Comment by CobrastanJorji
3 days ago
That was the second iteration of that. Most of the programmers were women until the mid-70s when the nerdy men kicked the women out.
3 days ago
That was the second iteration of that. Most of the programmers were women until the mid-70s when the nerdy men kicked the women out.
If you consider what assemblers and compilers do programming, sure.
But men didn't kick them out, technology did. Von Numan famously forbid the Eniac from ever being used for assembly when you had a perfectly cheap secretary pool to do the assembly by hand.
Low creativity repetitive work requiring great attention to detail is what the early female programmers did and what was automated first.
If we ever get deterministic AI the same will happen up the chain. I'm not holding my breath for the current generation of models, or the upcoming ones I've seen in papers.
That's underselling their role. One of those ladies doing the assembling for Von Numan was Grace Hopper, who then used that expertise to develop the first compilers.
And the other 100 weren't and didn't.