Last Week on NPR’s Planet Money, the editors covered an interesting story about women computer scientists. It is not surprising that their claim was “The field of computer science is dominated by men”, which they add up by listing the names that are known by everyone, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on… As a matter of fact, in the past decades there were women pioneers whose names should be remembered, but have long been forgotten.
In the 60s and 70s, the number of women computer scientists was growing faster then the men, but something has happened in 1984 and made it change for the whole world. Suddenly, the women were outnumbered, flattened and eventually plugged out from the computer science world.
The editors of NPR’s Planet Money were able to track down the moment of this breaking point, and they have a quite unexpected reason…
According to Steve Henn, “Here’s a good starting place: The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.”
“These early personal computers weren’t much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.”
It was in 1984 when being a woman was not favoured in the computer science classes. The parents were preferring to buy computer for their sons, and daughters were pushed to less nerdy topics.
If you would like to hear more about why women stopped coding, you may listen to the 15 minute podcast from NPR Planet Money.
Bildquellen: NPR Planet Money