2018

Women and Computer Science in the 20th and 21st Centuries

science technology and society

Nhi Tran

Table of Contents

Abstract:...................................................................................................................................2

Brief Description.......................................................................................................................2

Findings....................................................................................................................................31. 1940s – 1950: Second World War and the dawn of Computer Science..............................................32. 1950s – 1960: Era of computer inventions and female inventors.......................................................53. 1960s – 1970: The turbulent period – software crisis, opportunity for part-time................................84. 1970s – 1980: The shortage of programmers and the rise of software engineering............................95. 1980s – 21st century: Women became the minority in computer programming................................12

Analysis...................................................................................................................................14

Conclusion...............................................................................................................................18

Bibliography...........................................................................................................................20

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Abstract:

This research paper examines the participation of women in the field of computer

science from the end of the Second World War to the first decade of twenty-first century. The

paper investigates the changes in the nature of computer science while comparing it with the

changes in the percentage of women in the field.

The findings of the paper suggest that the changes in nature in computer science

throughout the chosen timeline is only one factor impacting the portion of women in the field.

The other factor, which is more or less influential, is social stigmata.

Brief Description

At its early stage – the second half of the twentieth century, Computer Science was a

female-dominant field. The number of women who actively worked in the field was

significant, when comparing to the alarmingly low figure at modern time. Nowadays,

Computer Science is categorized as one of the hardcore sciences which are dominated by

male scientists. Providing the demographic shift, I am intrigued to investigate the change in

the perception of the public of the field, and the extent to which this change contributed to the

imbalance of gender distribution in the field. At a personal level, I am particularly interested

in the topic of Women and Computer Science because I consider Computer Science a

potential major for my undergraduate degree. Therefore, I would like to know more about the

gender role, if it does exist, in this field to better prepare myself for my academic choice.

The topic of Women and Computer Science is directly relevant to the subject of

Sciences, Technology and Society. The topic is tied with one of the topics included in the

class syllabus – Science and Gender, Women in Science. The research paper will examine the

participation of women in a scientific field from a social perspective to investigate the impact

of society on the concerned field.

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Findings

The point in human history that marked the rise of computer science coincided with

the end of the Second World War. Since its beginning, the field has transformed radically, not

only in its technology and application, but also in its demography. It might not occur to many

that at the dawn of computer science, women played an active role in the field. To be more

precise, computer science was initially perceived as feminine. However, as a consequence of

the change in computer science, the role of women in computer science has changed over

time. This change can be traced using the following timeline.

1. 1940s – 1950: Second World War and the dawn of Computer Science.

The Second World War resulted in devastating loss for many countries, both the

victorious and the defeated. However, the war did not merely brought detriments with itself.

Rather, it brought opportunities for the unprivileged classes in society. Women were among

those whom opportunities befell on. Many women, taking good advantage of the silver

lightning, marched their way into the male-dominant society from many directions, one of

which was computer programming.

In the 1940s, as an effort to decode the German military messages, several

mathematicians, such as Alan Turing and Max Newman to name a few, developed

deciphering machines, which marked the dawn of computer science. The two most prominent

projects include the Colossus and the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

(ENIAC). The Colossus, developed by the British, initially operated in February 1944. The

ENIAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania, US, was completed in November 1945.

At the time, due to the need of soldiers to combat in the battle field, there was a

serious shortage of male labor in the workforce. Consequently, the government proactively

recruited women to fill out the blank in the job market. The government set up propagandas,

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aspiring women of their ability to do the socially perceived male jobs and of their

responsibility to serve the country in the time of war. Consequently, women were also

recruited in the two above-mentioned projects. The recruitment protocols of the two projects

bore some similarities, especially the following two requirements. One criterium was a

substantial education background or the competence in mathematics and the ability to operate

computing machines at the time. The other criterium was their performance in an aptitude

test, which examined their intellectual capability to determine their competence for the job.

Once accepted, these women run the machines, which were designed and built by the male

mathematicians in the projects.

When the war was over, the fate of the women participating in the two projects turned

differently. For the Colossus, aiming at keeping the project at top-level national secret, the

government terminated the project, dispatched the teams without forgetting to require each

member to not disclose any detail about the project to any party. Consequently, women were

required to return to their pre-war jobs, such as housewife, nurse, caretakers, clerical jobs,

etc. As noted by Janet Abbate in her book ‘Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing

Participation in Computing’, despite wishing to seek for jobs in the field of computer

programming, many women having worked in Colossus, could not persuade their recruiters

of their ability due to their signing contract with the British government about not disclosing

any detail of the Colossus project to any party. Moreover, they had little to none

qualifications to justify their competence for the position. This was not the case for their male

colleagues in the Colossus project, who were qualified mathematicians with qualified

certificates and degrees. Therefore, while the male members of the Colossus project

continued working with computers or other related fields, the female workers had no choice

but to return to their pre-war routines.

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The case for the Colossus’s trans-Atlantic female counter part was slightly less

pessimistic. For the ENIAC, since it was not completed until the war was over, the women in

the project could not only maintain their position, but also play contributing roles in the field.

Unlike their female counterparts working in the Colossus project, the women working for

ENIAC could play a more active role in the design of the machine. Rather than merely

operate the machines with the instructions given by the male mathematicians, the ENIAC

female team did a bigger share of the job. They conducted numerical analysis, converted

these analyses to instructions that met with the computer’s operating and calculating capacity

and then set up the machine to do the task. Providing their tasks, these women were titled

programmers, while their female Colossus counterparts were referred to as operators.

2. 1950s – 1960: Era of computer inventions and female inventors

The 1950s could be seen as the glorious era for women in computer programming.

After the Second World War, there was a shift in purpose of computers, which resulted in

breakthroughs in the field. Among the many inventors, women were among the most

celebrated with their impressive contributions to the field. Consequently, they shaped social

conception of computer programming at the time.

During and right after the Second World War, computers were mainly used by the

government for military purposes. In addition to deciphering the Axis’s messages, computers

were also used to for more complicated calculation. For instance, since the ENIAC was not

complete until the war was over, the ENIAC team could not use the machine as a deciphering

tool. Instead, the machine was used to calculate the ballistic projectile.

In post-war era, the potential of computers in business was realized. The military was

no longer the sole end customer. Computers were then used to do tasks that were more

relevant to daily business, such as payroll, accounting, etc. The military was no longer the

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sole end customers of computer firms. Rather, they included businesses. Responding to the

new demand of the job, during this time, many female programmers, especially those

working in the ENIAC project, made quite substantial contributions to the advancement of

the field. In the words of Abbate (2012), women’s incentives behind these inventions were to

improve the user-friendliness of computers so as to the end customers without much technical

knowledge could use them with ease. For instance, Betty Snyder, a former ENIAC member,

developed a sort-merger generator that saved programmers tremendous time from rewriting

already established subroutines when writing new programs. This generator inspired Grace

Hopper, also a former ENIAC member, to develop a compiler, which she named A-0

compiler, in 1951. With this invention, programmers could write pseudo codes, which was

more comprehensible because it is close to English, and the compiler would translate these

codes to instructions in computer language, saving programmers a great amount of time from

rewriting these instructions while programming. These two inventions were the foundation

for high-level programming languages. Moreover, they ignited the beginning of the

automation era in computer programming. In addition to these two individuals, there were

other leading female experts in the field, who contributed to or led projects whose output

were highly regarded in the field, such as Adele Mildred Koss, who created the first editing

generator to reduce time taken to format data for tape or printer, Nora Moser and her

contribution to improve the widely used Editing Generator, Mary Hawes and her contribution

to the development of COBOL, and Lois Haibt and her contribution to the float analysis.

Although many female programmers went on to pursuit their career in the field of computer

programming, women representation in the field were still low relative to men: women

accounted for twenty percent of the programmers while men eighty.

It is also worth looking into the recruitment methods of employers in computer

programming at the time. Job advertisements were separated for males and females: there

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were sessions in the job search, which were distinctively separated between male jobs and

female jobs. For recruiters, there were three standard criteria for the recruiting process. The

first one was a college degree. College degree acted as an indication of general intelligence

and an applicant’s ability to obtain programming knowledge. According to Abbate (2012), in

1966, about 35% of employers in the United States set college degree as a requirement for

applicants. In the UK, all of government labs and universities as part of their criteria for

recruitment. The second criterium was their performance on an aptitude test. Different

employers applied different, yet similar, aptitudes test during the recruiting process. The

aptitude test acted as an indication of the applicants’ ability to enter computer programming.

The third criterium was experience. Some, but not all, employers also organized training to

train new employees to help them become accustomed to the culture and the nature of the

business.

Year

United States United Kingdom

Percentage of people aged

from 25 to 29 with a college

degree

Percentage of women among

those with a college degree

Percentage of people aged

from 25 to 29 with a college

degree

Percentage of women among

those with a college degree

1950 7.7 24 3.5 23

1970 16.4 43 8.4 31

Table1: Percentage of the population with a college degree and the percentage of women among with a college degree

among them in the US and the UK. Date is taken from Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender : Women’s changing

participation in computing. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2012.

During this period, computer programming was strongly associated with women. In

job advertisement looking for programmers, the set of required skills included patience,

attention to details and the ability to follow instructions. Moreover, household metaphor

relating to women were added to job advertisements as a means to attract more women to

apply for the positions. According to Abbate (2012), this was an effort made by the female

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programmers, who were working for the firms at the time, by pushing their employers to

recruit more women into the field. Programming at the time were considered to be a low-

level job that required little intelligence because women could do it, said Abbate (2012) in

her book. While women bore the lower level job of programming, men completed computer

science with their masculine share of hardware engineering. Hardware engineering involved

using engineering skills to build computer systems. Labeled as an engineering job, hardware

engineering was ranked higher than computer programming.

3. 1960s – 1970: The turbulent period – software crisis, opportunity for part-time

housewife programmers.

The 1960s was a turbulent era of computer programming. There are threats and, at the

same time, opportunities to be taken. The most detrimental threats at the time was the

software crisis that significantly discredited the people working in the field. At the same time,

opportunities were created with the introduction of customized software.

Looking back in the 1960s, software crisis would not escape the conversations of

many computer science historians. Programming was not viewed with agreeable eyes during

this time due to many reasons. The general view on programming products was that the

products were most of the times full of bugs and unreliable, always late and exceedingly

overbudget. Programmers, consequently, could not escape the public skepticism. They were

considered to be too hard to work with. Abbate (2012) believed that these critics only

reflected the truth to a certain extent. They were only true for big projects that were at the

forefront of the field serving non-commercial purposes, such as scientific researches,

government programs, etc. Other software products commonly used by businesses were

rather reliable and highly regarded among the customers. Nevertheless, the harm was done.

The software crisis significantly discredited programmers, creating a backward stigma for

software programming in general. Moreover, the distinction between hardware engineering

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and computer programmers were also extended. The hardware engineers were able to

gradually improve the physical capacity of computers in terms of memory and speed.

However, the computer programmers tend to lag behind, unable to improve their programs to

match the physical improvement.

Despite the ongoing software crisis, there were many opportunities for software

business in the 1960s resulting from the introduction of customized software. Customized

software are computer programs designed and written to cater for the needs of a particular

business. It was a trend at the time to open a software business that offer such service.

Among the successful examples, there are two potent female names: Elsie Shutt in the US

and Stephanie Shirley in the UK. At the time, due to social constrains to women, it was hard

for women to go back to their job after having a family and giving birth to children. Firms

deliberately rejected their application during the recruitment process. As a result, there was

an abundance of female programmers looking for a part-time programming jobs while

fulfilling their housewife and mother duty. Seeing the resources of qualified programmers in

need of employment, Shutt and Shirley opened and run software firms, which employed part-

time stay-at-home female programmers, offering customized programs for business. They

received surmountable success with their business models. However, their business did not

receive much social approval due to the negative social stigma on middle-class working

women. At the time, when a middle-class woman had a job, her husband would be viewed as

an insufficient provider. This notorious idea put a threat to the husband’s ego and,

consequently, their marriage. This social stigma was probably one of the most challenging

obstacles barring women from pursuing a career not only in computer programming but also

other in other fields.

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4. 1970s – 1980: The shortage of programmers and the rise of software engineering

Before the 1970s, programming was considered a feminine skill due to the

participation of women in the field. Consequently, programmers were not regarded highly,

unlike the hardware engineers, which was regarded as a more prestigious job because it was a

male-dominant field. The 1970s was a transitory time for computer programming. The term

software engineering gained in popularity, promising higher status for programmers. Another

remark of this era is the serious shortage of programmers.

In 1968, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) organized a conference in

Garmisch, Germany to discuss the transformation of computer programming into software

engineering. The conference invited leading male experts in the field of computer science

from all over the world to Garmisch, Germany. The term ‘software engineering’ was coined

at the conference. In addition to the birth of the term, the experts also discussed means to

address the software crisis contemporarily confronting and threatening the field. Despite its

ceremonial nature and the failure in implementations these steps after the conference, the

conference did provide a momentum for the acceleration of computer programming,

especially with the introduction of the term ‘software engineering’. The term ‘software

engineering’ did not gain popularity until the beginning of the 1970s, when it appeared in

computer programming literature. With the popularity of the term came the popularity of

computer programming. Programmers were then no longer merely a low-level skill now that

it was labeled ‘engineering’. Abbate (2012) argued that this term did more harm to women

then it brought advantages to male programmers. At the time, engineering was considered a

masculine field. Consequently, labelling programming as engineering deterred women from

entering the field. Therefore, while the term upgraded the overall status of programmers, it

also acted as a drag force dragging women away from the field.

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Labor shortage was a serious issue in software programming. The issue had existed in

the 1960s. However, due to the rapid growth of software engineering during this time, the

shortage was manifested. Despite the shortage of programmers, the average salary for male

programmers was less than an engineer. As noted by Abbate (2012), an engineer could earn

on average $13,149 a year, while a programmer $11,193. For female programmers, the

number was significantly less, about $7,763. However, at the time, programming was

considered to be the highest paid job for women.

United States United Kingdom

Labor Needed Actual Labor Labor Needed Actual Labor

100,000 (1966) 13,000 (1960) 6,500 (1967)

650,000 (1970) 258,000 (1970) 63,000 (1976)

Table 2: Number of programmers needed (people) and Actual Number of programmers (people) in the US and the UK. Date

taken from Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender : Women’s changing participation in computing. Cambridge, Mass. :

MIT Press, c2012

The 1970s also marked the period of equality for women, when movements for

equality gained in momentum. In the nineteenth century, many laws restricting the working

hour and the type of jobs women were allowed to do were passed with the good intention of

protecting women from overworking to support them with their child-bearing duty. In the

UK, these laws were referred to as ‘Factory Acts’ beginning in 1802. In the US, the

movement began in Wisconsin in 1867, and gradually spread to other states. However,

diverging from the initial intentions of the legislatives, these rules posed as obstacles for

women to enter the workplace in the twentieth century. The movement for equality began in

the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s. They brought about legislations that paved

the way for women to gain equality with their male counterparts in the workplace. A few

examples of the legislations passed during this period that enforce equality includes US Equal

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Pay Act (1963), Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act (1964), the UK Equal Pay Acts (1970

and 1975), and the UK Sex Discrimination Act (1975).

In terms of education, there was an overwhelming increase in women enrollment in

computer science in the year. According to Rossiter (2012), there were several positive

driving forces that attracted more women in sciences and computer science in general. In her

book ‘Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972’, she argued that the

increase in women participation in education was a result from men colleges transformed into

co-ed institutions. Trying to attract more applicants to their colleges, administrations used the

female body students as a means of attraction to get male undergraduate students to enroll.

However, this attempt was not necessarily enough without the passing of legislations

encouraging women to participate in colleges, such as the Equal Opportunity Act signed by

president Nixon in March 1972. Moreover, Rossiter (2012) also argued that aside from the

previously mentioned reason, institutions were pressured by their federal governments to

increase their respective female student body.

For Abbate (2012), her explanation for women’s increased enrollment in college in

computer science was due to the fact that computer science was an open opportunity for

women without much masculine influence. For instance, according to Abbate (2012), many

women could obtain lecturing positions at universities even with a bachelor’s degree in

computer science due to the lack of faculty member in the department at the time. Most of

these women did not obtain a PhD in computer science until later.

5. 1980s – 21st century: Women became the minority in computer programming

In the 1980s, computer science gradually became a male dominant field. Despite their

glorious contribution in computer science in the past forty years, women participation in the

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field moderately shrank and eventually became the gasping minority. There are many factors

leading up to this trend, most of which had their roots in the 1980s.

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Figure 1: Percentage of female employed programmers and computer science degree earners in the US. Graph taken from

Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender : Women’s changing participation in computing. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press,

c2012

Figure 2: Number of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in computer science, 1970 - 2000. Graph taken from Rossiter,

Margaret. Women Scientists in America : Forging a New World Since 1972. JHU Press, 2012.

According to Abbate (2012), starting from the 1980s, there was a surge in the

enrollment of students in college majoring in computer science. However, at the time,

colleges did not have enough facility to accommodate the rise. Therefore, faculty members

deliberately set up criteria so as to accept more male students and reject female students

applying for a major in computer science. According to Rossiter (2012), the decrease in

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women majoring in computer science was due to the lack of solidarity of women network

already in the field. As a result of this deficit in support, women eventually dropped out of

this major.

In the 21st century, there are many obstacles in women’s march into computer science.

Computer science is now perceived as a male dominant and female-unfriendly field. The

book ‘Women in IT: Inspiring the Next Generation’ published by British Computer Society

(BCS), a collection of first-person narratives by highly-achieved women in computer science

at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, provides an

insightful view on women in computer science. For the most part, their experiences are

different. For some women, although their work place is male-dominated, they still find

support from their male colleagues. For the other, however, discrimination and inappropriate

behaviors, either intentionally or unintentionally, to women are, sadly, the norms in their

workplaces. Despite their unique personal experience with computer science, they all share a

love for technology and computer science. In addition to their passion, they also share a view

that women are underrepresented in computer science. Some of them, from their experience,

express their concerns over the fact that girls are discouraged from pursuing their passion for

natural sciences and mathematics from a young age due to social stigmata regarding genders.

Analysis

Since the 1940s, computer science has gone through many transitions. These

transitions undoubtedly affected the participation of women in the field. However, these

changes were not the only determining factors. In fact, there are other social implications that

drive women either forwards or backwards in their contributing to the fields. At times, these

two factors, social norms and perception of computer programming, were both supportive to

women, while at others, either or neither of them were. The participation of women,

consequently, fluctuated accordingly.

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During the Second World War, the dawn of computer programming, social norms and

the perception of computer programming were both encouraging to women. In terms of social

constrains, the era was the most vibrant and promising for women to join the labor force due

to the shortage of male labor resulting from men being sent to battle field. Social barriers

were extricated by the spreading of government propaganda empowering and encouraging

women to pay their patriotic duties. In addition to the favorable changes in social perception,

which were achieved by the restless effort of the government, perception of computer

programming at the time were not less agreeable. At the time, computer programming was

considered a feminine skill and thus was not regarded highly. Computer programmers only

needed certain set of skills and characteristics, which fitted well into the feminine side of the

characteristic spectrum. Regardless of its low status, computer programming provided

tremendous opportunities for women to enter the workforce and even set up their own

business. Taking advantage of the rare opportunities, women were at the forefront of

computer programming, earning recognition among their male counterparts with their potent

contributions to the field.

Although society resumed its opposing side to women after the war, the perception

computer programming as a feminine job continued to work in women’s favor until the

1960s. Being branded as a feminine job from the beginning, women were still recruited to fill

out vacancies in the field. In the job market for women, programmers were the highest paid

job. Moreover, there was a rise in concurrent movements for equality. Not only did these

movements result in legislations supporting women in the workforce, they also modified

social perceptions and empowered women to take up unconventional jobs for women.

Despite the financial incentives, the equality movements, and the employers’ attempt to

recruit more female programmers - which was urged by their female employees, the

distribution of women in computer programming was still relatively low. Women accounted

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for twenty percent of the programmers, which was a still relatively high figure comparing to

other male-dominated fields. The low participation of women in computer programming was

a result from the shift of social perception on gender role. When the war ended, male soldiers

coming back from the war filled the blank in the workforce. From nation’s precious work

force, women were again downgraded to trivia roles. They were no longer needed in factories

and thus were expected to return home to their pre-war duties, such as housewife, nurse,

primary school teacher, clerical position, etc. The pre-war social order was retrieved, and

society was no longer on women’s side. In spite of the serious shortage of programmers in

the 1960s and the 1970s, it was still hard for women to enter or continue working as

programmers, especially for those who were mothers and were raising a family. Firms

refused to employ women knowing that they were mothers and were raising a family. They

even refused to let women return to their positions after having their maternal leave to give

birth. Although it was legal to pay a female employee less than a male employee in the

1960s, the finance incentive was not enough to persuade businesses to recruit women.

Nevertheless, computer programming was not the battle that women completely lost

to their male counterparts. The refusing women of full-time employment by firms in fact

crated opportunities for other women to run their own business. Elsie Shutt, the first woman

to start a software business in the US, and Stephanie Shirley, the second woman to start a

software business in the UK, employed stay-at-home mothers as part-time employees to

develop customized business software. These two women opened up opportunities for many

women to stay in the computer programming. Their success was faced by many challenges,

especially social stigmata associated with working women. At the time, middle-class working

women having jobs were a controversial idea. Whether these women had a job to satisfy their

personal interest or to earn the extra money for their family, their husbands would still be

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considered incompetent providers. This social stigma was the largest barrier preventing many

women from pursuing their programming career.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the transformation in perception of computer

programming was completed. From being supportive to women, it switched its side to join

social stigma opposing women’s empowerment. Computer programming became computer

science and, eventually, software engineering. As a result of computer programming being

reformed as software engineering, it was transformed from feminine to masculine. The shift

in gender annotation of computer programming is mostly due to the label ‘engineering’ and

the masculinity associated with it. This transformation has been manifested by the social

stigmata which act against women’s participation in sciences. Hand-in-hand, the social

stigmata and the label have deterred women from entering the field since the 1980s. With the

‘engineering’ label, computer science is regarded among the highly masculine and hard-core

sciences. In addition to this, girls are discouraged from developing and pursuing a passion for

natural sciences since they are told that these topics are supposedly meant for boys. Being

discouraged from a young age, it is harder to empower girls at later stage in their life to enter

natural sciences and computer science.

Since the transformation was completed in the 1980s, masculinity of computer

science has worked in cooperation with social stigmata to inflate the imbalance in gender

distribution in the field. In addition to the lack of gender balance, the workplaces are

stigmatized to be mostly unfriendly to female. Fortunately, this is not necessarily the case for

all women in the field. In fact, some women do find support from their male counterparts in

their men-dominated workplaces. Nonetheless, these women’s positions and the culture of

their workplace should also be put into consideration while examining their not facing

discrimination or aggressiveness from their male colleagues. In most of the cases, these

women are in high-rank managerial positions, or work in firms that are notable for their

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diversifying effort. Unfortunately, these insurances are not guaranteed for all female workers

in the field of software engineering. Those without high managerial positions or whose

workplace are not female friendly will not have positive experience with their job. The

unfemale-friendly image of software engineering might discourage women outside the field

from entering it, and women inside the field from continuing it. One might argue that women

with strong resilience and wishing to live up to the challenge would find the field appealing

with these resistance and attempt to enter the field. Nevertheless, providing the fact that girls

are also spoon fed with the idea of being obedient and well-behaved, and to stay clear off the

seemingly masculine fields such as computer science, how many would grow up resilient and

passionate enough about software engineering to join the field and improve female

representation in computer science?

For this paper, the research method and the credibility of the resources should also be

considered. The paper is based on secondary research. Therefore, the quality of this paper is

dependent on the credibility of the resources. Due to the nature of this paper, which is

intensive on history, secondary research is one of the optimal options since it provided an

overview of the past events in history. Although the finding of the research is prone to error

due to the perspective of the authors of the resources, multiple sources on similar topics from

different authors would evoke the balance.

The literature resources for this research paper are books whose authors are scientists

with a conceivable interest in women and computer science and natural science in general.

The advantage of basing the research paper on the research of these authors is the extensive

focus on the topic. However, due to the personal interest of the authors, the finding of the

research might be bias. Margaret Rossiter and Janet Abbate, the two authors on whose works

this research paper is largely based, are leading scientist well-known for their persistent fight

for the inclusion of women in natural science. British Computer Society is also an

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organization vocal for their effort in the same area. The researcher of this paper does regard

this fact when extracting and integrating the findings of this paper to avoid making bias

assumptions and interpretations while writing the paper.

Conclusion

Computer Science has gone through many transitions from its beginning in the

Second World War until present time. Some transitions were favorable to women at the time

while the other were not. However, the different social perceptions of computer science

resulting from these different transitions are only one factor influencing the percentage of

women in the field. The other not less potent factor is social stigmata. Although the stigmata

preventing women from the workforce are not as influential as they once were in many

places, the stigmata discouraging young girls and women from pursuing careers in computer

science are still impactful. Although the stigmata have caught people’s attention, and there

have been attempts to destigmatize them, the participation of women in the field is still

relatively low. Nonetheless, it must also be noted that the result of such effort can only be

recorded in years. In particular Moreover, the fact that women are still taking high-ranking

managerial positions in leading technology firms or departments, as shown in the research,

are positive signs to retain hope on a future comeback of women in computer science.

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Bibliography

Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender : Women’s changing participation in computing.

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2012.

Rossiter, Margaret. Women Scientists in America : Forging a New World Since 1972.

Volume 3. JHU Press, 2012.

Women in IT : Inspiring the Next Generation. BCS Learning & Development Limited.

Oct 2014.

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