Computers and Me in the 80's

Check out this podcast from NPR about how women abandoned the Computer Science major in droves, starting in 1984: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

Here's a story from my life relating to this phenomenon. The gist of the podcast: Starting in the early 80's, home computers were marketed to boys, so they already had experience programming by the time they were in college. My data point is about how much a single teacher matters.

I took an advanced geometry class in 1982, my freshman year of high school. The "advanced" part of the class was computer programming. We had a single PC-like computer for a class of 25. We were supposed to do a group project to learn how to program in BASIC. The only kids who ever touched the computer were the ones who already had a computer at home. The rest of us sat at the back of the group watching. The teacher never intervened. Later, the teacher tested us on our programming knowledge by posing a problem and having us program the solution by writing the program out on paper. I failed that test. I vowed never to touch a computer again. This teacher's negligence mattered.

Fast forward to college. Early in my junior year, I was offered the chance to do research with a professor in the Physics department. The research was under the umbrella of a National Science Foundation-funded program to encourage women and minorities to pursue advanced degrees in science. It quickly became clear that I would need to program to execute research tasks - both for gathering data from equipment and for analyzing that data. When I told my mentor that I didn't know how to program, he said it was no problem - I had an entire research group to support me as I learned. With the team behind me, I picked up a book and taught myself to program in FORTRAN. I was soon doing research with the team and writing Monte Carlo simulations to model behavior in a prototype detector. This mentor's kindness and support mattered.

That NFS program worked - I went to grad school and finished a Ph.D. in Physics, specializing in particle physics. My post-academic career has been entirely in software technology companies, starting with a job as a software engineer, and eventually winding to technical program management roles. I would never have had this career had it not been for the strong, positive influence of my mentor.

The podcast discusses the cultural influences that discourage women from pursuing Computer Science and programming. Those influences are still present today. The positive point you can take from this story is that the power of a single good teacher or mentor can overcome all that negative influence. Be a positive force in the lives of students and people early in their career. Help them see their potential - you never know what the outcome might be.