Girlhood of a programmer

Do you agree with the following statement? “We live in the age of digitization. We have to reckon with the fact that our future, our digital world, will be programmed by young men. One can ask oneself: do we want that? Don’t we also want young women to shape our future? “

What Anna Steiger, Vice Rector of the Vienna University of Technology, is saying here is not a feminist call for a laptop storm, but the legitimate concern that women are underrepresented in computer science. A third of the students at the Vienna University of Technology are female, and Steiger wants to increase this proportion. And she’s in good company. Girl’s Days, women in technology – there are many initiatives to get girls interested in MINT subjects (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, technology). The success is manageable.

That’s the way it is, you could say. Girls are just not interested in programming and arithmetic. It wasn’t always like that, but one has to object.

1946, University of Pennsylvania: George Stibitz gave a lecture on the question: “Is it worth developing and manufacturing more automatic computers?” The first automatic calculating machines had been produced, and they had served well during the war. And now? Stibitz carried out a profitability calculation and came to the following conclusion for the performance of a computer: “The work done corresponded to four to ten girl years.”

Computer was a profession, not a device

Girlhood as a measure of computing power? That leaves us amazed at first. At that time, a computer did not designate an electronic computing device, but a profession. And one that was practiced almost exclusively by women. Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Ruth Lichterman, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Kay McNulty were not only gifted mathematicians, they also programmed the world’s first computer in 1946.

How is it that the pioneers of digitization are female, but their protagonists are now all male? Data processing was not a respected profession at that time, women spent a lot of time with nonlinear differential equations. Programming was still new during World War II, had no specific gender assignment, women were needed as workers. In the 1960s, the image changed, the industry gained in importance, efforts were made to get men enthusiastic about it. In the 1980s, the proportion of women in the computer industry fell rapidly, programming became a (now well-paid) male domain.

And gradually the conviction became stronger: women and computers do not go together. As history shows, this is simply wrong. And as is now being shown, it is not only discriminatory but also uneconomical to assign a gender to occupations. Because too many girl years are wasted as a result.