The First Women in Tech Didn’t Leave—Men Pushed Them Out
In computing’s early years, when it was considered women’s work, all six programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women
in 1959, an unnamed British female computer programmer was given an assignment to train two men.The memos said the woman had “a good brain and a special flair” for working with computers. Nevertheless, a year later the men became her managers. Since she was a different class of government worker, she had no chance of ever rising to their pay grade... At its genesis, computer programming faced a double stigma—it was thought of as menial labor, like factory work, and it was feminized, a kind of “women’s work” that wasn’t considered intellectual. Though part of the U.K. government’s low-paid “Machine Operator Class,” women performed knowledge work including programming systems for everything from tax collection and social services to code-breaking and scientific research, using punch cards on a vacuum-tube computer.
.. But replacing experienced women with male novices didn’t go as government bureaucrats planned, according to Dr. Hicks. “They were just hemorrhaging money and time to try and train and recruit this ideal young man
.. Not only were the male recruits often less qualified, they frequently left the field because they viewed it as an unmanly profession. A shortage of programmers forced the U.K. government to consolidate its computers in a handful of centers with the remaining coders. It also meant the government demanded gigantic mainframes and ignored more distributed systems of midsize and mini computers ..
.. Some women who were pushed out of government and corporations started their own companies of women programmers.
.. All six of the first programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women.
.. One of the earliest and most-respected coding programs was at Princeton University, which didn’t admit women at the time