Home > Work > Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing
1 " A 1964 study illustrated how status considerations could distort people's perceptions of the level of skill that was involved in various programming jobs. The study asked experienced computer personnel to distribute a list of programming tasks among a hierarchy of jobs–systems analyst, senior programmer, and programmer. The author found that "the higher the level of the job, the more job skills were included"–even if some of those tasks normally were performed by workers in the lower-status jobs. Higher-status workers were simply assumed to have a monopoly on skilled tasks, even by people who were familiar with the field and should have known better. We should not be surprised to find that employers, who often had no personal knowledge of programming, fell back on social categories when evaluating potential workers. "
― , Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing
2 " Another detrimental effect of undervaluing people skills was that in some cases, programmers were rewarded more for raw code production than for meeting the user's needs. Marge Devaney, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950's, recalled sex differences in how programmers judged their performance. Asked if she had ever experienced gender bias on the job, sh replied that discrimination was difficult to prove, adding, "With things like computing, it's very hard to judge who's doing the best. Is it better to produce a program quickly and have it full of bugs that the users keep hitting, and so it doesn't work? Or is it better to produce it more slowly and have it so it works?...I do know some of the men believed in the first way: 'Throw it together and let the user debug it!'" This critique is echoed by women today who find their male peers rewarded for averting disasters through heroic last-minute efforts, while women's efforts at preventing such problems through careful work and communication with users go unrecognized. As a female software engineer complained in 2007, "Why don't we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it's just an easy fit for the men in the sector. "
