The Decline of Women in Computer Science from 1940-1982

1.1  Background and Motivation

      In contrast to the majority of science and engineering disciplines that have been historically dominated by men, computer science emerged as a formal academic field only in the 1960s – intriguingly, in the same decade that the field of women’s studies was born¹.  Women were almost completely excluded from the founding of the other hard sciences, so the origin of computer science is unique in that women played a significant role during the genesis of the field.  For instance, when Charles Babbage designed his “analytical engine” in the 1830s, Ada Lovelace programmed it².  And when the first electronic computers were built during World War II, the programmers were again, women, who were then called the “ENIAC girls”³.  In fact, the term “computer” originally referred to the dedicated women who performed endless mathematical calculations by hand for male scientists, and later, military operations⁴. 

      Given the great progress that American women in general have made toward academic and professional equality since the World War II, and given that they were already important contributors in the early stages of computing, it seems natural to expect that by the beginning of the 21st century, women would be achieving a high degree of recognition and representation in computer science.  Today, however, it is obvious that the opposite phenomenon has happened, as the “geek” and “hacker” culture of computing has become increasingly inhospitable and unappealing to women⁵.  Only 12% of those who took the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science test in 1999 were girls, which corresponds to the biggest gender gap of all the AP tests – even greater than the gap in physics or chemistry⁶.  The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has asserted that girls are being labeled as “techno-phobic”⁷ and that they have increasingly been reduced to “bystanders” in the technological revolution⁸. Today, in terms of numbers, women have outpaced men in biological and agricultural sciences, and they have made steady gains in physical sciences and engineering as well⁹.  In computer science, however, the proportion of women receiving bachelor’s degrees has declined every year from 1984-1998, and has not recovered appreciably in subsequent years¹⁰.  In short, after an auspicious start in the field, women in computing have faltered even in the face of reduced gender discrimination, record college enrollment rates, and victories won by the women’s movement.   

      The reasons for this trend are complex and have not yet been exhaustively explored, but roughly speaking, the masculinization of computer science has occurred in three major phases post-war adjustment, academic/industrial establishment, and the popularization of computing.

      Post-War Adjustment (1945-1961): As part of the war effort, many women were compelled to abandon their traditional domestic roles to make vital contributions to the nation’s industry and manufacturing sectors.  After the war ended, however, men often expected to resume their prior occupations and women were often returned to the home.  The field of computer science was no exception to this pattern, and many women with great technical expertise felt social pressure to retire, raise families, and cede their positions to men¹¹.  Technically speaking, men could not truly “return” to a field that had not existed before the war, and this aided the women programmers to some degree, but there is evidence to suggest that post-war social and economic pressures were a force in the de-feminization of computing.

      Academic/Industrial Establishment (1962-1979): Initially, the post-war role of computing was ambiguous, as the need for ballistic calculations and code-breaking lost urgency.  By the 1960s, however, major universities began to create formal departments and degree programs for computer science, while companies began to market the business value of mainframe computers (and later, microprocessors).  Unfortunately for women, both of these new developments had the effect of marginalizing women in the field.  The new computer science departments, for instance, were typically formed in close coordination with their intensely male-dominated parent field, electrical engineering.  The growth of a lucrative new computer industry further transformed the field into the domain of business, finance, rigid hierarchical management, and intense competition, which would have been foreign and undesirable to the women of the time.

      Popularization of Computing (1980-?):  Unlike any of the other traditional academic disciplines, computing made its way into the household when electronic gaming systems and personal computers were invented.  Since most computing and gaming activities were created for males by males¹², and since these devices were becoming so ubiquitous throughout home, classroom, and popular culture, young girls were easily socialized at an early age to believe that technology was not part of the “women’s sphere.”  This final phase will not be probed in great detail since it is currently more an issue of sociology than of history, but sources will be cited to demonstrate that such this third phase of masculinization has been in effect since the innovations of 1980s.

      Put together, these three waves were powerful enough to not only erode early advantages the women had in computing, but even more devastatingly, to wash away the interest and participation of girls and women in the decades to follow.  The remainder of this paper will analyze these three forces in greater detail and historical context.  This discussion, however, will first be framed by a brief history of computing, and also a definition of who should be considered a “woman in computing.” 

1.2  History of Computing 

      The definition of “computer science” has always been slightly ambiguous.  Some interpret it to mean the “science of computers,” which may seem odd because computers were invented and constructed by humans, unlike the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology.  If computer science is truly only the “science of computers,” then cars, air conditioners, and other household appliances should merit their own academic fields of study too!  Yet at the same time, it is not truly an engineering discipline, since computer scientists do not build or design computer hardware.  They are, instead, the programmers and creators of operating systems, graphics, compilers, databases, artificial intelligence, the internet, and office productivity software.  Therefore, the faculty of computer science departments typically define their field as the “science of computation” (of course, using machines).  This definition is also slightly problematic, since it technically encompasses even the use of rudimentary computation devices, such the abacus or Stonehenge.  Nonetheless, Alan Turing, who produced the first papers on the “theory of computation” in 1936, is acknowledged as the “father of computer science.”  The origin of the field therefore predates the invention of the computer¹³. 

      Despite these claims, the “great milestones” in the history of computing are often highly biased toward the accomplishments in hardware and electrical engineering.  The first American computer – the Mark I, which was completed in 1943 through a joint effort by Harvard professor Howard H. Aiken and Thomas J. Watson, then the president of IBM.  The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was completed in 1946 under the direction of John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering (University of Pennsylvania).  During the next decades, these large, expensive mainframes remained affordable only to research universities, large corporations, and the military, but the development of the semiconductor and transistor paved the way for the next big breakthrough – Intel’s first microprocessor in 1971.  By 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had delivered the popular Apple II to the rapidly expanding personal computing market¹⁴.

      In some senses, computer scientists are to electrical engineers what architects are to structural engineers.  Although it is not a perfect analogy, computer scientists, like architects, are the ones who provide the imagination, the designs, and the conceptual plans that make the physical buildings or machines so useful to society.  Both are vital roles, but it is interesting to note that in the construction industry, the history books note the names of Frank Lloyd Wright and I.M. Pei, not the mason who discovered how to build an arch or a dome.  In computing, however, the prestige has seemed to flow in the opposite direction, where computer scientists play a subordinate role to the electrical engineers.  This particular orientation, although somewhat logical considering the progression of the technology, has arguably had important implications for women in computing, and will be discussed in more detail in later sections. 

1.3  Who are the Women in Computing? 

      The rule of technology, engineering, and computing has been that “boys invent things, and girls use things that boys invent”¹⁵.  Today, it is clear that many women are at ease using their computers to do create presentations, to surf the internet, and to write reports.  There is a significant difference, however, between those who use software tools and those who drive and direct the creation of these tools.  The distinction is important, because women have currently overtaken their male classmates in taking typing classes or in using web services, but have not been able to penetrate the higher echelons where these technologies are being designed and implemented¹⁶. Throughout the duration of this paper, therefore, the term “women in computing” will refer to as the women who made technical contributions to academia or industry, as opposed to the many others who became end-users and consumers.  In other words, this research will assume the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) definition of computer professionals – those who “provide support for other people’s usage of computer systems” as opposed to those who use the systems themselves¹⁷. 

2   Post-War Adjustment 

2.1  Women Programmers During the War

      During World War II, having timely access to ballistic trajectory calculations was critical to the American military.  As a result, the primary purpose of all computers during that period was to provide an efficient way of performing these convoluted computations, which had previously been a slow process for human “computers” to produce by hand or using desk calculators.  Betty Jean Jennings, one of the six original ENIAC programmers, hailed the machine as a great accomplishment because it “calculated the trajectory faster than it took the bullet to travel”¹⁸.  The rationale for selecting female programmers was partly due to the scarcity of qualified male labor during the war, but another significant factor was the expectation that women would be uniquely suited to this position, which demanded great “patience, persistence, and a capacity for detail” – qualities that many employers attributed to the feminine sex¹⁹.  As a result of this belief that women were “capable of doing the work more rapidly and accurately than men,” from 1943 until the end of the war, essentially all programmers and their direct supervisors were female²⁰.

      Of the many women who became programmers during and immediately after the war, the majority were recent college graduates with degrees in mathematics, and almost all of them were excited to exercise their technical skills, particularly in non-teaching roles.  Another common theme, although not universally observed, was that these women often “retired” early once they married and had children.

      The most well-known and widely-celebrated of these women is Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who worked with Howard H. Aiken to program the Mark I at the Harvard Computation Laboratory.  Others have described her as “feisty” or “strong-willed,” and she herself has used the term “maverick”²¹.  Frequently featured in various talks, interviews, and articles, Hopper often told “signature tales” from her youth that demonstrated her strength of personality.

“One summer afternoon when she was young, Grace Murray climbed into her little sail canoe and shoved off from the dock.  She had already acquired a considerable nautical proficiency, and her mother watched indulgently from the porch as she progressed down Lake Wentworth.  Suddenly, a sharper than usual gust of wind caught the little craft, capsizing it.  As Grace was to recall later, in this much-repeated tale, her mother merely picked up the megaphone she kept handy for such occasions and called to her daughter, “remember your great-grandfather, the admiral.”  With this stout admonition not to abandon ship, grace clung to the upturned canoe and kicked it safely back to shore.”²² 

      Another of the often-repeated stories featured her burning curiosity about the family’s alarm clocks.  Driven to learn “what made it ring,” she completely dismantled each of the family’s seven alarm clocks before being admonished by her mother to limit herself to just one clock for future experimentations²³.  Born in December of 1906, Hopper was the eldest of three children in a to a well-to-do upper middle class family that traced its lineage to the American Revolution²⁴.  Her father was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, and her mother also had a passion for “mathematics and intellectual games,” so Grace was raised in an environment that was very supportive of higher learning²⁵.  Grace eventually graduated with honors from Vassar College with degrees in mathematics and physics, and in 1934, she earned her Ph.D in mathematics from Yale – the only mathematics Ph.D awarded to a woman between 1934-1937 by Yale²⁶.  She was a professor of mathematics at Vassar until 1942, when “she finally persuaded Vassar to approve a leave of absence by telling them she was joining the Navy no mater what”²⁷. 

      While at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, Hopper was assigned to program the Mark I, and has often been credited with finding the first “computer bug” – an actual moth caught in a vacuum tube – as well as being the great-grandmother of the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) and creating the first compiler.  After the war, she resigned her faculty position at Vassar and became a Research Fellow in Engineering and Sciences and Applied Physics at Harvard, where she continued working on the Mark II and Mark III.  In 1949, she left to join Eckert and Mauchly as a senior mathematician on the ENIAC and UNIVAC projects²⁸.  In general, although some have voiced concerns about Hopper receiving an undue amount of credit for innovations that resulted from team efforts (in large part due to her high visibility and charisma)²⁹, the other women programmers of this period acknowledge her as a great leader, mentor, and innovator. 

      Ensign Ruth A. Brendel, who worked alongside Grace at the Computation Lab, called Hopper “a wonderful teacher, a mentor, a companion,” who often helped to soften the brusque and demanding manner of Aiken.  Brendel, like Hopper, had a background in mathematics, an open-minded and supportive family, and previous college teaching experience (University of Buffalo).  As a rare exception to the majority of technical women who wanted to escape teaching, Ruth had fully expected to assume a teaching role upon joining the navy, and was somewhat disappointed to have been assigned to the Computation Lab³⁰. 

      Meanwhile, the “ENIAC girls” were working on the top secret at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.  In all, there were 23 total women who were associated with the ENIAC during its development and deployment (including Grace Hopper).  The ENIAC’s six original programmers were Kathleen McNulty (Mauchly Antonelli), Frances Bilas (Spence), Elizabeth Jean Jennings (Bartik), Frances Elizabeth Snyder (Holberton), Ruth Lichterman (Teitelbaum), and Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer)³¹. 

      Of the six, McNulty, Bilas, and Jennings had undergraduate degrees in mathematics.  McNulty, an Irish immigrant, earned her degree from the Chestnut Hill College for Women in Philadelphia, where she was one of only three mathematics majors in the class of 1942.  Knowing that she “didn’t want teaching,” she applied for the job with Eckert and Mauchly when she saw an ad in the daily paper³².  Bilas, who was another of the three mathematics majors in the Chestnut Hill class of 1942³³, had expected to become a teacher, but also responded to the ad.  Lastly, Jennings graduated from Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University) in 1945 with a major in mathematics and a minor in English.  Jennings claimed that the principal of her high school had announced that she “made the highest marks in mathematics of anybody who had ever attended the school.”  Regardless of this encouragement, her original aspirations were in journalism, and she decided to go into mathematics only when the journalism program had proven to too costly for her family to afford. Jennings “had always considered mathematics as fun, like solving puzzles, thus more of a game than a subject for serious study.”  Despite great demand from local school districts, she, like McNulty, didn’t want to teach, but instead, “wanted to get out of Missouri, see the world, and have some adventures” – an attitude that eventually led her to the ENIAC³⁴. 

      Snyder and Wescoff had backgrounds in non-mathematical majors, but were hired because they had taken courses in math, or had shown some aptitude with calculating machinery.  Snyder graduated in 1939 with a degree in journalism from the University of Pennsylvania, one of the few areas at Penn open to women.  As a result, Snyder also had the opportunity to take undergraduate courses in the other colleges of the university, including mathematics and science.  As a daughter and granddaughter of astronomers, she had originally wanted to major in math, but was turned away by a university professor who believed that women belonged in the home³⁵.  Wescoff graduated in 1942 from Temple University with a major in social studies and English.  She had a minor in business, but was selected to work on the ENIAC because she could operate an adding machine³⁶.  Unfortunately, little information could be found regarding early background of the final of the six programmers, Ruth Lichtenstein.

      According to McNulty in an interview years later, “there were no manuals” for the ENIAC. “They gave us all the blueprints, and we could ask the engineers anything. We had to learn how the machine was built, what each tube did. We had to study how the machine worked and figure out how to do a job on it. So we went right ahead and taught ourselves how to program”³⁷.  Yet despite the challenges, these women also found a certain thrill to their work, as Jennings expressed: “The day ENIAC was introduced to the world was one of the most exciting days of my life”³⁸

      When work began on the successor to the ENIAC – the UNIVAC I – several of the “ENIAC girls” continued their work at the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation, with the notable addition of Grace Hopper and Adele Mildred Koss.  Koss’s background was unusual in that she was born in Philadelphia to a poor family, and that her parents both died while she was young – her father when she was nine years old, and her mother when she was thirteen.  She notes, however, that her aunt had gone to college, and that in her family, “there was no differentiation in the expectation between men and women going to college.”  Koss attended the selective Philadelphia High School for Girls, which was a public school for qualified college-bound students.  She eventually became the class president and earned a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania in 1946.  Particularly in the year following the end of the war, universities were giving preferential consideration to the returning veterans, so Koss must have been a strong candidate indeed to have been accepted³⁹.  When she graduated with her degree in mathematics, she initially interviewed for a position at an insurance company, who rejected her because she was engaged⁴⁰.  While working with the UNIVAC, Koss worked closely with Hopper on a number of projects, and eventually developed Editing Generator, which was released in 1952 to simplify the task of file format conversions⁴¹.

      In summary, these women, along with many others who have not been mentioned or interviewed, contributed significantly to the war effort and the beginnings of the computing industry, and they were, for the most part, excited passionate about working on the leading edge of technology. 

2.2  Decisions After the War

      Of the nine women programmers introduced, three continued with their technical careers, two went into teaching, and the remaining four “retired” once they married, although Jennings eventually returned after raising her children.  Grace Hopper, the only one to remain single (she divorced her husband, Vincent Foster Hopper in 1945), worked in the computing industry until 1971, although she remained active in advising, directing, and training those involved with the Navy’s computing operations for many years thereafter⁴².  Frances Snyder, who married in 1950 contributed to the development of both the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages, and she served on numerous national and international computer standards committees⁴³ until she finally retired in 1983.  Lastly, Adele Koss, who was also married, continued her career with technology until 1994, having worked at prominent computing companies such as Burroughs Corporation, Philco, and Control Data Corporation, where she helped to develop the earliest graphics algorithms⁴⁴.  Koss also served as Assistant Director of Technology Evaluation at the Office for Information Technology at Harvard University for 27 years before retiring⁴⁵.

      The two women who turned to teaching were Ruth Brendel and Ruth Lichterman.  Brendel stayed at the Harvard Computation Lab until the end of the war, at which point she returned to the University of Buffalo to help teach the masses of returning servicemen wanting to return to college⁴⁶.  Lichterman assumed the role of teaching programming techniques to the next generation of ENIAC programmers, although it is not known what she chose to pursue after the ENIAC became obsolete⁴⁷.

      Finally, four of the original “ENIAC girls” decided to return to more domestic roles, although two did continue to contribute to computing in some way.  Frances Bilas married in 1947 and resigned her position the following year to raise her three sons.  Marlyn Wescoff resigned before she got married in 1946.  McNulty, who eventually married the ENIAC’s co-inventor, John Mauchly, also resigned to raise a family, although it is unsurprising that she continued to work with technology, given her husband’s close involvement⁴⁸.  Lastly, as previously mentioned, Jennings, took 16 years away from work, but in 1967, returned to technical writing about minicomputers and communications⁴⁹. 

2.3  Analysis of Industry Climate Toward Women in Computing

      The stories of these nine pioneering women in computing are consistent with the general pattern of decline experienced by women scientists in post-war America.  These women had been in high demand by the government, and they had risen to the occasion to play an admirable war-time role, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the employers and universities reverted back to their pre-war gender stereotypes as soon as the men returned.  Furthermore, despite their great accomplishments, women themselves were ambivalent as to whether they should fight for equity, or whether it was more appropriate for them to return to the home⁵⁰.  This ambivalence can clearly be observed in the post-war decisions of the nine women of the Mark I and ENIAC, since only a minority of them continued in technical roles, while the others probably felt pressured to returned to more domestic roles, or more traditional “women’s work” such as teaching.

      Computing was unique, however, in the sense that the fledgling profession was still in its infancy and had no strong pre-war gender socialization.  This fact must have helped the women in that the returning men lacked programming expertise, and clearly had no expectation of “returning” to a programming job.  The lack of structure in the industry was also a boon to women programmers who wanted to continue working even after they became pregnant and had children.  Most notably, “Computations, Inc., of Harvard, Massachusetts (outside Route 128), formed in 1958 by Elsie Shutt and several other programmer-mothers who worked part-time and largely at home on problems contracted out to them by their former employers, such as Minneapolis-Honeywell and Raytheon”⁵¹.  These women, widely known as the “Pregnant Programmers” were mentioned by speaker Richard H. Bolt at the M.I.T Symposium on American Women in Science and Engineering in 1964.  Bolt, who was a lecturer in Political Science at M.I.T and also a former Associate Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1960-1963, also mentioned the following:

“I asked one of the unmarried women, a computer programmer in industry, if she thought a woman’s activities as a mother and homemaker would interfere with her opportunities in a career.  ‘One good thing about programming,’ she said, ‘is that you can work part time.’”⁵² 

      Adele Koss further confirms the atmosphere of flexibility of her programming job, and notes that it was a key factor in her ability to retain her position.

Koss: “What’s funny about that period, I’m not sure who my boss was.  This was such an unstructured environment….  Once I had a child they let me continue to work the way I wanted to.  I inferred from that I was of value to them.  Nobody lets you work that way unless they are getting value.  I got increases.  I got paid fairly well.  Eckert & Mauchly was pretty good that way….” 

Kleiman: “Do you think it was the nature of the profession that allowed you to work like that?” 

Koss: “Definitely it was.  There were no models, they didn’t care how you worked.  There were no preconceived notions as to the way you could contribute.  You did not have to be in the office….  We did not have huge management teams.  We did incredibly new and exciting things and nobody had a problem. ⁵³ 

      Koss also mentions the importance of her “soft skills” in dealing with clients, since the company’s male programmers were often incapable of establishing any rapport with the clients, and in fact, occasionally ended up insulting them.

“On the other side, you had clients who wanted to use the machine and the techies did not handle the clients very well.  They were just as likely to say to a client, ‘well that’s dumb’ to some idea a client might have.  We had our fair sure of that kind of ‘that’s dumb’ incidents….  I was assigned to a huge client.  It was a riot, Grace and I used to sit and laugh.  They gave me Commonwealth Edison, the electric company of Chicago.  I was coming in part time and they were my client and of course I wasn’t a salesperson, but we laugh a lot.  Here I was pregnant, a mother to be, but actually it worked out quite well⁵⁴.

      Finally, perhaps due to her own astronomical success in the field, Grace Hopper has always vehemently denied the existence of any prejudice against women in computing.  She also insisted that “programming was never cast as a man’s job and pointed out that secretaries regularly graduated to programming, which they had picked up on the job”⁵⁵.

      However, even as women touted the positive aspects of the field, there were trends suggesting that men were starting to make their mark.  Koss, for instance, notes that she was never in line for a management position⁵⁶.  In addition, despite great demand for more programmers throughout the nation, there was little new recruitment amongst women, presumably due to the decades-old assumption that they could not work long hours, or that they would simply leave when they married.  IBM, on the other hand, was aggressively trying to hire women as “systems service” representatives, but despite the lofty title, the position was really a dead-end sales role, in which IBM carefully selected only the most attractive, personable young ladies to provide reassurance to the potential buyers who were intimidated by their new machines.  Furthermore, a 1962 article from the popular journal Datamation portrays fictional programming candidate “Sallyann Bunch” as an unattractive, unqualified, and unfeminine charicature,⁵⁷ thus indicating that less than a decade after the war has ended, the public image of the female in computing had already begun to decline.

      The conclusion to be drawn from the post-war adjustment period is that the women in computing were in many respects similar to the other women in academia and industry; although they found their jobs to be exciting and rewarding, it was common for them to bow to social pressures and return to the home.  The pressure of yielding scarce jobs to the returning men was a less potent force in computing than it was in more established fields, since there was a constant shortage for qualified programmers.  Nonetheless, even though several of these women took advantage of the initial family-friendliness of the field, the proportion of male hires increased as time progressed, and the stage had been set for a hostile takeover. 

3 Academic/Industrial Establishment

3.1  The Founding of Computer Science Departments

      In the years following the war, Howard Aiken started the first academic computer science courses, a decade before most schools followed suit⁵⁸.  These were, however scattered offerings without an accompanying degree until Purdue University founded the first computer science department in the U.S.⁵⁹  Stanford University⁶⁰ and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)⁶¹ followed suit in 1965.  Several other schools did not create formal departments until the 1970s, but did build various “computing centers.”  M.I.T., for example, created “Project Mac,” (Project on Mathematics and Computation) in 1963, a year after Purdue⁶², but the department of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) was officially created in 1974, eleven years later⁶³.  During the same year, Harvard created its Information Sciences program which would lead to the Master of Engineering degree⁶⁴.  The EECS department at UC Berkeley was also created during the same period (1973)⁶⁵.  Notably, of all the top computer science departments today, only CMU has a school of computer science that is separate from the school of engineering, and many of the degrees granted are in both electrical engineering and computer science. 

      The decision to keep the two disciplines integrated was natural in many ways, since computers had been created by the electrical engineers, and since the earliest programming required intimate knowledge of the machine architecture.  Koss noted that in her time one had to understand the hardware in order to write the software⁶⁶.  Even as the division between software and hardware grew more pronounced, however, the fields remained closely associated.  Unfortunately for the women of the time, the image of the engineer was highly masculine, and it was considered socially unacceptable to pursue such a career.  When polled regarding the level of disapproval for women working in particular occupations, men and women alike responded with the highest degree of disapproval for two positions: female business executives and female engineers⁶⁷.  A NORC study polled female college graduates as to why they thought women would be deterred from entering certain vocations, and the findings were bleaker for engineering than any other field:

• 61% agreed with the statement that “women are afraid that they will be considered unfeminine if they enter this field.”
• 57% agreed with the statement that “most parents discourage their daughters from training in such a field.”
• 56% agreed with the statement that “men in this field resent female colleagues.”

In comparison, the numbers were 33%, 38%, and 12% (respectively) for medicine, and 33%, 28%, and 28% for research scientists⁶⁸.

      The linking of computer science and electrical engineering had the predictable effect of allowing the male-dominated culture of engineering to influence the new field of computer science.  By the start of World War II, electrical engineering was already a well-established discipline, and it has been argued that since subordinate occupational cultures tend to assume the ideologies and culture of the dominant field, as an “occupational offshoot” of electrical engineering, computing eventually assimilated the engineering values and norms⁶⁹.  By 1983, the handful of women in the EECS department of MIT felt that the atmosphere was stifling and discriminatory, in that they were frequently ignored in meetings, given less office space, and constantly on the defensive against colleagues asking for dates⁷⁰.  Thus, the institution of computer science as a formal university discipline – particularly as an engineering discipline – had the double effect of making the field seem less feminine socially, and also eventually producing a chilling effect on the atmosphere of the departments. 

3.2  Business and Industrial Expansion

      As mentioned previously, business and engineering were both perceived as predominantly male domains in the 1960s, and it is perhaps no accident that these prejudices coincide with the “coming of age” of the lucrative technology industry. During the 1960s and 1970s, computer use in grew exponentially in the business sector⁷¹ and the period was also marked by increasing emphasis on management sciences, as the Master of Business Administration degree was finally beginning to gain popularity and prestige⁷².  The small computing companies of the post-war decade were rapidly consolidating into larger firms, and very few survived the 1960s⁷³.  For instance, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and  Engineering Research Associates (ERA), the other company Grace Hopper had considered working for, were both acquired by Remington Rand in 1950.  Remington Rand eventually went through a merger itself, to become Sperry-Rand in 1955, and ultimately, the UNIVAC was taken over by IBM⁷⁴. 

      The loss of the small company feel and the rise of rigid, corporate, hierarchical structure was detrimental to the needs and work habits of the women in computing.  Gruer reports that in the earliest years, female programmers typically felt that they were accorded the same respect as men, but that in later years, the “absorption of male hierarchical business structure” and the growing competition caused the industry to become less than ideal in its treatment of women⁷⁵. 

      On the opposite coast, the same phenomenon began to take shape in the 1970s, but with a twist; when the silicon chip was invented, a local journalist coined the term “Silicon Valley” – a site brimming with work-obsessed nerd mythology – but during this period, the bay area of California also became renowned as the “Feminist Capital of the Nation” due to all the women who achieved political success there⁷⁶.  Unlike the east coast, the history of the west coast seems to feature little evidence that women ever had an early foothold in computing.  Thus, when giants such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard made their humble beginnings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were predominantly run by men.  It is unclear exactly how the macho culture of Silicon Valley originated, but today, many are familiar with the following description from a 1999 article in the San Jose Mercury News: “In Silicon Valley, muscling through sixteen-hour days is a badge of honor; being celled, faxed phoned, and e-mailed at all hours of the day and night is a sign of prestige….  You’re so busy doing, you can’t really feel happiness, or love or laughter.”  The emphasis was on “faster, cheaper, better,” and the “ever-present and unrelenting pressure to produce and produce quickly [took] a fearsome toll on all personal relationships…as well as on the individual’s own sense of psychic well-being.” In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak epitomized the Silicon Valley dream, by founding Apple Computers and rocketing into the FORTUNE 500 within five years of the firm’s founding⁷⁷. 

      The work-obsessed culture was clearly insensitive to well-being of men, women, and families alike, and moreover, the culture of young, unkempt, “hackers” doubtlessly alienated women further⁷⁸.  On the political scene, Janet Gray Hayes became the first female mayor of a major American city in the 1970s, and new public policy was allowing the oppressed women cannery workers to unionize and “mount a successful challenge to rigid gender segregation.”  However, Glenna Matthews notes that canning was at this point a declining industry in the valley, and that the high-tech industry taking shape allowed even more rigid gender segregation to flourish⁷⁹.  With the exception of Lockheed, which sponsored daylong science programs for female high school students, and where 20-25% of the employees were female, the corporate identity of technology and computing had become decidedly unsupportive of the women who had thrived in the earlier era of the “Pregnant Programmers.” 

4  Popularization of Computing

      Despite the considerably negative changes in industry and academia, the greatest modern force for the masculinization of computing should probably be associated to the appearance of microcomputers and gaming consoles in the home, where early gender socialization conditioned girls to believe that technology and computing are a boy’s domain.  Gaming consoles such as the Atari system were first released to the market in the late 1970s and became wildly popular within a few years.  The last issue of U.S. News and World Report in 1982 reported that:

“Up to now, at least, home video games have enjoyed immense popularity.  Factory shipments of consoles to dealers rose from an estimated 400,000 in 1979 to about 8 million in 1982.  Shipments of game cartridges, at about 55 million this year, are up from an estimated 4 million in 1979”⁸⁰.” 

      Earlier in 1982, the prominence of video-gaming boys was enough of a concern that the issue was addressed in Business Week:

“Check out any video game arcade or computer camp this summer, and one trend will stand out: The boys punching away on the machines will far outnumber the girls. A growing number of experts believe this tendency could ultimately spell trouble for girls, who may be limiting their career potentials unwittingly by shying away from computers…. The role of advertising in molding attitudes toward the computer also has been sharply criticized. The machine is ‘viewed as a boy thing,’ asserts Edwards Allen, because that is how it is presented in the manufacturers' ads. Apple Computer Inc.’s G. Gregory Smith, director of educational marketing, openly admits that his company targets its ads toward males and has no intention of changing its pitch”⁸¹. 

      Finally, in a sociological study of undergraduate women in the computer science department of CMU, Jane Margolis and Allan Fischer find that when families buy computers, they are more likely to place it in a boy’s bedroom, and that when fathers interact with their children, they are more likely to teach the boy how to use the computer⁸².  Consequently, even before girls have a chance to discover the inequalities that might exist in academia or industry, they receive fewer opportunities to work with computers, and are even socialized to believe that they shouldn’t want to work with them.

5  Conclusions

      It is doubtless the case that there are more nuances to the masculinization of computing than what could be covered by this short analysis, but the main components of the transition seem clear – that the early advantage of women in computing was largely diminished by a post-war society trying to return to “normalcy,” that the establishment of male-dominated academic and corporate structures marginalized women’s working habits and culture, and that the ubiquity of computing in the home triggered early gender socialization of computers as being a male domain.  The positive outcome of this history, however, is the strong evidence that computing is not inherently a male domain, that it is indeed a socially constructed stereotype, and that women’s interests and technical capabilities are not a matter of “innate” differences.  The historic accomplishments of the generations past are proof that women can succeed in computing, and understanding the forces that caused their decline is the first step toward fixing the today’s continuing gender inequalities in computer science. 

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