You would think that women were playing a sizable role in tech by now. You would be wrong. And historical trends underpin the delta between men and women in tech. Despite early interest in the 1970s, including computer programming, by the mid-1980s women were disappearing from computer science programs. Consider reasons that are offered, including the possibility that recently introduced personal computers were more likely to be bought for boys than girls. Note the reinforcement from Apple ads (no kidding) about what these computers could do for the career dreams of boys.
Women were pioneers (for a while) in computing, but not necessarily credited. Grace Hopper is credited with the 1959 creation of COBOL, the programming language that is still foundational for most enterprises, running 85% of business transactions via 800 billion lines of code. She also wrote the first computer operating manual for Harvard’s Mark I in 1944, though, no surprise, she was not credited for it. Later, Radia Perlman, one of only 50 women in a class of 1000 at MIT, earned the nickname “Mother of the Internet” due to her innovation of network bridges in 1984 (see her poem about it). And she also helped launch ‘tangible computing’ for pre-school children, using an onscreen turtle.
Despite pioneers, women’s participation in computing peaked in 1984. Was it the popularity of shoot-em-up video games? Was it marketing ads like Apple’s? Regardless, the percentage of women in computer science programs is low compared to men – and they only make up 35% of the STEM workforce – and less than a third of the AI workforce are women. The pay gap is persistent as well, across all categories of tech (STEM, IT or similar categories).
What would get more women into tech fields? How about marketing? Stanford is involved in an experiment to help women get the skills needed to land tech jobs. While interesting, this seems a bit late. Efforts are made (sporadically, it seems) to generate interest among school-aged girls. Girls were persuaded that they wanted jobs that help the world and utilized creativity – and apparently did not see tech jobs as doing either. This is a spectacular failure of marketing – an inability to relate work to an end result – finding examples in the real world of tech innovations (like Radia Perlman and tangible computing) cannot be difficult – initiatives are underway and effort is being made globally.
