My mom was a systems programmer who used assembly language and built a lot of the banking infrastructure!
Originally, programming was actually a woman dominated field because it was considered a subset of secretary work and “beneath men” (it wasn’t for a good reason).
If you watch the recent cummerbatch movie about Turing the eagle eyed observer will notice that nearly everyone who actually interacts with the computer software is a woman.
Not to turn this into a sociology discussion, but for anyone unaware: this is a fairly common pattern.
Women often pioneer fields like this, but as soon as it becomes seen as something “important” out “respectable” then suddenly it becomes male dominated.
The opposite also happens, where as society deems something as unimportant, a male dominated field will become female dominant - see teaching for an unfortunate example of a field that used to be highly paid and respected, and is now largely looked down on.
Sorry, don’t mean to go off on a tangent - it just bugs me and I think more people should be aware of it.
Beer brewing was originally a field dominated by women.
The presitege associated with a position can also change the expected gender. Women traditionally cooked meals at home but “Chefs” are predominately male, especially famous or celebrated Chefs.
My mom was a systems programmer who used assembly language and built a lot of the banking infrastructure!
Originally, programming was actually a woman dominated field because it was considered a subset of secretary work and “beneath men” (it wasn’t for a good reason).
If you watch the recent cummerbatch movie about Turing the eagle eyed observer will notice that nearly everyone who actually interacts with the computer software is a woman.
I have infinite respect for anyone that professionally works with assembly. That shit is wizardry compared to today’s higher level languages.
I think assembly was easier back then. Some architectures still are. But many architectures like x86 got incredibly complicated.
Not to turn this into a sociology discussion, but for anyone unaware: this is a fairly common pattern.
Women often pioneer fields like this, but as soon as it becomes seen as something “important” out “respectable” then suddenly it becomes male dominated.
The opposite also happens, where as society deems something as unimportant, a male dominated field will become female dominant - see teaching for an unfortunate example of a field that used to be highly paid and respected, and is now largely looked down on.
Sorry, don’t mean to go off on a tangent - it just bugs me and I think more people should be aware of it.
It’s a good tangent, and they should.
Beer brewing was originally a field dominated by women.
The presitege associated with a position can also change the expected gender. Women traditionally cooked meals at home but “Chefs” are predominately male, especially famous or celebrated Chefs.
It also did happen in other fields in astronomy or genetics pretty early on.
Somebody once described her team as “Young, motivated, highly educated and otherwise basically unemployable”.
Guess it helps that sorting through myriads of stars or kernels of corn was often not seen as prestigious enough