The Secret History of Women in Coding

The Secret History of Women in Coding

The History of coding has had an unusual development, unlike other areas coding is relatively new, therefore in the early 50's there was no majors or studies for programming, it was until 1959 when a brand new discipline was "established".

For this reason in the beginning of the coding discipline the requirements for working in this area were nos strict, many women saw an opportunity and applied for "programming" jobs, such is the case of Mary Allen Wilkes who quickly became a programming wiz and was part of important computing projects by the pass of the years. Years passed, the World War II happened, women take and active part helping with activities like code-breaking, "programing" ,etc.

Women were intrinsically related to the evolution of the computing area they were a key part of it,
in the '50s and '60s computer companies were fair when hiring staff, there was no prejudices, if they contract someone it was because of their aptitudes and not because of his gender, look or nationality, the programmer work force in some companies like Raytheon was 50 percent men and 50 percent women, everything was doing great but that doesn't last long, by 1983 the percent of women who were graduating in computer and information sciences started to drop, the following years drop even more reaching 17.6 percent in 2010 but what happened? how does the discipline passed from having an equally population to 17.6 percent?

When personal computers arrived boys were most likely to have been given a computer by their parents, since computers represented something related to electricity, something "mechanic", the families "establish" that it should be manipulated by the son with help of the father, something that didn't include girls. Then this was reflected to the school where men had a lot of experience and girls had almost zero experienced, this was not the problem, the problem was that the school didn't make an effort to help initiate students with no experience, they were basically focusing on the people that already had experience because they happened to had a computer from years before, the atmosphere itself worsened this, the ones that already have experience made them feel isolated and dumb to the ones without.

In consequence by the ’80s, the early pioneering work done by female programmers had mostly been forgotten. And Hollywood didn't help, they were creating the image that computers were male domain. Just look at movies like Tron, WarGames, the computer nerds were "always" young white men. Even the corporate sector started to contract personal following their appearance and not their aptitudes.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the last year (2018) about 26 percent of the workers in “computer and mathematical occupations” were women, is still to far from the good old days when it was 50% vs 50%. This data indicates the need for computing programs to be opened and to consider less experienced people, and to aware everyone that we have to be more inclusive and tolerant to people who is new in the area, also it's essential to put effort in transform the corporate sector since there still exist so much prejudices in a lot of men who think that women are not prepared and capable to occupy some important charges that involves IT.