2. W. Barkley Fritz, "The Women of ENIAC", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18,3(1996), 13-28, and Jennifer Light, "When Computers Were Women", Technology and Culture 4,3(1999), 455-83. On the the loss of technical jobs following the war, see Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995). The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator went into operation on 14 February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. It was the basis for the subsequent development of the stored-program device now commonly understood as the electronic computer.
3. John Backus, "Programming in America in the 1950s -- Some Personal Impressions", in N. Metropolis et al. (eds.), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (NY: Academic Press, 198, 125-135.
4. See Michael S. Mahoney, "Software: The Self-Programming Machine", in Atsushi Akera and Frederik Nebeker (eds.), From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 91-100.
5. For the first round of studies, see Sex Roles 13,3/4(1985), a special issue on "Women, Girls, and Computers", which includes empirical studies ranging from kindergarten to adults in the office. Subsequent studies have in general reinforced the basic tendency, but with some conflicting findings. For a critical evaluation of seven such reports, see Robin Kay, "An Analysis of Methods Used to Examine Gender Differences in Computer-Related Behavior", Journal of Educational Computing Research, 8,3(1992, 277-9; and for a recent effort to disaggregate the factors involved, see Lori J. Nelson and Joel Cooper, "Gender Differences in Children's Reactions to Success and Failure With Computers", Computers in Human Behavior, 13,2(1997), 247-67. Despite the conflicts and critiques, the general trend of these results would seem to have profound implications for educational policy, but few commentators, much less school boards, seem to have considered the effects of introducing into classrooms devices that students so clearly associated with one gender rather than the other. Interestingly, the question does not appear to have caught the attention of the current Administration in Washington, perhaps because it places its concern for women's issues in conflict with its enthusiasm for educational technology. [Added 2004] For an extended discussion of the issues and literature see now Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
6. Perhaps at this point, I should clarify my perspective. My daughter majored in computer science and music at a research-oriented university and has had a successful career as a software developer. Her experiences as a woman in computing have been a continuing topic of conversation between us for some fifteen years.
7. Ruth Schwartz Cowan: "The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology", in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
8. Flis Henwood, "Establishing Gender Perspectives on Information Technology: Problems, Issues and Opportunities", in Gendered by Design?: Information Technology and Office Systems, ed. Eileen Green, Jenny Owen, and Den Pain (London/Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis, 1993), Chapter 2.
9. "Computer" here means electronic, digital, stored program computer, i.e. a practical device with the capabilities of a Turing machine. One can get bogged down in various definitional problems here, none of which is pertinent to the point at issue.
10. That does not mean anything goes. No one who has worked with computers doubts their capacity to resist (see Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice). That resistance goes beyond occasional crashes in the midst of a late-night chapter: it includes planes crashing, rockets going astray and exploding, overdoses of radiation therapy, and collapse of the telephone system. These seem about as real and non-negotiable as the world can get.
11. Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
12. Or, to take another tack, counterproductive: "It could equally well be that once these newly-discovered [feminine] attributes of flexibility, intuition, etc. are revalued and become sought-after skills in computing, men will be the first in line to demonstrate their competence in the field." Henwood, "Establishing ..", 42-43.
13. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18,3(1996), 43-46. Estrin is Professor Emerita of Computer Science at UCLA and has had a distinguished career in the field of biomedical engineering and computer science, including terms as Director of the Engineering, Computer and Systems Division of the National Science Foundation, 1982-4, and member of the Board of Directors of the Aerospace Corporation.
17. Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++ (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994).
18. By coincidence Estrin's article is followed in the same special number of Annals by Alison Adam's "Constructions of Gender in the History of Artificial Intelligence", in which the line of thinking for which Lisp has served as primary tool, indeed for which it was designed, is designated as irremediably masculinist. It is hard to aim at Lisp without hitting Logo.
19. Alan Kay, "The Early History of Smalltalk", in T. M. Bergin and R. G. Gibson (Eds.), History of Programming Languages II (New York: ACM Press; Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1996), 511-78.
20. Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl, "The Development of the Simula Languages", in Richard Wexelblat (Ed.), History of Programming Languages (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 439-8.
21. M. Douglas McIlroy, "Mass Produced Software Components", in Software Engineering: Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germay, 7th to 11th October 1968 (Brussels: NATO Scientific Affairs Division, 1969), 138-5; repr. in Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques: Proceedings of the NATO Conferences, ed. Peter Naur, Brian Randell, J. N. Buxton (New York : Petrocelli/Charter, 1976)
22. "Competition and Collaboration in Male Shaping of Computing: A Study of a Norwegian Hacker Culture", in The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research, ed. Keith Grint and Rosalind Gill (London/Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis Ltd./Inc., 1995), Chap. 7.
23. Håpnes and Sørensen, 177. They refer here to B. Rasmussen and T. Håpnes, "The Production of Male Power in Computer Science", in I.V. Erikson et al. (eds.), Women, Work and Computerization (Amsterdam, 1991), and T. Håpnes and B. Rasmussen, "Excluding Women from the Technologies of the Future?", Futures (December 1991).
24. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Powser and Human Reason (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), esp. Chap. 4, "Science and the Compulsive Programmer"; Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1984), esp. Chap. 3, "Child Programmers: The First Generation". There in discussing styles of programming, Turkle differentiates between hard and soft mastery, which she associates with Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinction between scientist and bricoleur: "Hard mastery is the mastery of the planner, the engineer, soft mastery is the mastery of the artist: try this, wait for a response, try something else, let the overall shape emerge from an interaction with the medium. It is more like a conversation than a monologue."(14-5) Although her first example contrasts the practices of two boys, she goes on to note on p. 19, "But now it is time to state what might be anticipated by many readers: girls tend to be soft masters, while the hard masters are overwhelmingly male."
26. Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). For a sense of Unix as a culture, see Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, Life with UNIX : A Guide for Everyone (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989).
27. Ulrike Erb, "Exploring the Excluded. A Feminist Approach to Opening New Perspectives in Computer Science", in Women, Work and Computerization: Spinning a Web from Past to Future (Proceedings of the 6th International IFIP-Conference, Bonn, Germany, May 24-27, 1997), ed. A.Frances Grundy, et al. (Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer Verlag, 1997), 21-7; at 23-4.
29. Lucy Suchman, "Supporting Articulation Work: Aspects of a Feminist Practice of Technology Production", in Women, Work and Computerization: Breaking Old Boundaries - Building New Forms, ed. Alison Adam, Judy Emms, Eileen Green, and Jenny Owen (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1994), 7-21.
29a. Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 25.
30. Peter Naur and Brian Randell (eds), Software Engineering: Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germany, 7th to 11th October 1968 (Brussels: Scientific Affairs Division, NATO, 1969), p. 13. Republished as Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques: Proceedings of the NATO Conferences, edited by Peter Naur, Brian Randell, J. N. Buxton (New York: Petrocelli/Charter, 1976).
30a. [Added 2004] On these models, see my "Finding a History for Software Engineering", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 26,1(2004), 8-19.
31. Perhaps the most prominent is Mary Shaw, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and former Chief Scientist at the DoD-sponsored Software Engineering Institute there in the late 1980s. Shaw earned her reputation in the area of data abstraction but most recently has emerged as a strong proponent of an architectural approach to software development; see Mary Shaw and David Garlan, Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall,1996)
32. Well, almost and in principle; cf. Donald MacKenzie, "The Automation of Proof: A Historical and Sociological Exploration", Annals of the History of Computing 17,3(1995), 7-29.
33. When I made this point in another context in
a talk at the Dibner Institute in 1996, Joel Moses, the Provost of MIT,
commented that a recent study of their program in software engineering
had come to essentially the same conclusion and was revising the curriculum
so as to direct students to courses outside computer science.