“What Programming’s Past Reveals About Today’s Gender-Pay Gap” (Atlantic) is kind of interesting because a journalist without apparently any programming experience writes about what programmers do and why one candidate might be preferred by an employer over another.
Here are some excerpts:
During the 1940s and 50s, it was primarily women, not men, who were developing code for the nation’s first computers, and the accompanying pay and prestige were both relatively low. But as the century progressed and the field of computing became male-heavy, compensation and esteem both rose precipitously—despite the fact that the substance of the job remained similar.
How did programming transform from a feminine field into an occupation synonymous with young men wearing hoodies who collect generous salaries for hacking and disrupting things? The story behind the fluctuations in programmers’ salaries and cultural status—as well as those of other professions whose gender composition has shifted over the years—sheds light on how and why women’s work is, across the economy, considered to be less valuable than men’s work. It also provides a rebuttal to the common argument that the gender-pay gap exists because women tend to choose less demanding jobs that pay less.
Aptitude tests and personality profiles, which were the primary mechanisms used to screen and rank job candidates in programming in the 1950s and 60s, helped accelerate the profession’s shift from female to male. … The type of math questions on these multiple-choice exams—requiring little nuance or context-specific problem solving—were often testing skills that men were more likely than women to have learned in school at a time when girls were more likely to be steered away from STEM subjects.
Coders: What do you think of this article? Can it be the case that IBM’s hiring practices in the 1950s are determining the composition of the modern programming workforce?
[Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t point out that a woman in a lot of U.S. states (including here in Massachusetts) who wanted to have the spending power of a programmer could simply have sex with three programmers and then collect child support plus, if she did choose to work at a job more enjoyable (to her) than programming, park the children in daycare at the defendants’ expense (on top of the child support cashflow).]
“How did programming transform from a feminine field into an occupation synonymous with young men wearing hoodies who collect generous salaries for hacking and disrupting things?”
Stopped reading right there. Total gibberish.
What @tk said.
NPR did a story about the gender balance in the profession that more closely matches reality.
I think a lot of smart women went into law, healthcare or other more lucrative fields with better hours.
Michelle Obama got a $300K job as a VP at a Chicago hospital after just a few years on the job – that is much more than the Facebook average of (under $200K I would guess).
How much do dermatologists make? They can operate a clinic with regular hours and no weekends (unless they want to) and make a lot off treatments.
I’m pretty sure the “substance of the job” has changed a lot since the 1950s. I’m a male and a programmer, so I’m probably biased, but my first reaction is that the job title “computer programmer” in the 50’s and 60’s meant that you were somebody who needed to translate program designs into machine code on punch cards – in other words, doing the clerical work that assemblers and then, later, compilers started doing. I could be wrong.
(In the specific case of the Apollo Guidance Computer, “programming” the ROM meant something close to sewing (with wires and magnetic cores), and it may be Raytheon hired women to do that job because they figured sewing was women’s work.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory
Note, I am not saying at all that women are not capable of designing software (or hardware) or being hackers. I’m mainly trying to point out that the salary and cultural status didn’t rise just because the profession became more male-dominated. “Greedy” male executives at companies aren’t going to start paying more salary for the same work just because the workers are using the same bathroom as them.
Like most other articles in this genre, the Atlantic piece requires readers to believe that IBM and other employers more or less intentionally decided to incur higher labor costs by excluding qualified workers, especially women. Women are paid less. Women are just as good, if not better, at doing a job than men. Employers hire men anyway. It might make sense if you don’t care about profit (e.g., a government employer) but it is hard to see how a commercial enterprise with competitors could do this.
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Philg – you are assuming that employers were capable of making conscious, non-sexist decisions:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutionalized_discrimination
You aren’t aware of your unconscious, so you don’t understand how it really works.
Also, there’s an invisible purple dinosaur sitting next to you.
What Alex said.
http://womensenews.org/2012/03/women-were-first-computer-programmers/
Since electronic computing was then envisioned by the ENIAC developers as “nothing more than an automated form of hand computation,” it seemed natural to assume that the primary role of the women of the ENIAC would be to develop the plans of computation that the electronic version of the human computer would follow. In other words, they would code into machine language the higher-level mathematics developed by male scientists and engineers.
Goldstine and von Neumann spelled out a six-step programming process: (1) conceptualize the problem mathematically and physically, (2) select a numerical algorithm, (3) do a numerical analysis to determine the precision requirements and evaluate potential problems with approximation errors, (4) determine scale factors so that the mathematical expressions stay within the fixed range of the computer throughout the computation, (5) do the dynamic analysis to understand how the machine will execute jumps and substitutions during the course of a computation, and (6) do the static coding.
The first five of these tasks were to be done by the “planner,” who was typically the scientific user and overwhelmingly was frequently male; the sixth task was to be carried out by coders.
Coding was regarded as a “static” process by Goldstine and von Neumann — one that involved writing out the steps of a computation in a form that could be read by the machine, such as punching cards, or in the case of the ENIAC, plugging in cables and setting up switches. Thus, there was a division of labor envisioned that gave the highest-skilled work to the high-status male scientists and the lowest-skilled work to the low-status female coders.
The author’s vast experience in this field (or any field) and unbiased journalist’s treatment are on display in the excerpt below:
“Gender equality and politics have been my passions for a long time,” says Cohen, an American studies major from East Brunswick, N.J. “At 14, I volunteered for Hillary’s presidential campaign and had the moxie to call voters in Pennsylvania and urge them to support her in the Democratic primary.”
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2013/11/northwestern-senior-wins-prestigious-marshall-scholarship.html
“despite the fact that the substance of the job remained similar.”
The old programming maxim was “garbage in, garbage out”. If you start from a false assumption (that the job of programming has not changed from the days when women wrote COBOL programs for large government agencies on punch cards) then chances are you will reach false conclusions.
Going back even further, in the pre-ENIAC age, “computers” were people (most often women) who sat at mechanical calculators (AKA adding machines) all day and did repetitive calculations such as calculating ballistics tables. When the digital computer took away their jobs, some of them were redeployed to do coding on the new devices.
“a journalist without apparently any programming experience writes about what programmers do”
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
More nonsense from the Atlantic article:
“[A researcher] suggested that, in the absence of perfect information, workers take the percentage of female employees as a proxy for an occupation’s prestige.”
That’s why garbageman is the most prestigious job in America.
Presumably, it was originally a lot of manual labor involving transcribing written text to punch cards, loading punch cards, loading tapes, swapping vacuum tubes, manufacturing core rope memory that the women did. Most of the work of the CS industry in the old days was probably female because it was manufacturing.
Theoretical computer science was still male dominated & what was theoretical in the old days is now standard. The higher level internet protocols, programming languages & algorithms that are the domain of men now were all being designed by male professors in the old days.
Originally “computers” were people. It was a clerical occupation which added up sums of numbers. Women did most of this work, and the original ENIAC was a bunch of accumulators so it made sense for those women to “program” the first computers. As the skills required needed more autistic personalities, men became more prevalent because there are more men on the spectrum.
I have been a programmer for 27 years and know a woman who was programming machine code from the 70’s until her retirement in 1999. Women have always been accepted in the field, but they don’t seem to like it.
The author appears to be in her early 20s and is simply cross that she doesn’t get a programmer’s salary for non-programming work, even though being youthful she has ready access to Phil’s staple suggestion for securing such a salary.
I can code, but I hate it, which is why I am a housewife married to a programmer instead of a programmer.
A lot of women do like documentation, but nobody really pushes for them to go into that one. Funny how that works.
“Readers would be disappointed if …”
I suppose some would, but I for one would be glad if you’d stop sounding like a broken record on this. Yes, it’s important, and can bear a lot of repetition, but at some point enough is enough.
Norman, I would be disappointed!
https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ claims average $250k/year total comp (including stock, excluding benefits) after four years at a “big tech company” (Google, Microsoft, Facebook).
I read that post, it doesn’t match up with income data for the regions where those companies are. A few rare superperformers, sure, but given the clustering of those jobs, income medians and means in the relevant areas would be a lot higher if 250k/year in cash pay was average.