1984

My husband, at that time my boyfriend, started a career in Systems Engineering in the early 90’s and at that time, there was a predisposition to pigeonhole women who studied Computer System , of which I was an accomplice. We, the girls in the B.S programs, used to say that engineers had men and ugly women. There was no other way, if you studied Systems and you were a woman, you automatically fell into the pigeonhole of the ugly ones, we never considered that probably, those “ugly” girls, maybe they were not so ugly, they were brilliant minds, progressive; because they fought against a system that made them less, and they had ethics and integrity, because they pursued their dreams even knowing that the road was going to be winding and not lacking of external and internal struggles.

You may wonder what all this has to do with the number 1984, well, a lot, because the year 1984 is known as the year that women stopped writing code. Few know that many pioneers of computer science were women. For years the number of women entering this field grew percentage-wise faster than the number of men. In 1984, something happened, women stopped entering the computer science field and some even dropped out.

What happened?

No one knows for sure, some say that with the creation of personal computers, which at first served more as game consoles and word processors than anything else, their use became stereotyped. In my house we were proud owners of a Commodore 64. On it there were games like; asteroids, where shooting to destroy rocks in space gave you points. We also liked target shooting which was basically a target to shoot and collect points. We loved one of a racing cart, where you tried to make the circuit in the shortest time possible to win. With this, carts, racing, guns, killing, it became part of the narrative that computers were for men.

It is also suggested that the era undermined any possibility of thinking that women were capable of contributing to the field of computer technology. Steven Levin in his book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution claims that women in computer science are “terribly inefficient and uneconomical things” I only read the paragraph where he writes this and didn’t have the stomach to read any more of it.

As you can see it is the same old story. The reasons for women continue to be the same, hostility in the workplace, lack of security, fear of what people will say, disparity in treatment, lack of opportunity, etc, etc, etc, etc. These continue to be the reasons why the numbers continue to be low, Today only 18% of computer science graduates are women, I am sorry to have been part of the narrative that forced women to change their destiny.

Slowly the narrative is changing and we are seeing women returning to the programming field. There are organizations like: Girl Develop IT, AnitaB, Girls who Code, WIDS, Data Science Salon Elevate (DSSe), Wai2go, Waidathon, etc that create a strong support network, and foster a space for all women in technology.