How women, who helped shape computing's early years when it was considered “women's work”, were systemically pushed out of the field in the US and UK
In computing's early years, when it was considered women's work, all six programmers of America's first digital computer, ENIAC, were women Tweets: @un_women , @mims , @histoftech , and @skupor Tweets: UN Women / @un_women : Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself. Let's push for more #womenintech! http://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ Christopher Mims / @mims : Mar Hicks is an amazing historian and I wish I could have included the copious notes she sent while I drafted this — was a crash course in itself. But check out her book for more. http://twitter.com/... Mar Hicks / @histoftech : “Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself.” Christopher @mims wrote an awesome article featuring my work from @proginequality for the @wsj! cc @mitpress @UWMadison @UWHistoryDept #womenintech #twitterstorians http://www.wsj.com/... Scott Kupor / @skupor : The proportion of women earning computer science degrees peaked at 37% in 1984; now at 17% http://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wall Street Journal piece, built on historian Mar Hicks' research and reported by Christopher Mims, documents that computing began as 'women's work' — all six programmers of America's first digital computer, ENIAC, were women — before women were systemically pushed out of the field in the US and UK.
It lands amid a wave of corrective history: the New York Times later traced women coders from Ada Lovelace onward, BBC Future profiled Xia Peisu, the 'Mother of Chinese Computing', and MIT Technology Review examined how Silicon Valley's corporate culture entrenched straight white men's advantage. The through-line is that tech's gender imbalance is a constructed outcome, not an accident of aptitude.
First-order effects
- Mar Hicks' scholarship gains a mainstream platform through Mims' reporting, giving UN Women and other advocates a citable historical basis for #womenintech campaigns rather than purely contemporary arguments.
- The documented exodus — with women's share of CS degrees falling from a 1984 peak of 37% to about 17% — reframes today's pipeline problem as a retention and culture problem, not a recruitment one.
Second-order effects
- Employers and diversity programs face pressure to explain the decline since 1984, shifting the debate from 'how do we get more women into computing' toward 'what pushes them out' — the same question underlying the Girls Who Code study finding internships often hostile for young women.
- Historical framing raises the reputational stakes for companies whose cultures are under scrutiny, connecting the exclusion record directly to present-day critiques of Silicon Valley's corporate culture and everyday sexism reported among India's tech workforce, where only 7% of women tech workers hold executive roles.
Third-order effects
- If the historiography keeps moving from academic presses into business media, the industry's self-image as a meritocracy becomes harder to sustain, making structural fixes — retention, promotion equity, workplace culture — the benchmark against which diversity efforts are judged.
- A durable counter-narrative, spanning ENIAC's programmers, Lovelace, and Peisu, gives educators and policymakers evidence that women's participation can rise again, since it demonstrably has before.
The trend: Tech's diversity debate is being rebuilt on historical scholarship showing women's exclusion from computing was engineered by policy and culture, converting a recruiting story into a structural-accountability one.