Programming is girly work — at least that was the prevailing sentiment up until the late sixties*. Experts in the field used to say things like: “Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming. I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.” (James Adams, then education director at the Association of Computing Machinery.)
Many important early developments in computers and programming were achieved by women. Everyone knows Ada Lovelace. Decades after her, in the ’40s, the ENIAC girls programmed the first all-electronic programmable computer. In 1959, COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages debuted; US Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper had a major roll in its development.
Incidentally, Grace is also the original hardware debugger. In 1947, she removed an actual moth from a relay that caused Harvard’s Mark II computer to malfunction. The moth is now displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington D.C. (How do you honor your bugs?)
The number of women enrolled in Computer Science studies continued to rise in the following decades. But in parallel, the stereotype of the anti-social nerd programmer began to creep into our culture. According to NPR it culminated in the mid-eighties when movies like Revenge of the Nerds came out. The number of women in CS fields plateaued, and then started to taper off. A trend that continues to this day.
Nowadays, just 18% of CS undegrads are women. Less than 10% of Silicon valley startup founders are female. Women account for less than 10% of our website visitors.
A typically ugly bureaucratic term “leaky pipeline” is used to refer to the fact that the number of women in STEM fields drops off for each consecutive career stage.
This year, in a humble attempt to contribute to patching up the pipeline, our International Women’s day offer is two-fold. An 8% discount offered to draw your attention to this article is lasting this weekend and applies to everyone. On top of that, orders placed by women while the offer is in effect will receive an additional 10% discount voucher in their package (doesn’t expire until December 31 this year).
Happy International Women’s day!
Yours sincerely,MikroElektronika
_______ *The whole article discusses the role of women mostly in software. Hardware seems to have always been (wrongly) considered a guy thing as so many other tech fields.