- May 14, 2012
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It's the 21st century, but enormous divisions in gender roles persist, and someone is trying to do something about it:
The article mentions ENIAC, an early computer I spent quite a bit of time researching last week so I could write about it. The machine was incredibly difficult to program; the programmers were said to have needed to know the hardware to the same level of detail as the computer's designers. Its six original programmers were all women, none of whom got the credit they deserved.
The most depressing part of the article:
My wife has been a programmer for nearly as long as Allen, and hasn't experienced much in the way of overt sexism, but the gender imbalance can be disquieting at times.
Sarah Allen has been the only woman on a team of computer programmers a few times in the more than two decades she has worked in the field. Most notably, she led the team — as the lone female programmer — that created Flash video, the dominant technology for streaming video on the Web.
Since only about 20 percent of all programmers are women, her experience isn't uncommon, and now she's trying to bring more women into the field.
A little over four years ago, Allen founded , which does design and development of software for mobile devices. The company's mix of 10 programmers and designers work with entrepreneurs and help them take an idea and turn it into software that works.
The article mentions ENIAC, an early computer I spent quite a bit of time researching last week so I could write about it. The machine was incredibly difficult to program; the programmers were said to have needed to know the hardware to the same level of detail as the computer's designers. Its six original programmers were all women, none of whom got the credit they deserved.
The most depressing part of the article:
Allen says the number of women who major in computer science has actually been going down. She hopes that making women in the field more visible to each other will help young women see that there is a path for them in what is one of the fastest growing professions in the world.
My wife has been a programmer for nearly as long as Allen, and hasn't experienced much in the way of overt sexism, but the gender imbalance can be disquieting at times.