Computers Are for Girls (2022)

This is a real vibe shift kind of article, remember circa 2018 Hacker News?

> Why was home computing such a boys' club? I don't know, really.

Are we seriously going to pretend the answer isn't simply guys and girls have different interests on average, why do we keep having to rediscover fire here?

Growing up the girls I know (including me) were much more drawn to making and coding on computers, while boys were more interested in playing games on the computers. If it weren’t for the games, many more boys might be coding, OR many more boys might not even be interested in computers. I wonder what a real representative survey would show. I’d still much rather have a computer spin cycles solving my problems than me spin cycles solving a game.

People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths. People have different tolerances with respect to conformity, and at different stages in their lives.

It's a shame something as fundamental as computing is seen as a "boy" thing by many, often fatalistically, and I think we've been worse off for it.

I remember reading that there was an active re-framing of the computer worker. It was somewhat reflected by employers that started hiring exclusively men and of computer workers being associated with nerds and geeks, and the combination could have driven woman away.

Also I don't know that finding ads that targeted woman by simply searching Google is a rebuttal that ads were almost entirely targeted at boys. As it tell us nothing of the prevalance and quantity of each.

That said, I agree I don't think the ads were a major part of it. It's the culture, and what I heard is the culture shift happened once computer work was seen as requiring rigorous knowledge, intellectualism and was starting to pay well.

I'm not gonna advance I know the truth of these hypothesis, but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.

That's something about low-level feminism that has been making me furious for the past 10 years. Because these people didn't even live through that era, when most women only started taking an interest in personal computers once these machines became a vehicle for social interaction (they were born after Internet became a thing, so they don't take into account the fact that these machines weren't connected, that it was a solo activity... and that, to me, explains everything about most women's lack of interest at that time).

When I was young, I would have sold my soul to hook up with a hardcore female coder who ate 68000 for breakfast. Met on February 32 at a code party, perhaps. It would have been love at first sight. We would have started a family, had kids, ethical hacker seeds, in binary underpants, learning to code before they could even walk. The Addams Family of hacking. The Tarantino-esque Killers of dev. Throwing around scroll texts writhing in all directions, nauseating rotozooms, while breaking borders in HBL sync, chasing cathode rays to spew psychedelic plasma effects in 4096 colors... damn it!

My female cousins did learn how to load and play games on their Commodore 128, but of course that fell by the wayside when they got an NES.

It was a lot easier to get a game going on the NES.

Computers were girls.

"Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

Also, the movie:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures