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RE: A slice of ~IT history
by MacTO on Mon 28th May 2012 21:52 UTC in reply to "A slice of ~IT history"
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You are missing something: in most cases, women were accepted for those programming roles because it was a mechanical task. In most cases, it would have been men who did the stuff that we think of as programming today: developing the algorithms that they women entered into the computer (or executed themselves, in the case of human computers). And the main reason why women were given those opportunity was the lack of able men to fill the role. The able men were already on the front or contributing to the war effort at home. Most of the remaining men weren't good fit for anything.

I don't mean to paint this as a negative thing. Grace Hopper was certainly a solid contributor to the field of computer science and the employment of women during the war opened up opportunities for women to enter and remain in the workforce after the war. But most of the women in early computing were doing the mundane stuff that men didn't want to.

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RE[2]: A slice of ~IT history
by zima on Mon 4th Jun 2012 23:59 in reply to "RE: A slice of ~IT history"
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Well though it was happening also outside (before, after) the time of (the) war.
Not even necessarily a very universal factor - a lot of women fought on the eastern front. Plus only minority of men were shipped away to fight, and women were also "contributing to the war effort at home" in more general terms.

But yeah, largely a matter of acceptance - already in the works, coming also from earlier inroads into ~office (thanks to introduction of typewriter for example)

Edited 2012-06-05 00:19 UTC

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