What Happened to All of the Women in Computer Science?

[Starry Messenger]

I'm a non-math person, but I live in SV, so the gender disparity in tech always interests me. I've seen a few of these "what happened to the women" articles recently, though none have really seemed to nail it.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/happened-women-computer-science-98057/

The original compute-ers, people who operated computing machines, were mostly women. At that period of history, most typists were women and their skills seemed to transfer from that job to the next. As late as the second half of the 1960s, women were seen as naturals for working with computers. As Grace Hopper explained in a 1967 Cosmopolitan article:

It’s just like planning dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are “naturals” at computer programming.

But then, this happened:



<snip>

The folks at NPR, who made the chart, interviewed information studies professor Jane Margolis. She interviewed hundreds of computer science majors in the 1990s, right after women started dropping out of the field. She found that having a personal computer as a kid was a strong predictor of choosing the major, and that parents were much more likely to buy a PC for their sons than they were for their daughters."