Computers are for girls (2022)

by mastazi • 11 months ago

46 20 11 months ago

empressplay• 11 months ago

My female cousins did learn how to load and play games on their Commodore 128, but of course that fell by the wayside when they got an NES.

It was a lot easier to get a game going on the NES.

klooney• 11 months ago

This is a real vibe shift kind of article, remember circa 2018 Hacker News?

0xDEAFBEAD2• 11 months ago

A few years ago, I thought it was remarkable how politically balanced the commenters on HN were. Crazy to think I ever believed that.

pylotlight• 11 months ago

Why was home computing such a boys' club? I don't know, really.

Are we seriously going to pretend the answer isn't simply guys and girls have different interests on average, why do we keep having to rediscover fire here?

koonsolo2• 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox explains it all, and should be common knowledge by now.

Your reasonable comment being downvoted doesn't surprise me. I'm feeling more and more alienated from HN lately.

chasil• 11 months ago

Computers were girls.

"Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

Also, the movie:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

dzink2• 11 months ago

Growing up the girls I know (including me) were much more drawn to making and coding on computers, while boys were more interested in playing games on the computers. If it weren’t for the games, many more boys might be coding, OR many more boys might not even be interested in computers. I wonder what a real representative survey would show. I’d still much rather have a computer spin cycles solving my problems than me spin cycles solving a game.

cedws• 11 months ago

Games played a big role in introducing me to programming and I think it’s the same for many others in my generation.

theden• 11 months ago

People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths. People have different tolerances with respect to conformity, and at different stages in their lives.

It's a shame something as fundamental as computing is seen as a "boy" thing by many, often fatalistically, and I think we've been worse off for it.

0xDEAFBEAD2• 11 months ago

People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths.

I mean, if you read the OP, it basically presents a bunch of evidence against this position. (Specifically, if it were a matter of social construction, it wouldn't be so easy to find lots of computer ads featuring girls and women.)

dzink2• 11 months ago

Boys who code seem to be more territorial about their craft and code and choices and content of teams. As a female who codes, I love the craft and making innovative work. Yet waaaay too many times I’ve encountered people who get severely attached to their own approach about something and religiously force others to subdue to their ways. To the point of bullying other teammates about things that don’t really matter. I wonder if that kind of culture has alienated women more than men.

koonsolo2• 11 months ago

How do you explain that more gender equal countries have less girls in STEM?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

didibus• 11 months ago

I remember reading that there was an active re-framing of the computer worker. It was somewhat reflected by employers that started hiring exclusively men and of computer workers being associated with nerds and geeks, and the combination could have driven woman away.

Also I don't know that finding ads that targeted woman by simply searching Google is a rebuttal that ads were almost entirely targeted at boys. As it tell us nothing of the prevalance and quantity of each.

That said, I agree I don't think the ads were a major part of it. It's the culture, and what I heard is the culture shift happened once computer work was seen as requiring rigorous knowledge, intellectualism and was starting to pay well.

I'm not gonna advance I know the truth of these hypothesis, but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.

surgical_fire• 11 months ago

but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.

This sounds very revisionist.

When I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, absolutely no one spoke of "working with computers" as a glamorous career path or associated it with well paid jobs. Much to the opposite, being interested in computers made you into a sort of social pariah in school. Girls wouldn't touch computers much for that reason - hell, my group of friends would fall over one another to accommodate any girl that showed even a remote interest in anything nerdy, not that those were in plentiful supply. It was quite pathetic really.

It was much later that "working with computers" was associated with being well off in terms of money, more or less at the same time when there was an explosion of active efforts to get more women into coding.

And honestly, especially as a father of a little girl, I welcome the effort to make it more egalitarian and all. But let's not pretend that 30 years ago women were being held back from computers by a shadowy conspiracy to keep them from cushy jobs. They just didn't enjoy the thing.

Martin_Silenus3• 11 months ago

That's something about low-level feminism that has been making me furious for the past 10 years. Because these people didn't even live through that era, when most women only started taking an interest in personal computers once these machines became a vehicle for social interaction (they were born after Internet became a thing, so they don't take into account the fact that these machines weren't connected, that it was a solo activity... and that, to me, explains everything about most women's lack of interest at that time).

When I was young, I would have sold my soul to hook up with a hardcore female coder who ate 68000 for breakfast. Met on February 32 at a code party, perhaps. It would have been love at first sight. We would have started a family, had kids, ethical hacker seeds, in binary underpants, learning to code before they could even walk. The Addams Family of hacking. The Tarantino-esque Killers of dev. Throwing around scroll texts writhing in all directions, nauseating rotozooms, while breaking borders in HBL sync, chasing cathode rays to spew psychedelic plasma effects in 4096 colors... damn it!

defrost2• 11 months ago

Growing up in the 1970s in high school I met few people into math or computers, although there were a few.

Hardly surprising, perhaps, given it was the Kimberley.

Once I hit university nearly half the math stream was female, as were the staff in the computing services and early CS courses. Many had come across to Australia from Dartmouth (UK).

As PC's became more and more popular at home items purchased for boys to play games on the number of women in the mechanics of CS started to decline, veering more into law, medicine, and sociology.

Martin_Silenus3• 11 months ago

Yeah... schools ARE social places. Jobs too. Personal computers at home were NOT. That's the point.

Computers are for girls (2022)

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