you use a noun in place of an adjective it can be written after the following noun and "of"; "defense department" and "department of defense" are basically the same meaning in English. Computer programmer is a programmer of computers. If you still don't get it, consider how strange "two men programmers" would sound.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

As a counterpoint, I find that when introducing people to coding, mentioning Grace Hopper's role in the development of compiled languages does a lot to break down the perception of it being a job for boys.

tus872• 7 years ago

Not being associated with COBOL is hardly a bad thing...

barbecue_sauce• 7 years ago

I've been trying to pinpoint when programming transitioned from being considered "pink collar" work to "white collar" work in the general population. My parents were born in the 40s and I was born in the 80s, and when I went to college in the early 2000s they were still under the impression that programming was akin to secretarial work. (I didn't pursue computer science for other reasons as out-sourcing anxiety was at its head then, not because of their weirdly mistaken impression).

Townley• 7 years ago

That's not my impression at all. To me, it deepens their accomplishment by acknowledging the headwinds faced by women in tech.

Your proposed headline would be a fine lead-in to an article solely about a research accomplishment, but this is also an article about two people making inroads towards better gender representation in STEM fields.

dgzl5• 7 years ago

The tech industry bends over backwards to get women involved. Putting them on a pedestal only worsens the divide rather than closing it.

baddox• 7 years ago

What makes you think that? Note that your claim is not a subjective claim about how you feel when you see the headline, but an objective claim about how other people will react to the headline. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that removing the mention that the programmers were women from the headline would make the headline more encouraging for women interested in STEM fields?

I don't have any evidence either way for this specific claim, but there is no shortage of studies that show that how groups are represented in media have a strong affect on how people think about those groups.

thehogrammer5• 7 years ago

No this is great, because "two programmers" most would automatically assume are men. Maybe once shit has been sorted out and its not some fantastic amazing thing that women are in tech and it becomes more normal we won't have to state "women programmers" but until then, I'm down for this.

oh_sigh7• 7 years ago

My problem with 'women programmers' is it sounds weird and is probably ungrammatical(female is both a noun and an adjective - women is just a noun, and it is used as an adjective in the title), not that they specify the sex of people they are writing about when their sex had a big effect on what they could contribute.

And maybe it would be good if some people who jumped to 'two men programmers' (doesn't that sound weird?) automatically instead read the article and found out they were women?

anoncake• 7 years ago

People assume that a "programmer" is male because if he weren't, "woman programmer" would likely have been used. The meaning of a word is determined by its use. If we want "programmer" to include women, we have to use it for women.

SpaceManNabs• 7 years ago

Sorry if slightly off topic: This reminds of me a great play about a young, fictional mathematician woman that comes to great insights about chaos and entropy in the universe.

The ending is beautiful.

"Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard

ghaff• 7 years ago

My favorite of Stoppard's plays. (Which is a very high bar.)

pseudolus• 7 years ago

In a similar vein there was also David Auburn's "Proof" which featured a female mathematician following in the footsteps of her mentally ill mathematician father.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(play)

dkural• 7 years ago

Arcadia was infinitely better imho. Proof is formulaic (didactic and on the nose on its moralizing theme) and propagates a number of stereotypes about mathematicians around mental health and the lone genius etc.

tus872• 7 years ago

Chaos theory was the 90s machine learning.

criddell• 7 years ago

For me it really was. I think it was Mondo 2000 that first pointed me to James Gleick's excellent Chaos book. After reading that I was looking for anything else like it. Eventually I found books on artificial life and genetic programming and these talked about neural nets and other machine learning systems.

Those were exciting times. I was just thinking about Mondo 2000 and recurring stories about smart drugs (nootropics?). I always wanted to try some of it but never had the guts. I'd be curious to know if there were any long term consequences for those who used them.

Edit: I just did some searching and found that R.U. Sirius did a followup article:

https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/03/09/smart-drugs-nutrients-1...

selimthegrim• 7 years ago

What, no Mary Cartwright?

sneakernets• 7 years ago

When I was a child, I was told by my 1st grade teacher that math was important because when I'm a mother with a wonderful husband, I would know how to do fractions and measurements to prepare cakes easier.

I would have loved to hear stories like this instead.

Verdex• 7 years ago

Ultimately, the people teaching young people math do not understand what it is or how to actually use it. If you took away their ability to do math, it is unlikely that anything would actually change in their life.

Mathematics is the closest thing that humans have to doing magic. It's about consistent axioms and finding true statements that are unintuitive. And it allows you to problem solve at a level that exceeds what experience can teach you.

No 'this is how you can use math' statement that I've ever heard in school has ever done it justice.

Here's another history of math and women story that you might be interested in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MpQG2xXVo

zaroth• 7 years ago

Boy, how the tables have turned.

ncmncm• 7 years ago

I like that this article gives me more reasons than I already had to admire everybody involved, even the writer.

sampo• 7 years ago

Still, for coder-scientists in academic systems that measure success by paper citations, things haven’t changed all that much.

This is true. Someone still needs to write code for all the systems and simulations needed to do science. But you don't get much academic credits for building these things. Academic career-wise, much better to run simulations using software others have written, and write papers about that.

Then again, being a programmer gives one a good position to leave academia and get a software engineering job.

faissaloo• 7 years ago

Good for them I guess? What a weird title, either say 'women' or 'programmers', the use of the phrase 'women programmers' makes it seem like some sort of alien concept.

asark• 7 years ago

It's become a common construction, but it bugs me too. You'd never say "men nurses", for instance. Makes it sound like nurses who specialize in working with men, not necessarily nurses who are men. It's awkward but it's sticking around, unfortunately.

[EDIT] more relevantly, "women doctors" definitely reads like an old-timey euphemism for gynecologists.

OJFord3• 7 years ago

Why is 'women programmers' or equivalent the 'in' or PC thing to say? It doesn't make sense, 'women' is a plural noun; here it's used adjectivally. I've never read 'men <noun>' by anyone literate.

Two _female_ programmers.

Or hey, as another commenter points out, who gives a shit that they're women? You don't achieve the (presumed) goal of it being unremarkable whether a programmer is male or female by remarking on it every time one is female.

seandougall2• 7 years ago

Their gender is rather pivotal to the story told by the article. It's not presented as remarkable that these two programmers were women -- in fact, that was quite commonplace at the time -- but rather, the article argues that their contributions have been minimized in the intervening years in part because they are women.

As for the grammatical question, there are various theories why "woman" and "women" have started being treated adjectivally, e.g. [1]. I agree that it's problematic, but it seems to be a response to equally problematic baggage attached to the way the word "female" has been used in other contexts. In other words: grammatically, you're absolutely right, but it turns out it's not _really_ just a grammatical question.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/02/when-you-should-use...

dgzl5• 7 years ago

It's the issue of equality vs. equity.

Equality means everyone has a fair chance from start. Equity means those who didn't achieve should be benefited until they do. This is justified by saying it's the achiever's fault that the unachieving parties failed.

Currently our PC culture wants to throw money and attention at those who aren't achieving.

SilasX3• 7 years ago

Because someone decided that "female" is offensive, regardless of the lack of a better alternative, and everyone joined the train.

My earlier comment about the inanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539361

tom_3• 7 years ago

Lack of a better alternative? We have a perfectly good term for an adult female human: "woman". (Plural: "women".) See, e.g., the headline. If we need to stretch the grammar a bit to make this work, well, why not do that.

noodlenotes• 7 years ago

For context, there are ugly groups on the internet that refer to women as "females" in a way that's intended to be derogatory. (The noun form, not the adjective.) Think of how impersonal it is to say "I sat next to a male/female" vs "I sat next to a man/woman" to understand why they do this. Now people are avoiding the word "female" to distance themselves from these groups even though it's just fine as an adjective and there isn't a good alternative.

I don't think "women programmers" is the best way to phrase it, but writers haven't just randomly decided to be offended by the word "female" for no reason.

oh_sigh7• 7 years ago

I agree with your first point. It sounds absolutely bizarre to say "I saw two men programmers working in the cafe today", but apparently "I saw two women programmers working in the cafe today" works.

I don't understand what the fear of using 'female' is. Too clinical? Somehow not inclusive for transgender people?

danso2• 7 years ago

Yes, it would be strange to say "I saw two men programmers working in the cafe today". And for me, "...two women" as well. Just like it'd be strange to say "I saw a black guy programming at the cafe today" unless you (or the person you're addressing) found that to be a sight worth noting.

danso2• 7 years ago

It matters that they were women because women’s contributions in that past era were consistently overlooked or outright stolen. Fran Allen, the first woman to win the Turing Award, said in her “Coders at Work” interview that she knew of several women whose work in computation was stolen by men.

natestemen• 7 years ago

i think the author probably wanted to draw attention to their gender, not their sex. hence female is off the table.

harry8• 7 years ago

Without commenting on whether its effective or not, the theory being ascribed to in the headline is clear. It has been suggested that one of the reasons why there is a strong gender imbalance in computing is the lack of role models for young women considering entering the field. Those who see this as a real problem and wish to solve it then go ahead and trumpet successful women in programming so that such role models are more prevalent.

Is this kind of thing effective? Does it make any meaningful difference to actual young women considering the field? Is the premise flawed anyway? I honestly have no idea, it's not something I've ever looked at in any depth to know if such questions are even answerable with anything other than one's own prejudice - maybe they are and it all is? If so, studies with data would be interesting and worth my time to read.

I'm a bit surprised that people around here are driven to comment in this headline and need this pointed out. Disagree with the theory all you like to whatever end you feel is a good one, by all means. Being aggressively ignorant seems to be rarely productive for anything useful.

Beyond this, clicks are where you get paid and we're talking about this and posting it here which seems worth mentioning in passing...

booleandilemma• 7 years ago

Monocle drops

Women programmers? You don’t you say!

Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory

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