alt Hacker NewsThis is similar disruption that terminals brought. Before terminals, programming was done in the computer room, it was social gathering, many programmers were women, people were debugging printouts on the floor, punching cards together. Then terminals came and everybody crawled into their dark solitary offices, staring at green or yellow phosphor screens of their terminals. Women didn't like it and left.
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> Women didn't like it and left.
I appreciate the rose-tinted, high-agency historical take, but I think the factors that led to computer science/programming becoming male-dominated were largely external to and independent of the preferences of women themselves.
Some people prioritize their paycheck over enjoying their job, and those people are AMAB more often than not.
"Women didn't like it and left" is certainly an interesting interpretation of the systemic exclusion of women from a field when it transitions from low-prestige manual work to high-prestige intellectual work.