What Bell Labs Was Like C.1967 (theguardian.com) 264
New submitter niittyniemi writes: There's a rather interesting photo-gallery over at The Guardian
which gives an indication of what life was like at Bell Labs c.1967.
This was the year that Dennis
Ritchie joined Bell Labs and went on to produce a body of work which has
been pretty much unrivaled in its influence on the modern computing
landscape, even some 50 years later.
What's noticeable about the pictures, is that they are of woman. I don't
think this is a result of the photographer just photographing "eye candy." I
think it's because he was surrounded by women, whom from his comments he
very much respected and hence photographed.
In those times, wrangling with a computer was very much seen as "clerical
work" and therefore the domain of woman. This can be seen as far back as
Bletchley Park and before that Ada Lovelace.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT
company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is
woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
The tech industry turned toxic. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the simplest explanation for why women fled the tech industry is that the industry became toxic due to
Re:The tech industry turned toxic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cooling in machine rooms might have had something to do with it. Try wearing a Sixties-style sleeveless dress in a computer room or data hall today
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They had cardigans in the 60s. Brown ones.
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That is true. Jumpers and jackets were not invented until 1992. Plus any woman caught wearing trousers in the 1960s was executed on the spot.
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And in the typical 1960s computer room, you didn't even have to remove the corpses. Just pull up a floor tile and drop the body into the underfloor morgue, I mean, cooling plenum in the subfloor.
Re:The tech industry turned toxic. (Score:4, Funny)
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I am also mail, I would also have to give up manspreading.
That would make us go postal!
Re:The tech industry turned toxic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'd like to think that most women are too smart to get into IT at this point.
For an example, my wife is a pre-school teacher. In that job, she gets:
1) A pension that pays 80% of her salary for the rest of her life when she retires.
2) 12 weeks of vacation (mostly summer break) a year
3) A 35 hour (8 to 3:30) workday
4) Government health benefits that beat almost anything that you can get in the private sector.
5) Tenured status after 5 years that basically guarantees that she has a job for life
Meanwhile, my IT job looks more like this:
1) A lousy 20% 401k match on 4% of my income. I'll never be able to retire on that.
2) 3 hours of vacation a year (that you almost don't want to take, since you know that everything will go to shit while you're out)
3) A 45+ hour workday, plus on-call hours.
4) Lousy health benefits with huge deductibles and co-pays
5) The constant threat that my job will be outsourced to some third-world country.
And we both get to deal with spoiled brats all day :)
So... who made the smarter career choice?
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Dude, your job *sucks*. Sounds like you really need to polish that CV and get a job somewhere that doesn't treat you like utter crap.
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Wouldn't these things also cause men to flee the tech industry? I don't see why any of those would only apply to women.
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The exact opposite is true. If you work as an employee, everything you do is property of your employer. If you work for hire, the specific code you produce belongs to the employer, but the development is yours, and the development material is far more important to the programmer than any specific code implementation.
Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
At least some of what was going on there was hardware work. The first picture shows a woman holding a 'scope probe, connected to an advanced, (for its time). Tektronix oscilloscope. And if she used the equipment for more than just that photo op, then her role was considerably more than clerical in nature.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Informative)
She's the exception to the rule in that gallery though... Not that there's any reason women can't be engineers (they're usually better than us; more focus, less stupid errors).
Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
FEWER stupid errors...
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Let's get pedantic, shall we?
If it's about countable errors, you AC, are absolutely right.
If it's about the magnitude of the errors (the stupidity of them), you are definitely not.
GP didn't specify. So he could be correct in his use of language. No need to go full Grammar Nazi here. Maybe women engineers both make less AND fewer stupid errors and GP's list of women engineering benefits simply isn't complete. Can hardly fault him (probably he is ... by the way, I am too) for that, can we?
Unless you have irre
Re:Easy (Score:4, Informative)
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
At least some of what was going on there was hardware work. The first picture shows a woman holding a 'scope probe, connected to an advanced, (for its time). Tektronix oscilloscope. And if she used the equipment for more than just that photo op, then her role was considerably more than clerical in nature.
Yes, but if you read the captions, most of them were actually clerical workers, keypunch operators, or tape handlers, as the OP said.
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It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
At least some of what was going on there was hardware work. The first picture shows a woman holding a 'scope probe, connected to an advanced, (for its time). Tektronix oscilloscope. And if she used the equipment for more than just that photo op, then her role was considerably more than clerical in nature.
It is much more likely that the woman was "...posing with a scope probe..." Not that she could not have been an engineer holding one of the tools she used every day, just not very likely.
Engineering? Clerical? (Score:2)
> software development is engineering, not clerical work
Thanks God Agile is changing that.
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That doesn't explain anything. You just made a claim, and expected prejudice that women can't be engineers to do the rest. That's ridiculously lazy, even for a misogynist. As the son of a woman who was writing code since the late 60s, I find your comment perplexing. Either you are wrong, or my mother doesn't exist. As I'm here typing this, it seems rather more likely that the former is wrong. I await whatever logical absurdity you intend to use to defend such a wretched position.
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It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
Well, yeah. That's a given. The question is: how did that became a factor in skewing the industry so bad as to squeeze the female workforce out?
I think this is greatly cultural. I see a higher proportion of women going into STEM (including software and CS) in countries like India and China than in the West. So there is a cultural factor at play, and it is one worth discussing (hopefully without devolving into misogyny and faux man-rights.)
Re:Easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably a late 80s thing, to be sure, because even at Atari, there were significant female population creating video games, and there were many females in the history of computer science as well.
I say 80s because that's when Nintendo came out, after the crash. They did one clever thing to get their NES on store shelves, and it may have had unintended consequences.
First, you have to remember the video game crash of the early 80s - it got to the point where retailers were shying away from anything videogame-related. So how does a company like Nintendo get their videogame machine in stores where retailers refuse to stock videogames?
Easy - you sell it as a toy that kids play with. But here's the rub - toy stores were (and generally still are) separated by gender - you have boy's toys on one set of aisles, and girl's toys on another set, and they will not mix. Nintendo now had a problem - is it a boy's toy or a girl's toy - it can only be one.
They chose boy.
This has very interesting ramifications - first, the Atari and other early console ads featured a whole family playing videogames - father, mother, daughter, son - all gathered around the TV and playing together. After this, Nintendo ads primarily featured boys - since that's how they decided to sell them. No more parents nor daughters - just boys gathering around playing.
Which may explain the perchant for people to regard videogames as what kids do, but not adults (because it was sold as a toy for boys, not the entire family), as well as regarding it as a male endeavour - again, Nintendo marketing as a boy's toy.
Other cultures didn't have this. Japan didn't have a videogame crash, and other countries didn't have to market exclusively to boys, so the whole videogame/computer association with boys never got made through marketing.
No Fucking Incentive for $100 Alex? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
The women who first worked with computers were treated like underling eye-candy, and told their daughters to avoid that shit like the plague? And their granddaughters now see it as a field where wages are going down, where they still get treated like second rate coders (even when they are not), and they are still avoiding that shit like the plague?
Shit, I'm not sure why any male wants to get into IT these days, never mind the ladies.
Generalization Bulls$*^ (Score:5, Interesting)
Women were not treated like underling eye candy. Your generalization matches propaganda, but propaganda does not match reality. Any attempt at explaining very complex social and economic issues with simple gender claims is wrong, and will be wrong.
Women in the 60s and 70s were looked upon with sadness and sympathy if they had to work. If a woman had to work, it was because her husband was not capable of supporting his family. If the guy was not in bad medical straights, he was a loser, a bum, an alcoholic, or an addict. Some women worked for the greater good, namely in sciences and teaching, but generally speaking it was frowned upon. Nothing at all to do with sexism, or the patriarchy holding women down. This modern push to get women working in careers for as long as possible before having a family, if they have a family is a newer trend brought to you by social engineers. It is not beneficial for society, it's beneficial for the wealthy who can cash in on the commercialism. It's also a great way of manipulating an economy to make it look progressive, when at the root it is nothing more than a string of broken window fallacies.
Women working in the sciences was actually common. Glamorized jobs for women didn't come about until the later 70s early 80s. Then women didn't want to work in Science, they wanted to work where they could do what they saw on TV and advertisements. Make huge bucks with sex appeal, marry that rich guy she worked with, and live happily ever after in the mansion. Scientists don't make money, and didn't then either.
Look at when development were made for like disposable diapers, fast food, the microwave, baby formula. Suddenly this fantasy about men abusing women by not letting them sit in an office for 45-50 hours a week will dissipate. Then you have to work on dispelling the more recent propaganda.
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Your analysis is mostly correct, but you're off by a decade or more. It all goes back to the 1940s and Rosie the Riveter.
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Your analysis is mostly correct, but you're off by a decade or more. It all goes back to the 1940s and Rosie the Riveter.
No, he's right about the timing. Rosie was thrust into work out of patriotic necessity, because all of the men were off fighting. The fact that Rosie did an admirable job did open up lots of opportunities for women to work in the 50s and into the 60s, and it undoubtedly gave some women a taste for the empowerment of making their own money, but that doesn't change the fact that the social structure still expected women to be homemakers. Success for women was about being married to a successful man and keepin
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It's probably an age thing. He's mostly correct *if you only look at that time frame* - there was a big lull in that after the boys returned. That comes with some caveats and people will try to twist that. A fun stat that people like to toss out is that 80% of the women were "forced" out of work after the war. The reality is, only 20% of them wanted to continue and 18% of the women forced out of work were "colored." (Yes, I've dragged out the citations before.)
So, 2% of the white women still wanted to work
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Sorry, did you just use massive generalisations in an attempt to show why someone else's generalisation is incorrect?
Also, how can women being looked down upon be anything other than sexism? You glossed right over that claim.
Your post sounds like a fantasy you concocted, drenched with generalisations that point at women being the culprits, and then drifts off into some weird rant which has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion at all.
You are trying too hard.
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Oh, what the hell? It's *kinda* trolling but it's also serious...
I'll believe you're actually interested in equality when you send me a newspaper clipping that shows you went down to your local courthouse to wave a sign protesting that women don't get equal sentences when they're convicted for domestic violence.
I mean, c'mon... What else are we supposed to do with this thread? But, in all seriousness... I await a newspaper clipping. ;-)
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Some women worked for the greater good, namely in sciences and teaching, but generally speaking it was frowned upon. Nothing at all to do with sexism, or the patriarchy holding women down.
Wait what? How on earth is frowning on women working merely because they're women not sexism?
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True, nowadays only politicians can get away with having an assistant for fun.
But the real reason is that work just doesn't pay enough for most of us to afford a 2nd "secretary" and those that do earn so much they can have 3 or 4 think they're too important to do anything but flounce about thinking they're working.
Besides, why would it be creepy? She gets paid, regular hours, and doesn't have to worry about her pimp beating her up and taking the cash!
Which Culture Are We Talking About? (Score:4, Interesting)
Historically some cultures had primarily male clerical workers. Up till recently some had primarily female welders. Social context makes difference. Women have not been excluded for lack of capability. The decline is a sign of sociological bias because of where industry manufacturing was located.
Also decline of unskilled labor jobs in manufacturing after the decline of post war government funding of large projects drove more men to clerical (techie) jobs. The jobs were just rebranded to make them palatable to the post world war 2 cohort.
The cold war created the last of the big science jobs funded by government. Many of hose jobs were in research labs and clerical.
What actually happened in North America was grunt jobs disappeared and the grunts began to occupy the clerical space to make a living. This at it's best would reduce the clerical jobs available to women by 50%.
So, it probably wasn't a sexist plot. Just a shift in markets.
Wrong bell labs (Score:5, Informative)
Dennis Ritchie worked at the Murray Hill, NJ campus, which is also where the transistor was invented, etc. These photos are from some Oakland, CA location.
Not full circle (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle.
If the industry had turned full-circle then it would be full of women again. Instead it seems that the industry has done a vile 180.
If I had to take a guess... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Schools across the world teach typing, and require a certain speed for passing the course. Also, women make up a rather large proportion of computer users, including writers. Plus, back then they used punch cards for most development, not normal keyboards.
So no, typing quickly doesn't seem to be the answer.
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Schools across the world teach typing, and require a certain speed for passing the course.
True today, not true in the 40s and 50s, when the women in the photos were in school. It really wasn't until the advent of computers that schools decided typing was a generally-useful skill. I took a required typing class in Junior High in the early 80s, but it had only been a few years since it became a general requirement.
I think the GP has a point, that keyboarding skills were primarily feminine in that era, and that was part of the reason that computer operator jobs were seen as feminine. It was prima
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keyboarding skills were primarily feminine in that era
Some people still have that weird perception. My girlfriend will remark occasionally how strange she finds it that I can type so much faster than she can, and I'm "a man". I just shake my head.
Aww, Winchesters (Score:2)
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They were still in use at Bell Labs in 1997 when I left. On Vaxen.
Bell learned early of the talent females offered (Score:2)
It was learned early in the telephone business females a better job on the other end.
At first males were hired to be switchboard operators but they flipped bs to the other end all the time. Females replaced them, it worked out so well I guess females were more than welcome in their business outside of the switchboard.
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That is something you just invented. I'm for fighting all kinds of inequality, including if the minority in question is white guys. I'm not alone. I think your little outburst says more about how ill-educated you are on this topic than those you slung it at.
we don't need tape librarians anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Tape library work really was clerical work.
The computer would put up a number, the tape librarian would find the tape with that number and mount it.
That was drudge work, and those jobs are just plain gone. Most storage is on-line now, and what isn't is near-line where the tapes are located and mounted by robots.
I'm not saying women didn't do technical computer work then. But many of these jobs are non-technical. And the statement these women aren't eye candy is undercut by the fact that they are (almost) all dressed up and in some cases showing off their wall hangings.
Re:we don't need tape librarians anymore (Score:5, Informative)
Since you weren't around at the time, allow me to inform you that the clothes the women are wearing represent very typical office attire ca. 1965-75.
Re:we don't need tape librarians anymore (Score:5, Informative)
The custom of the day was that you dressed up for work, men and women. You didn't go slouching into the office in jeans and a t-shirt.
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The custom of the day was that you dressed up for work, men and women. You didn't go slouching into the office in jeans and a t-shirt.
Correct. Even as late as the mid 1990s I had a job that required me to wear a tie for a while even though it was a Unix system admin job supporting a group of developers and we never met customers. We still had to wear ties. Not suits but ties. To protest this nonsense we guys wore some pretty creatively designed ties, some of which were not very professional, but as long as we had on a tie, even a stupid one, management left us alone. I think that lasted for 2 years until the management guy who made u
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Agreed. The only things missing are ashtrays and cigarettes.
Even in the machine room, back then, save for the serious organizations. I scrubbed Selectric covers with straight ammonia back then to cut the nicotine. Imagine, IBM didn't make three shades of beige, that typewriter was WHITE!
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It's just been automated.
groups=...,0(wheel),5(operator)
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipe... [freebsd.org]
I replaced a job with a gid.
Because there were pathways up to those roles (Score:4, Interesting)
big hair (Score:2)
Don't think (Score:2)
"I don't think ... I think it's because ..."
So this is very much a discussion on the some random thought of some random blogger, isn't it? Richie was a good photographer, though.
Maybe I'm missing something but... (Score:3)
Most of the pics in the article were of woman doing clerical and data entry. These job functions have been largely automated. So it would kind of make sense that the more we automate away the jobs that woman performed in tech, the less women will be there.
Am I missing something? The article is SJW bate right? But content of the article don't seem conducive towards an good old fashion SJW flame war.
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Yes, you are missing something: A photoset from one company does not represent the entire industry over a decades-long span of existence. Maybe you are so annoyed with "SJWs" because some of them seem to have a better grasp of logic than you, and can show you just where you went wrong.
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So I kept seeing SJW being used here so decided to look it up. Found an interesting article which explained the history and usage. I particularly like the idea of needing Social Justice Clerics, Social Justice Mages and Social Justice Rogues to balance the party.
I mostly find it interesting that people on the outer edges of ideological phase space can't think for themselves. Rather than look at the merits of an argument on it's own they're relegated to thinking in terms of acronyms.
Why there are so few women ? Because of the men. (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a look at how male software people treat women and you got your answer. The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS is that she was shocked by all the drooling guys in college. During the new student orientation week, there was always this 'magic number' buzzing around: How many females dared to show up. I sometimes really felt embarrassed by my fellow male students.
Submitter missed the point (Score:2, Interesting)
The submitter of this article did not work at the Labs during the Dennis Ritchie era.
Women at that time held repetitive jobs that engineers weren't allowed to perform. It doesn't mean that we didn't appreciate their work. We did. They made our own time much more productive.
What we lacked in those days was the instant feedback that we needed to catch bugs. That is the biggest area where our work environment was not productive. And we had to fight tooth and nail to get TSO terminals and mini-computers be
Best mentor I got was a woman (Score:2)
I do however highly respect the people that develop and maintain the wonderful APIs I use on a daily base. Most of them I think are men. Never met them though.
How long ago? (Score:2)
even some 50 years later
That's 48 years, you insensitive clod!
Subby: Don't ever end a summary with "Discuss." (Score:2)
Seriously. What else do you expect readers to do? That is a very condescending statement.
Being old enough to remember when IBM mainframes ruled data centers, I can assure you that these woman are minimum wage clerical staff; keypunch and tape librarians (a.k.a. "operators"). Notice that Bea, the one in front of the oscilloscope is also pictured pulling a tape off the rack.
Another big part of their job was pulling printouts off the printers and putting them into little pigeon holes for the engineers to pick
Poor ROI drive women to other career fields (Score:2)
Plugboard Queenbee (Score:2)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
Look around at the field of garbage collection, there aren't many women there either but I don't hear you complaining about it.
That's because writing garbage collectors is a man's job.
Bell labs "failed" by making money. (Score:5, Informative)
bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
Bell Labs existed to spend money - provided it was on research that had SOME plausible connection to improving the state of the art of telephony.
This was because, as part of the legislative deal that gave Bell a near-monopoly on telephony, they were allowed to set their rates to return a regulated percentage on their expenses, and those expenses included such research.
Suppose this rate was 6%:
1. Spend a hundred million dollars researching, designing, and delivering telephone service.
2. Set the phone rates so you collect 106 million dollars.
3. Deliver the phone service and collect the money.
4. Profit! (six million dollars of it).
Spend more on research, raise the rates, make more profit. So the incentive is to shoehorn in as much basic research as you can possibly manage to SOMEHOW connect to telephony and spend as much as you can on it. So spending money in this profitable way is what Bell Labs was intended to do.
But they get to (were REQUIRED to) license their inventions. And the money from these licenses counts against their costs. From year one they made more on licensing inventions than they spent on research. So they were a "failure" at their original purpose, but the poster child that proved basic research was a money-maker, big time, even though you didn't know in advance HOW you'd end up making money off it.
This continued through the Bell breakup, the spinout as Lucent technologies, and didn't get broken until about the new millenium, when management pulled a standard loot-the-company stunt: improving the bottom line (and their bonuses and options) by cutting off research that wouldn't pay off until a few years down the road (when they're gone, their money is safe, and their successors get to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.) A few years back some of the old hands were brought back to revive the near-corpse, and it seems to be on the mend.
Xerox PARC's opportunity to create wonders out of basic research was also enabled by an accounting pathology - though of a much different sort.
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Re:Bell labs "failed" by making money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bell Labs created the transistor, Unix, c, comsats, and goodness knows what else.
As Jerry Pournelle used to say. Bell Labs was the closest thing to an R&D department for the human race we have ever seen.
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R&D is an expense today, which is subtracted from revenue before determining taxable profit.
Re:huge budgets to hire the best... oh wait.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The English language is being pummeled into submission by reddit style reporting on the front page. Discuss.
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That could explain the higher population of Women working there. As they had a monopoly on the telephone systems, they had staff of telephone operators who were slowly becoming obsolete and need new jobs for them.
However Woman in Computer Science based jobs were much higher back in the old'n days. If you go to any place that still has mainframes as its core technology you have a much higher woman (most of them are at or near retirement age) % then newer organizations.
Re:Shocking, really (Score:4, Interesting)
Fascinating. Honestly, fascinating.
I would characterise it more as "somewhat weird, possibly creepy". If you look at the notes accompanying the photos, it seems like the guy was also responsible for hiring them all. He then bought them materials to make artwork for the walls. That's just a wee bit odd.
You can obviously interpret it in many ways, ranging from positive to negative: He was a big supporter of women in the workplace, he was overly paternalistic, he was a bit creepy... in any case I don't think you can generalise from this to the computer industry as a whole.
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I would characterise it more as "somewhat weird, possibly creepy". If you look at the notes accompanying the photos, it seems like the guy was also responsible for hiring them all. He then bought them materials to make artwork for the walls. That's just a wee bit odd.
You should keep in mind the The Guardian chose those photos from a larger collection to highlight the presence (and hairstyles) of computer women of the 60s. I don't think buying art supplies for your team is necessarily any more creepy than buying them Nerf guns, fitbits, or a foosball table. Pick distractions that fit the tastes and interests of your team.
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Well note how he describes some of these women;
"smartest of the bunch"
"a smart single mom"
"a soft-spoken newlywed "
The first suggests he identified, and ranked the intelligence of, these people as a separate group, based on their gender rather than their occupation. Bea may have been the "smartest of the bunch", but she still gets lumped into together with the lowliest female clerk.
The other two he identifies by the fact they have children and their marital status. Would he do the same if he was describ
Re:Here on Slashdot, SJW Work is Never Done (Score:5, Insightful)
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But did the site have stupid 4chan/reddit style English grammar at the time? Discuss.
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If I might play devil's advocate here. The fact there were once far more women in IT is often brought up in the shortage of woman in IT situation. The idea is to say "see, woman must have loved to do engineering work until those evil white males drove them away with their neckbeards".
However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
So, at least according to the art
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The idea is to say "see, woman must have loved to do engineering work until those evil white males drove them away with their neckbeards".
That's just a deliberate mis-representation that anti-feminists use to discredit the argument, i.e. a straw man.
So, at least according to the article, we know the cause of the decline of woman in the IT workplace. We just have less of a call for tape librarians.
That rather misses the point though. The nature of jobs in IT changed, sure, but why don't we have more female sysadmins or technicians? It doesn't really explain why there are fewer female programmers, as a percentage of the total, than there used be. All you are really saying is that a heavily gender biased job was made obsolete, not offering any real insight into the issue.
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It doesn't really explain why there are fewer female programmers, as a percentage of the total, than there used be.
This has been asked (by you) and answered (by everyone else) again and again and again ad nauseum. You get told this at least twice a month. Let me try again:
Women in the 80's had fewer career choices than women today.
I'm actually genuinely curious at this point - why do you continue this argument? It's been debunked multiple times, yet you still try so hard. I'm not being facetious - I'd really rather like to know. It's now beyond the point of being commonly accepted knowledge - when women have choice t
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So, your argument is that there used to be an artificially high number of women in CS because they had fewer other choices, and now that more options have been opened up the percentage is returning to some kind of "natural" level?
That seems unlikely, especially given that you have not explained why the "natural" level isn't 50% (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying you need to explain your reasoning).
Or are you perhaps saying that the decline doesn't indicate things have got worse, merely that they stayed
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However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
You mean the same types of low level support positions that are replaced by H1Bs before they're completely automated?
How is it that slashdotters can identify and call out the "low level support personnel" when looking at a photo from decades ago but don't realize they're in the exact same position now?
If you're doing things the same way you've been doing them for the last N years, then you're about to be completely automated so that the rest of us can start working in the 2050 'efficient workplace'.
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Any time a site with a muddy history like Slashdot does a story about something cool and totally ignores the cool angle and immediately focuses on what the only topic the far-left is interested in, that's a bunch of bullshit.
It IS part of the "oppress nerds, uplift women" thought. Because if it wasn't, where is the racist talk? Feminism is for white women, and that's exactly what we have here. The racists are totally absent from this conversation.
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How do they not remember Jack Thompson [jackthompson.org]? Anita Sarkeesian is just a boring rehash of the same crap Jack said with more of a sexual spin less of a violence spin.
Re:Here on Slashdot, SJW Work is Never Done (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Slashdot has had a wide variety of articles and a wide variety of viewpoints back in the day.
What has made Slashdot into "what it is today" are neaderthal neckbeards like yourself who have the self control of a toddler and can't simply scroll past articles that don't interest them. Instead, they come into them and shit all over the place and get modded up by their equally ignorant and intolerant cronies.
These neanderthal neckbeards weren't what made Slashdot - but they are what is destroying it.
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Agreed, but what I would say has changed is that the summaries are now trolling. This could have been presented a number of ways, just like the Code of Conduct story the other day which was a total non-controversy, but the summary trolled us and made a lot of people (who naturally didn't RTFA) angry.
Re:Here on Slashdot, SJW Work is Never Done (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but to be honest it pretty much wouldn't have mattered what the summary said. The people who got angry were the all the usual suspects and are part of the perpetually offended crowd who seem to believe that the efforts to get diversity in tech mean that everyone hates straight white men like them and is always out to get them by accusing them of rape or some such nonsense.
Re:Here on Slashdot, SJW Work is Never Done (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic that all the things they accuse "SJWs" of - being perpetually offended, wanting to silence others and shut down debates, demanding everyone agree with them and labelling any dissent as abuse and harassment - is all the stuff they themselves are doing.
Then they tell you to grow a thicker skin, while being unable to scroll past articles they don't like without getting offended themselves.
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Looks more to me like you're trying to project your ideological hangups onto a completely unrelated story because ZOMG pictures of wimmins next to computers, it's a plot to castrate us all.
*eyeroll*
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There is literally no job that is available to a man that isn't also available to a similarly capable woman.
Sperm donation.
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You mean they'll pay you for that? My guidance counsellor has some serious explaining to do...
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Do Americans also do this IRL? I mean, posit something and then end with: 'discuss'? I mean, it's annoying in message boards, but bloody hell that would make me lose it if someone were to say that to me in the flesh.
I propose that any post that ends with 'discuss.' is automatically deleted by /.
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Women back then didn't complain about rugs in the office.
Presumably you are referring to Chris Wanstrath removing Github's "United Meritocracy of Github" mat.
The reason it was removed is that Github and the tech industry isn't a meritocracy, and saying it is just enables people to carry on thinking that the reason there are more white people at the top is because white people are better than minorities. If it's a meritocracy, that's the only explanation.
In real life, white people tend to have more privilege. Not all of them, and not equally, and no-one is blaming
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to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.
In reality, white people make up about 75% of the population of the USA (even more in places like the UK), so there's a bigger pool of talent to choose from.
The idea that white people are privileged is a bit of identity politics from the black and identity-politics brigade that seeks to denigrate white people and promote blacks (same applies to women, for example, this isn't a racist thing) sayi
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to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.
Indeed! The police bend over backwards to include them in stop and search, and employers bend over backwards to include black people in the category of people discriminated against purely on the basis of their name [nber.org].
Wow such inclusion many privilege.
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The reddit account isn't me. In fact, on the first page of Google results only the Slashdot account is me, the Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, Sourceforge and Deviant Art accounts are not me. I thought it was a fairly unique name, but I guess not.
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The vast majority of women today don't do those things, just as some guys do those things today.
You're going to have to try better than using "INSERT AGED STEREOTYPES HERE" as an argument. Your wonderful use of illogical generalisations and the masterful false dichotomy at the end really drive home just how vapid your argument is.
Do you tell all the women you know in your life just how much contempt you seem to have for them? Or do you hold this attitude just towards women you don't know or like? If that
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But women back then did complain about things such as being paid 30 to 50 cents on the dollar that men made. They also weren't very fond of the rampant sexism.
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Nothing to do with lint and static electricity, of course.
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You don't think the alienation great swathes of the possible IT workforce is of any concern to anyone here? I'd say it's very important, and hand-waving it away as some sort of politics or even non-story is incredibly disingenuous.
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It's not Stuff That Matters to Nerds.
If it doesn't matter, then why does anyone comment?
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Possibly the same reason: societal splitting of jobs based on assumed "suitable" gender, and then the cementing of those assumptions through generation after generation of workers being exposed to them and reinforcing them through participation. IT having fewer female developers and nursing having fewer male nurses are quite possibly part of the same issue. If we just scream "SJW! SJW! SJW!" and stick our fingers in our ears we might never know for sure.