TIME has an article on Margaret Hamilton and the software for the Apollo 11 mission. The journalist is quick to point out that “she was successful in the pre-women’s lib era in a field that remains tough for women to crack.” Being an Ellen Pao-style gender warrior was apparently secondary in Hamilton’s mind to achieving a successful landing on the moon, but the present-day journalist is quick to fill in the gaps: “Hamilton says that she was so wrapped up in her work that she didn’t notice the gender problems of the time…”
What kind of discrimination did Hamilton actually face? Wikipedia notes that this female graduate of Earlham College was hired for some of the most advanced computer system projects of the day, e.g., SAGE at MIT, and weather simulation for the professor who popularized modern “chaos theory.” Hamilton was promoted to “director and supervisor of software programming for Apollo and Skylab.” Then she was founder and CEO of her own software company, apparently successful enough to survive for at least eight years. For about the last thirty years she has had her own company as well. Her writings are published by the IEEE (example), one of the two most prestigious societies in computer science.
These are the facts that support the present-day journalist’s conclusion that the software industry was unfriendly to women in the 1960s and remains so today.
[Hamilton may have used her gender to advantage via Massachusetts family law. She married a Harvard Law School graduate who went on to found a Boston-area law firm (Boston Globe). The article says that there was a divorce lawsuit but it isn’t clear what alimony and child support profits, if any, Hamilton earned.]
Separately… what do we think of the ideas in that IEEE paper? Plainly big software systems need to be more resilient and to have some learning capabilities. But is this Universal Systems Language an important step in that direction?
There’s the theory that earlier computer science was more equally divided among genders, but the first personal computers were marketed towards boys. As these adolescents went to college the boys showed up with years more computer experience than their female classmates, who ended up being discouraged.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
It’s possible Hamilton didn’t face as much discrimination as contemporary women in CS.
In the mainframe era, there were a lot of woman programmers. In the pre-computer era, many of the “computers” (people who did calculations on adding machines all day) were women and when their jobs were replaced by digital computers, a lot of them were retrained to program the new machines. As long as programming was a 9 to 5 job in a corporate environment, it suited women just fine. The introduction of the PC changed the equation because guys were willing to work on their own stuff 24/7.
Steven: “Hamilton didn’t face as much discrimination as contemporary women in CS”. What evidence do you have that women overall face discrimination in CS or software engineering, either now or at any point in the past? (Obviously in any given enterprise or with any given manager there may be some discrimination either in favor of or against a particular group, but in some cases that could work in favor of female students or employees.)
Women constitute 20% of graduate in Engineering in US.
Women constitute 50% of graduate in Medical field in US.
Medicine is an imprecise, non-specific field
where as engineering is right/wrong kind of field. Precision is needed.
Only way more women will want to be in Engineering,
if it is lucrative, not hard work, not filled with nerds (not potential partners).
Other fields are a lot more friendlier to Women because they are social, more alpha
are also present in those fields like Law, Medicine, Acting, etc.
“but the first personal computers were marketed towards boys”
I call B.S. on this. First of all, the first PCs were too expensive to be toys for either gender. 2nd, marketers go where the market is. If they thought that girls could be persuaded to buy computers, you can be damn sure they would have been pitching them at them. But girls were just not interested. This was not the computer mfrs. fault. Also the idea that women (minorities), etc. get “discouraged” is BS – if there is something that you love, nothing will keep you from it. Computers appeal to “Aspergy” type personalities and these are mostly boys. (Heterosexual) boys are mostly not interested in, say, fashion design. This is not because they are “discouraged” or because of marketing or discrimination – they are just not interested in cutting out paper dolls and sketching dresses.
There is blue collar jobs meme going around in twitter that says.
Garbage Disposal Workers almost 100% male.
Sewer Workers almost 100% male
Coal Miners over 90% male
No call for equality.
Comfortable White Color Jobs.
Call for equality
Empower Women
More Women at work place