“For decades after this, society would devalue the work of programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of the workforce.” – fascinating
It’s more that women already did a lot of human computing work, and programming was seen as being in the same league — which IMO isn’t actually that wrong, for the kind of mathematical batch programming this is about. If anything, maybe the human computing work was undervalued to start with.
I had an elementary school teacher (decades ago now, and she was old then) bring in her programming material from when she was basically fresh out of college. I don't even think she was using punch cards*, it was weird...but every one of her coworkers was a woman because it was considered rote work for secretary types.
* My memory is really fuzzy on this, but IIRC they had 1-2" holes in sheets that would either be transparent or black. Looking back they may have had some sort optical setup to read raw binary. I've never run into this since then (never really looked for it though either). She may have worked at IBM. I'd be interested if anyone knew what I was talking about.
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“For decades after this, society would devalue the work of programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of the workforce.” – fascinating
It’s more that women already did a lot of human computing work, and programming was seen as being in the same league — which IMO isn’t actually that wrong, for the kind of mathematical batch programming this is about. If anything, maybe the human computing work was undervalued to start with.
I had an elementary school teacher (decades ago now, and she was old then) bring in her programming material from when she was basically fresh out of college. I don't even think she was using punch cards*, it was weird...but every one of her coworkers was a woman because it was considered rote work for secretary types.
* My memory is really fuzzy on this, but IIRC they had 1-2" holes in sheets that would either be transparent or black. Looking back they may have had some sort optical setup to read raw binary. I've never run into this since then (never really looked for it though either). She may have worked at IBM. I'd be interested if anyone knew what I was talking about.