In the early 1980s the number of women studying computer science defied the laws of sexual gravity, but then male dominance of the new technology reasserted itself. The actual number of women studying IT has not much changed; but as new courses have developed, boys have tended to monopolise places.
In the 1970s computers were associated with the manipulation of information, particularly data analysis, and with the service sector, which is traditionally more feminised than industry; computing was an acceptable profession for a woman scientist. But in the early 1980s adolescent males, always the first to desire new gizmos, began to acquire micro-computers.
They became the predominant, if not the exclusive, users of the family computer. Adolescent male technophiles, at just the age when they need to define themselves in opposition to females, formed clubs and groups dedicated to programming and video games. When they went to university, a prescriptive media discourse reinforced the process.
Despite the technological advances and the transformation of daily life since then, the next generation of science students, both male and female, still see the micro-computer and the programmer as the symbols of computing; 80% of them think of IT as dominated by geeky men more at ease with machines than with humans, content to spend the day behind a desk performing repetitive tasks, mostly programming.
How does this distortion of reality happen? All the young watch digital images, listen to electronic music, make calls on their mobiles and use the internet daily to email, order goods, and download music or videos. Why has this familiarity had no impact on career ambitions? It is as if these applications had developed in a vacuum; as if computing as a profession had not evolved alongside new applications and technical developments.
The common perception is that everyone who works with computers is a programmer. But fewer than 30% of IT jobs are for programmers. They are hackers in the original sense of the word, before it acquired a negative connotation: enthusiasts specialising in systems and networks. They are now a minority, respected and admired for their skills yet feared for their real or imagined ability to penetrate computer security.
Although hackers are the archetypal experts, businesses want nothing to do with them, seeing them as technically gifted but uncontrollable, incapable of working in a team and unresponsive to the imperatives of production.
This minority, whose ambiguous outlaw image fascinates and repels, is the professional stereotype which influences science students and even those IT specialists who dislike the label "programmer". Women attempting to find legitimacy in a profession with such an alien image describe themselves as "in computing".
Starting with Lady Ada
However, the first programmer was female: August Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. (The US army named a programming language, Ada, after her in 1979.) Hidden behind the initials AAL, as was proper for Victorian women, in 1842 she translated a memoir by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on Charles Babbage’s idea for an Analytical Engine (1). She appended an algorithm, the first of its kind, listing a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine. This first of all computer programmes used a loop, a series of instructions that would repeat until a certain condition was met.
In 1944 IBM built the Mark I, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the United States. IBM was convinced that only scientists were capable of using computers, and did not imagine any large-scale commercial exploitation. Grace Hopper, one of the three engineers in Howard Aiken’s team, realised that the only way to make computers acceptable in non-scientific circles and in business was to make the programming language comprehensible to non-mathematicians.
Her colleagues ridiculed her belief that programmes could be written in English. By writing the first compiler in 1952, she opened the way to the widespread use of programming languages by non-mathematicians. Software has been undervalued since all the prestige accrued to the builders of the machine, which is probably why women mathematicians were key in the development of software.
IT has a near-total lack of women, so girls do not have positive role models. From childhood on, the socio-sexual division of knowledge in books, films, comics and other representations of everyday life associates science and technology with men. A choice of study subject depends on imagining a plausible, attractive future image of the self. Nobody enters a profession for which they feel no affinity and whose practitioners are alien. Girls use computers but they don’t seem to want to master them.
In French studies of male and female science students, almost 70% of girls (compared with 40% of boys) said they didn’t know whether they were interested in working in information and communication technology (ICT) (2).
Girls often have no idea of what the work involves. One said: "I can’t see myself spending my entire day talking about printed circuits, RAM and networks." Another: "I don’t want to spend my day surrounded by machines. I’d rather look after children or talk to people."
Women who have qualified explain that they chose the profession for reasons that match its realities – diversity, overlap with different professional sectors, constant opportunities to learn new things, intellectual challenges, the importance of human relations and teamwork.
They have encountered the usual obstacles; accusations of incompetence, lower pay than male colleagues; and career paralysis around 30, when employers expect they will start a family. Still, many women have been successful in a sector where unemployment is low and starting salaries are the same for both sexes.
It would be easy to change attitudes if we clarified the realities of computer-centred professions and downgraded the supremacy of the image of the hacker instead of reinforcing it. Then more girls might see computer science as their professional future, engaged with the world, and full of intellectual and human challenges (3). ________________________________________________________
Isabelle Collet is a computer scientist and researcher in educational science at the University Paris-X (Nanterre) and the National Institute for Telecommunications at Evry. She is author of L’informatique a-t-elle un sexe? Hackers, mythes et réalités, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006
(1) Babbage worked on this design for a mechanical computer for more than 40 years, but unlike its predecessor, the Difference Engine, it was never built.
(2) When questioned, 21% of boys said they were interested in IT work and 37% were not. For girls the figures were 9% and 11%. For 1972 to 1995 see "Bulletins ID", Conseil national des ingénieurs et des scientifiques de France (CNISF). For 2000 see Catherine Marry, Une révolution respectueuse, les femmes ingénieurs? Belin, Paris, 2004.
(3) This has been the aim of the Brussels-based Ada Project, Women and New Technologies, www.ada-online.org
Translated by Donald Hounam
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