A profession for men only

I heard about a young woman whose father forbade her to study computer engineering because it is a “career for men only”. Unfortunately, this mistaken perception is still lodged in the minds of many people and, worse still, in the minds of many of my colleagues.

Look at this chart, taken from Bob Martin’s blog (Uncle Bob), which shows the share of women in different fields, including computing.

What happened to women’s participation in computing?

The worrying drop in women’s participation in computer science is plain to see.

Why does this happen?

What makes so many colleagues think this is a profession for men only?

I lead a team of thirteen people, six women and seven men. That is not by chance; there is a conscious decision to keep a team with an even gender split. It is a decision I made years ago and so far it has served me well.

I explained the reasons years ago in this other post; I think it is what we should do. Computing is not the exclusive domain of men, and it never was.

Margaret Hamilton, standing next to the printed source code of Apollo 11, which was recently published on GitHub.

This photograph became famous a couple of years ago. It is Margaret Hamilton, head of the team of software engineers who wrote the code for the Apollo 11 mission that took the crew, led by Neil Armstrong, safe and sound to the Moon and back, just as President Kennedy had committed to.

These photographs are less well known. They show the women who did the calculations for several NASA missions.

The women of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped launch the first American satellites, the lunar missions and the first planetary explorations. They were known as the “human computers”; this photograph is from 1953.

The group led by Macie Roberts; she is toward the upper right, standing and talking with one of the women on the team. The photograph is from 1955.

During the Manhattan Project, a group of women, led by Richard Feynman, worked as human computers to carry out the complex calculations needed to build the atomic bomb. Those women later programmed the digital computers that replaced them.

Here we have Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician and physicist who was part of this group of women who calculated and later programmed for NASA. In 2015 she received the American Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, in recognition.

Katherine Johnson receiving the award from Barack Obama

These are the original programmers of the Eniac, who show that women were involved in computing from the very beginning. There is a documentary about them, in case you want to know more, at this link: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/eniac6

Apparently what they are holding in their hands are different generations of a bit

And finally, Lady Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage designing a computer in the first half of the 19th century.

Lady Ada

So where did it come from, this stupid idea that computing is a profession for men only?

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