Many computing pioneers were women. What happened then?

Computer science, as we know it today, is mainly a male-dominated field. But statistics reveal that till a couple of decades back, the number of women in the field was on the rise. According to data provided by National Science Foundation, American Bar Association, and American Association of Medical Colleges; women in computer science were on the rise for decades before the percentage started to drop around 1984.

A report by Planet Money states that many of the computing pioneers, the people who programmed the first digital computers, were women. It has been noted that the decline in the number of women in the field started around the same time when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.

One could not do much on these computers. Things that could be done were limited to playing some games like shooting or pong and some word processing. All these games however, were targeted for men and boys. Moreover, movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds, and War Games, that were released around the same time, reinforced the idea of awkward tech savvy geek boys winning the girl.

In the 90s, Jane Margolis interviewed computers science students at Carnegie Mellon, which had one of the top programs in the country. Through the survey she found out that families were much more likely to buy computers for their boys than girls, even if the girls really wanted it.

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Patricia Ordóñez, who did not have a computer growing up, told Planet Money that being an exceptionally good student at mathematics she decided to take up computer engineering in college but soon realized that all her male classmates were way ahead of her. She said, “I remember this one time I asked a question and the professor stopped and looked at me and said, ‘you should know that by now’ and I thought I am never going to excel.”

She eventually dropped out of the course. But after a decade, she decided to go back to it and earned a Ph.D. in computer science. She is now an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Puerto Rico.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Planet Money

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding