A detailed history of the important but under-recognized roles women have played in computer coding, from Ada Lovelace through to today
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Says Company ‘Never Overpromised’ on Watson A.I. Tweets: Stacey E. Singleton / @staceynycdc : When Wilkes talks to today's young coders, they are often shocked to learn that women were among the field's earliest, towering innovators and once a common sight in corporate America. “Their mouths are agape,” Wilkes says. “They have absolutely no idea.” http://www.nytimes.com/... Mukund Thattai / @thattai : In 1984, 37% of computer science students in the US were women. . Today, it's 18%. . 1984 was the year parents started gifting their boys personal computers. . http://www.nytimes.com/... Iulia Tudor / @julsica : Fascinating read on the gender balance in coding, which used to be much better than today “by the 1983-84 academic year, 37.1 percent of all students graduating with degrees in computer and information sciences were women.” Thx for sharing @LererHippeau http://www.nytimes.com/... Marshall Kirkpatrick / @marshallk : NYT today on Women in Technology. Once a stand-out field of opportunity for women, tech has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Let's learn this history so we can change it. http://www.techmeme.com/... NYT / @nytmag : In the United States, by 1960, more than one in four programmers were women. At M.I.T.'s Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, most of the “career programmers” were female. Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : In fact, the reason she went into coding? It 1959, it was *far less sexist* than law. She'd wanted to be a trial lawyer, but nope. “The computer business was in a literal way my *fallback*,” she told me, drily, last week. (Director's cut quote, not in the piece!) 4/x pic.twitter.com/SRFmD8jl4L Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : Anyway, back the 50s and 60s, coding was extremely open to women because it was a new field that prized aptitude and talent. If you could pass a test — if you could prove you were good at thinking logically and meticulously — you'd get hired. That's how MIT hired Wilkes! 3/x pic.twitter.com/Ts8Uit8ftK Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : But here's the thing: That early culture of openness and merit died. In 1960, when Wilkes was coding, 27% of programmers were women. That reached a peak of 35% in 1990. Then it plummeted, so by 2013 it was 26% — *lower* than the 60s. What happened? 8/x pic.twitter.com/zW5MsQJxqB Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : Despite the racism of the age, even some black women got opportunities; hiring was truly merit-based. Here's Arlene Gwendolyn Lee's story up in Toronto, which her son @raganwald (an awesome coder whose JavaScript books I own!) told in his blog post: http://braythwayt.com/... 7/x pic.twitter.com/3sBhmG8mj2 Marcia Hofmann / @marciahofmann : Fascinating history of women pioneers in early computer programming and how the field became male-dominated in the '80s https://www.nytimes.com/... Shannon Morse / @snubs : This is a really interesting read. I'm lucky that my dad put our computer in my nursery, that he taught me how to build one, and that he supported my nerdy lifestyle. https://www.nytimes.com/... Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : One reason coding was so open to women was that the sexism worked in reverse. Men back then thought the difficult, glorious stuff was making the *hardware*. Software, eh: who cares? So women did it. The entire team of programmers for the ENIAC were women ... 5/x pic.twitter.com/lghMTTlA8s Emily Nussbaum / @emilynussbaum : A terrific excerpt from @pomeranian99's book CODERS (out in March!), all about the lost history of women programmers: https://nyti.ms/2UVFlxP Anthony Ha / @anthonyha : This NYT feature is (intentionally) infuriating but it's nice to see Disrupt held up as an example of things getting (somewhat) better https://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/PMSvspl2Tr Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : Behold Mary Allen Wilkes — in the early 1960s, she wrote the operating system for the first personal computer. She walked into MIT with no experience; they hired her. Why? Women were considered *naturals* at coding. https://www.nytimes.com/... (From my book CODERS, out 3/26!) 1/x pic.twitter.com/k1VEOwYvAl