Why women stopped coding in the '80s?
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No.10
Since the second half of the 20th century, the percentage of women at universities has been constantly growing, almost in every field, except for one. Until the mid-80s, the percentage of women in computer science grew very quickly and overtook even medicine, and then when women began to make up more than 35% of students in this field, the percentage began to drop sharply until today, when it’s between 15 and 20%.
Until the end of WWII, a large number of higher education institutions were reserved only for men, and when it was slowly opened for female students, there were various problems, for example, MIT didn’t have housing facilities on campus for women until the 1960s. And, as these obstacles were removed, the number of women in these fields grew. Until the 80s, when the barriers became cultural.
The reason for this decline was laid out perfectly by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, Jane Margolis. If you came for a quick answer — it's marketing.
The idea that computers are for boys became a dominant narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computer revolution. It helped define geeks and created techie culture.
Namely, this decline happened in parallel when the use of personal computers in homes started to grow. In the beginning, those computers were mostly toys, and they were promoted to be primarily intended for boys.
So, when that generation of boys was pursuing college degrees, they already had experience in working with computers, while girls generally did not, and therefore opted for other fields of study.
Here are some examples:
Or look at some more here. In a nutshell, it’s almost all men and boys.
Although the number of women entering the European ICT sector is growing faster than men, (6% for women and 4% for men), in 2021 in EU, only 19.1 % of ICT specialists are women.
What now?
There is only one lesson here — change the narrative. If you are already a subscriber, you know that already and we hope that the content we share is:
motivating you to encourage your daughter’s interest in tech, and more importantly,
that the tips that you receive every other week are helping you to do it.
See you next week and please share this with your friends — the more of us are thinking about diversifying tech education and representation, the better we will all be.