I was about to make a presentation at a tech conference
when a male attendee gave me this unsolicited piece
of advice. "Don't be nervous. You're hot.
No one expects you to do well."
I'm a software engineer, and I'm regularly asked to take
notes in meetings. None of the men are asked to do that.
After giving a talk, I received abusive emails from men
who said things like, "I jerked off to the video of your talk."
How did we get here?
Why is this so common?
How did tech become so male dominated?
Modern computing emerged in the early 1940s.
During World War II, the military hired hundreds of
women to solve complex calculations that would
improve the accuracy of weapons on the battlefield.
Naval officer Grace Hopper, also a mathematics
professor developed a compiler - a program that
translates English instructions into computer code.
This paved the way for modern programming language.
And by the end of the war, women worked on the army's
top secret projects - the Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer, or ENIAC.
The ENIAC is often credited as the world's first
general purpose computer. After all of our hard work,
we weren't even invited to the ENIAC unveiling
celebration. The male hardware engineers were
congratulated, while we trudged home in the snow.
Throughout the '50s and '60s, women often worked
behind the scenes building software, while men
specialized in hardware engineering.
Perceived as mindless and menial, computer
programming had become women's work.
In 1967, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article
hailing computer science as an exciting alternative
to secretarial work.
Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, school
teacher, social worker or a nurse. Now have come the
big, dazzling computers and a whole new kind of work
for women - programming.
During the 1970s and '80s, the number of women
pursuing degrees in computer science steadily
increased. By 1984, women majoring in computer
science grew to 37 percent, nearly twice what it is today.
The revolutionary advancements in computer software
of the 1980s brought a gold rush to Silicon Valley.
The focus for men shifted from hardware engineering
to software development. Men like Steve Jobs and
Bill Gates became the heroes of the rapidly
expanding industry. This is a 21st century bicycle
that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has.
Pop culture gave rise to the stereotypical male nerd
with movies like "War Games", "Weird Science", and
"Revenge of the Nerds". They don't have the moves or
the muscle. But they've got the brains.
Video game companies marketed their consoles as
toys, and because toys were gendered, toy stores
stocked games in the boy aisles.
Ads depicted fathers teaching their sons how to use
computers. Women often appeared as wives or product
models. I was a math geek in high school and thought
Comp Sci would be no problem. When I went to college
and took a beginning computer science class,
I was already behind. When I asked questions,
I was told, "You should know that by now."
Today, the number of female computer science majors
holds steadily at around 18 percent.
The truth is that the company had trouble hiring women
because it was just a bunch of nerds. They never talked
to women, so how were they supposed to interact with
and hire them? Tech companies reject women
from jobs by saying they're not culture fits, which
seems to be code for our male employees don't
know how to socialize with women.
Today, around one in four computing jobs are held
by women. The percentage has actually fallen slightly
in recent years, even as women are making large
strides in other fields. These women are nerds and
innovators, but because our culture relentlessly tells us
that only men can be defined as geniuses, women
get pushed out, leaving tech at twice the rate that men do.
Women developed computer science - not just men.
Programming is not male or female, and remembering
that is a key step to fixing the tech industry's gender gap.