One floor of my office building is a very well known gaming company. They’ve been remote since I started my job in 2021, but they have started coming into the office recently. I’d say 75% of the people I’ve seen get off at that floor have appeared to me to be LGBT+.
Little known fact: Woz would show up to work in the early days of Apple dressed like Bea Arthur.
I really wish this were true. And if it is, please, please, please provide even the tiniest shred of proof.
Bonus points if it made Steve Jobs angry.
Edit: if this is not true at all, at least write some fun fanfic about it. Who wouldn’t enjoy an episode of Golden Girls: a Day at Apple, 1996?
Edit 2: Gil Amelio— he wouldn’t like that.
Steve Jobs would sometimes show up looking like Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. In hindsight it’s easy to see the diverting vision between the 2 founders.
Lmao, go on…
(Although, I’m pretty sure Woz would be very amused by this)
Personally, I’m not wearing programming socks. Mostly because I’m wearing nothing at all.
To prevent electrostatic, right?
RIGHT?
You see, because of the stark absence of women, we kinda had to make our own.
Can’t argue with that logic. Where do I sign up?
The original programmers were women. We’re just returning to our roots.
Pretty sure this is just a trans joke.
Now you got me interested! Please explain 👀
I woman programmer helped get humanity to the moon.
You can google “women in computing” for more details, or check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing - it’s amazing how much women contributed to this field and how little known that appears to be. (I only learned about it a few years ago myself.)
But the gist is:
Early on (i.e. the 1940s and 50s), men thought the prestige and honor was in building the giant machines (which back then could fill a classroom or more). Actually programming them was considered easier, “just like following a recipe”, so women got jobs as “computers” who did this part. To quote that wikipedia article: Designing the hardware was “men’s work” and programming the software was “women’s work.”
Fast forward to the 1970s and people had started realizing that programming was actually hard, and so it was promoted as a field boys should get educated in, while girls were encouraged to instead become nurses and teachers and such.
In addition to other comments,read about Ada Lovelace. She was brilliant, she wrote the first program, and done so before we had computers!
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.
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
It’s a good tangent, and they should.
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.
The person that created the first version of assembly was a woman I think!
Do you mean Grace Hopper, who wrote the first assembler?
Grace Hopper invented the some of the first “high level” languages, FLOW-MATIC and COBOL. I’m not sure about the first assembler.
At the time, she called it a “compiler”, but its function was more akin to what we’d call a linker or assembler today.
using a computer traditionally was seen as a secretary job, so it was often dominated by women. its only as of post consumer computer events where a lot more males went into the field due to the large market it offers came in.
Not only were the programmers women, but so were the computers.
Ada Lovelace
Margaret Hamilton!
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She invented the term “software engineering”, stating “I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process.”
On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
Huh, didn’t know about her! She sounds like a badass lady!
People might be more familiar with this viral picture as well, if not the name.
“Margaret Hamilton shown in 1969 standing beside listings of the software developed by her and her team for the Apollo program’s Lunar Module and Command Module.”
I have her Lego set :)
For anyone unaware, Ada Lovelace created the first programming language - all before a computer even existed. Absolute Chad of a woman.
The only legitimate child of notorious poet philanderer Lord Byron. I love her whole story.
There’s an awesome Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast episode on Ada Lovelace!
The original computers were often women as well.
Well, call me the field then!
Forget the socks, where do I get a top like that?
https://devilwalking.com/products/circuit-board-cold-shoulder-crop-top closest I’ve found so far
Forget the top, where do I get topped by that?
NGL I’ve noticed a lot of trans homies in CS where I live and I’m here for it.
You’ll see more and more to a certain extent too, as it becomes more normal and, namely safe, to be trans.
Don’t let anyone convince you anyones “becoming” trans. Always have been, always will be
That makes sense!
this mentality made me doubt and question and delay for too long so i try to push back on it when i see it. You don’t actually need to have always “known” or “shown signs”. If you feel like it you can just try it.
Absolutely. Nobody owns gender. Just do what you want, do what makes you happy.
There’s a lot of us neurodivergent folks in tech because it suits our needs better than a lot of other fields, and a lot of us just love technology
We’re more prone to being LGBTQIA+ than neurotypical folks, scientifically documented
Makes sense tech would have more trans folks as a result, we pad the numbers a lil bit
This is of course a generalization and actual ND/LGBTQIA+ presence is going to vary based on job, location, how insufferable management is, etc
Gender is a neurotypical construct
…are you trying to imply that all neurodivergent people are LGBT+?
No.
I guess they are saying that everyone is queer, actually, but only neurodivers people are aware of that.
I wasn’t saying the latter but that’s an interesting idea. Not the former per se- the cis heteronormative gender and sexuality binary is bullshit and only exists bc religion (capitalism… moar serfs in fields) and generations of fear. There’s tons of fluidity in earlier civilizations and more in nature.
I’d just like to hear some comments from all the downvoters. Odd thing to get so defensive about Lemmy
:3
Then you should know: You just gotta click through to see the dick.
i clicked 40 times i think it’s just a static image :(
If you keep clicking long enough, you’ll cum. I promise.
Please donate to my PayPal tip link…
I’d let them dominate me
Something I’ve been for a while now is why this gender disparity is so strong in this specific area of engineering compared to all other engineering areas. People seem to claim it’s because of the “geek” stereotype, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause and I fail to see how it enforces this disparity, considering there’s nothing preventing a woman from being a geek too.
the actual reason? Nobody pushes women into the field of CS. Back in the 80s and 90s it was a similar thing, boys were fucking around with computers and software, not girls, it was considered to be a boys thing back then, and it still is now, because women are moving more frequently into higher expertise fields more often than not. CS while incredibly complicated, and difficult, is also just code monkey simulator at the end of the day. You could just write a PHD thesis on some mathematical shit and be as involved with CS while having been a mathematician instead lmao.
That’s my guess at least.
Which is ironic, because women were the “code monkeys” of back when human computers were a thing - humans actually doing the computing by hand; and most of them were women.
Nobody pushed me into this field, I followed it because I liked it. Same thing with kids messing around with computers in the 80’s. Nobody was pushing boys to do that, they just did. For some reason more men enjoy working with computers than women. I’ve worked with a few female coders, and they were good at their jobs, but women are definitely a minority in the field.
May have something to do with computers as they exist being defined by male psychology. Well, it’s understandable why swords, guns, rockets are, and same with computers.
Basically sending instructions to change state. I don’t know how can a computer exist which doesn’t work like this and is still usable for the humanity, but this seems to be psychologically a bit more of a male thing. Maybe there’s nothing problematic for women but aesthetics there.
If it’s something deeper, then maybe some analog optical\quantum\whatever computers of the future will push us to change paradigms for some drastic change in efficiency. And maybe those new paradigms will be more appealing to women.
I probably would have gone into tech earlier if I’d had a female role model in tech. When my (male) friends started programming in high school, I was very interested and wanted to learn it too. But it literally didn’t occur to me that I could, until ten years later, when I was already far along in a study in the humanities. I ended up in data/ software development in the end, but it took me ten years longer because I didn’t realise earlier that it was a field I could get into if I wanted.
So long story short, it’s not just a matter of interest, there are societal factors that play a role too.
In countries like India and China where women are less free to choose quality of life and human connections over money, a lot more of them go into IT.
