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Britain in the 70s killed its tech industry because of sexism

rhymes on September 25, 2018

I just finished reading an article on Logic Magazine: How To Kill Your Tech Industry. Let's start from the subtitle: In World War II, Britain in...
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Ben Halpern

I've always wondered how technology (not just computing tech) would be now if society didn't basically forbid half of its population to work for so long.

I am certain progress would have been much faster in every way had major blind spots not been so forcefully baked into the process.

Many bad choices would have been avoided if this monoculture hadn’t become so trendy.

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Ruth Evans

... the “backwater” of computer work, which had still not fully shaken its association with low-level, feminized labor. Machine work in general was viewed as unintellectual and working-class, ensuring that men of the desired background had little interest in being swept up in the “industrialization of the office.”

A few years ago a manager was asked what my role was, when I said I was a programmer she was impressed, "wow, you must be so smart!" (I'm not 😅). Amazing how much the reputation of computer work has changed in 40-odd years.

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rhymes

Hi Ruth! Amazing indeed...

Let's hope it gets better and better (at least until we will all be jobless because of AI :D)

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Ruth Evans

Yes I hope it gets better and more inclusive!

(Until the day we all serve our AI betters 😁)

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Carly Ho 🌈

Yeah, this bit of history is honestly fascinating and horrifying. Even with our problems now, it's still hard for me to believe that discrimination used to be so completely shameless :\

For more reading on this, I'd recommend goodreads.com/book/show/32078427-p... by Marie Hicks—it's on the academic side, so it's a little dense, but it's very thorough.

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rhymes

Thank you!

Marie Hicks is the author of the article I mentioned! Thanks for the suggestion!

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Carly Ho 🌈

Oh, haha, that's what I get for not paying attention to the byline!

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Dustin King

Writers to this day use male pseudonyms to sell books and there are studies on how women hiding their gender on GitHub get pull requests accepted at a higher rate.

You gotta do what you gotta do, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

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Defiance Black • Edited

Lowering standards of technical proficiency to create an elite class of male computer workers didn’t work, however.

I wonder, then, what people expect from the recent (and ultimately ineffective) pushes/quotas for more women in STEM?

Also, I wonder what changed between say... the 60s, where a woman coded men to the moon, and the 90s, where a man interested in computing was too dorky for the attention of your average woman. The stigma was not insignificant. If you remember the "talk nerdy to me" of the mid 00s, you see when the collective of women began to think code was cool again -- then the number of self identifying "nerdy" females has only increased.

Multiple things changed, I think, and it's not entirely that "men decided to kick women out and that is the end of the story."

The recent pushes for more women in STEM should see more success than it has, given women were the original programmers, which I'm sure we won't hear the end of until forever.

Just saying.

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George

Studying this topic in school always had me fascinated, if it wasn't for women in tech a lot of what we currently have either wouldn't be the same or be no where near as good as it now. Personal favourite of mine is Grace Hopper who invented the compiler in 1959, if it wasn't for her the technology we have now would be miles behind.

It's sad to see that women were being erased from the tech history back in these times, their contributions were as much as important as anyone elses. Thankfully we're in a generation now where this isn't the case.

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Alex Lohr

Even worse, one of the fathers of modern computing, Alan Touring, was convicted for being homosexual. He had it even worse than the women in tech then.

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Ross Henderson

Turing*

He had such a sad story. Literally helped stop WWII but because of his sexual orientation they chemically castrated him, because it was illegal to be gay, and he killed himself.

The UK has done a lot of horrible things to a lot of people, but I'll be honest: It is very quickly resolving these problems. Let's just hope it's not too late.

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Alex Lohr • Edited

Damn autocorrect... :)

There's another tragedy looming ahead and it's Brexit. It will cause many talented developers and engineers to seek their fortune elsewhere, pulling the tech industry even further behind the rest of Europe.