- as the title indicates, women have been there since the dawn of computing
- computer referred to a person that did calculations, and it was usually a woman.
- is sitting on your ass on a comfortable chair in front of a computer instead of running around caving in skulls really masculine or feminine?
IIRC back when “computer” is a person rather than an object, it was a woman’s job.
So it was always an object?
it was OOP even back then
And even when computers started to come around, data entry was still largely female dominated. It wasn’t until late ron that it became a male dominated space. Largely due to the takeover of video games, which were in America heavily marketed towards only boys and not often marketed towards girls.
The origins of computer programming are also intertwined with textiles, as the first punch card programs emerged as part of weaving in the early 1800s (Jacquard looms).
Also interesting: trans people in addition to cis women are historically associated with textile production in many cultures. Trans programmer socks = modern day trans weaver.
Lovelace
On the subject of lace, making it is very intricate and quite mathematical too
whats really funny to me is people make this claim, but any good study that looks for differences finds none or that women are very slightly better at math and spatial reasoning
honestly, drawing patterns only uses “calculus” and “trig” because those are the arbitrary names given to the thought processes that blend the proper melding of mind to motion
Remember me to
A lot of math needed, more as for the pattern, to make clothes to fit on an irregular body
First computers are based on the input of sewing machines
I wonder if this is what they were referencing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-level_task
“…the finding that men perform [the water-level task] at a higher level has been robustly confirmed.”I assume for the college level students it’s who can mark the level of the water most accurately? I certainly hope all of them would at least mark the water line horizontal to the ground
Whenever I hear someone slopping that “adage” out, I silently note that they’ve no idea how many of the Apollo astronauts were able to return to Earth safely. (It rhymes with “female mathematicians”, btw.)
(It rhymes with “female mathematicians”, btw.)
…The male mathematicians? Retail statisticians?? Detailed staff positions???
All of them, the answer is all of them. Follow me for more English hacks!
I love these pseudo intelectual arguments that try to explain human behavior. It’s a fact that there are biological differences between men and women, that is obvious. But people love to pull sophisticated pseudo scientific arguments that rest in very weak premises, which often ignore the many other factors (for example social and political) that also influence the outcome this argument is trying to explain.
So, this women are bad at spatial awareness so they are bad at math. How do we objectively validate the premise in the first place, without taking into account biases that can influence that very premise, like social, nutritional and political factors? Are math skills only influenced by spatial awareness or are there other factors that influence math skills?
So this argument is actually a subjective prejudice but worded in a way that seems to be scientifically valid. One consequence of the enlightenment is that we started to try all the time to disguise a subjective prejudice with an objective truth. After that we had eugenics, (pseudo-) scientific race theory and all kinds bad justifications, but the truth is that people want to exploit other people, and they think that coming up with moral and scientific explanations for this exploitation makes them sleep better after making numerous atrocities during the day.
