Historical scholarship contributed a misperception that computer programmers in the 1950s were mostly women who were then replaced by men in the 1960s. No. The real inflection point was the 1980s.
Interesting analysis here! Love the data and thoughtful questions. Not sure revisiting Ensmenger's argument or looking more carefully at the data regarding the early days of IT as a profession does justice to the work being done at Penn with ENIAC, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NACA/NASA. The gendered division between male managers and female clerical workers would seem to explain what the early participants in SHARE were doing as IBM was figuring out the commercial applications of computers. It also explains gender roles in the research labs.
A lot of history focused on the 1950s is about correcting the historical record regarding the research contributions of women. The questions we can ask about trends in the employment data are distinct from how women contributed to cutting-edge research in the early days of electronic computing in the handful of places where that research was happening.
I think my only point here is that Ensmenger's account should not be confused with other historical arguments about the role of women in the early days of electronic computers. Also, we should be careful about how far back the categories of social and professional roles that we find familiar should go.
Hi Rob! Thanks for those comments and engaging deeply with the piece. I should probably do a couple of posts on this. I think the reason for the "the first programmers were women" myth is that the historians like Ensmenger (and others) conflated operators of scientific calculation machines with programmers; but these operators came from a separate tradition of operating calculating machines (which goes back even before the ENIAC).
And while it is true that the ENIAC was invented specifically for scientific calculations, the biggest market for digital computers was not scientific calculation in research labs but in the data processing departments of corporations doing things like managing payroll or analyzing sales figures to make decisions.; this is where we get the first programmers (in the sense of people who did jobs that programmers today typically do). In terms of sheer numbers, there were way more of these data processing programmers than the scientific machine operators.
One of the things in Ensmenger's book is that he moves back and forth between programmers in data processing and the scientific operators but the claim in the book that women were the first programmers is supposed to be both for scientific calculations and data processing and it's only true for scientific calculation (and that's if you accept that scientific operation was "programming").
Again, I am not disputing that the scientific operators were not given credit; it's just that what they did has little resemblance to what we call programming while what the programmers in data processing did has a lot of resemblance to it.
But your point is well-taken and I think I should explore this in a post.
Interesting analysis here! Love the data and thoughtful questions. Not sure revisiting Ensmenger's argument or looking more carefully at the data regarding the early days of IT as a profession does justice to the work being done at Penn with ENIAC, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NACA/NASA. The gendered division between male managers and female clerical workers would seem to explain what the early participants in SHARE were doing as IBM was figuring out the commercial applications of computers. It also explains gender roles in the research labs.
A lot of history focused on the 1950s is about correcting the historical record regarding the research contributions of women. The questions we can ask about trends in the employment data are distinct from how women contributed to cutting-edge research in the early days of electronic computing in the handful of places where that research was happening.
I think my only point here is that Ensmenger's account should not be confused with other historical arguments about the role of women in the early days of electronic computers. Also, we should be careful about how far back the categories of social and professional roles that we find familiar should go.
Hi Rob! Thanks for those comments and engaging deeply with the piece. I should probably do a couple of posts on this. I think the reason for the "the first programmers were women" myth is that the historians like Ensmenger (and others) conflated operators of scientific calculation machines with programmers; but these operators came from a separate tradition of operating calculating machines (which goes back even before the ENIAC).
And while it is true that the ENIAC was invented specifically for scientific calculations, the biggest market for digital computers was not scientific calculation in research labs but in the data processing departments of corporations doing things like managing payroll or analyzing sales figures to make decisions.; this is where we get the first programmers (in the sense of people who did jobs that programmers today typically do). In terms of sheer numbers, there were way more of these data processing programmers than the scientific machine operators.
One of the things in Ensmenger's book is that he moves back and forth between programmers in data processing and the scientific operators but the claim in the book that women were the first programmers is supposed to be both for scientific calculations and data processing and it's only true for scientific calculation (and that's if you accept that scientific operation was "programming").
Again, I am not disputing that the scientific operators were not given credit; it's just that what they did has little resemblance to what we call programming while what the programmers in data processing did has a lot of resemblance to it.
But your point is well-taken and I think I should explore this in a post.
That makes sense, and I like the description of "scientific calculations in research labs" vs "data processing departments."