An 80s Girl Talks About Computers: A Reminiscence
NOTE: I found this in my Drafts today. I apparently started writing it a couple years ago, but the topic of Why Women Quit Coding in The 80s just keeps coming back, unfortunately, so I’ve finally finished it.
The other day I listened to a piece on Planet Money called “When Women Stopped Coding.” (Go ahead and go listen; it’s 17 minutes long, but it’s really interesting.)
The piece says there was a dramatic drop in women majoring in computer science in 1984—the year I started college. It suggests a couple of reasons for that: Girls didn’t have computers at home (which the piece backs up with a study from the 90s), and computers were marketed mostly to boys.
Now, I love Marketplace, and I love Planet Money, and at first, I was like, “Yeah! That’s it exactly!” I tweeted, “100% of the CS majors I knew in 1984 were male,” with a link to the piece.
And then I remembered: My best friend was a CS major… for a year. She dropped out after our freshman year to get married and move to California with her new husband, who already had several job offers at places like XEROX PARC, and she almost immediately got a job with Ashton-Tate. She wasn’t a CS major anymore by 1985: she was a programmer with a major software company.
So I started thinking about what it was like in the 80s, and how girls like me got interested (or not) in computers. (Yes, it’s anecdotal, but so is the one story Marketplace cited.)
Computers at Home
It’s true that not many of us had computers at home, but neither did the boys I knew. In my circle, nobody had computers at home. They were expensive, and our parents saw them as overpriced toys. I knew one guy with a TRS-80 that he bought himself with money from an after-school job. Otherwise, if our parents were going to spend money on us, they spent it on musical instruments, clothes, maybe a third-hand 15-year-old car… not computers. Even the computer-science majors I met in college didn’t have their own computers; they used the lab. Come to think of it, in college in the 80s, you knew who the CS majors were because they were ALWAYS in the lab.
Advertising
Then there’s the advertising. The piece talks about how computer advertising was targeted to boys, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Take a look at this Commodore 64 ad: Most of the people in it, and possibly the dog, are female.
While looking for that, I found plenty of ads with women and girls in them (The Vintage Browser has a lot of them). Maybe they all date from before 1984, I don’t know.
But it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway, because those ads weren’t in anything I was reading. Here are the magazines I read in high school in the early 80s: Twilight Zone. Seventeen. Cosmopolitan (at a friend’s house — the same friend who became a CS major). If any of those magazines ever ran an ad for Commodore or Apple or Radio Shack, I’d be surprised. Every once in a while I picked up a copy of Games or Omni, and those might have had computer ads, but if they did, I don’t remember. Someone in the comments points out that the advertising was primarily targeted to electronics hobbyists, who were mostly male. But again, that’s not what I’m seeing in the images of 1980s computer ads.
“Male Geek Culture”
It’s possible that computers were associated with “techie culture” in my world, but it’s not like that would have kept me from being interested. If anything, it probably have made me more interested. Actually, I’m pretty sure that if computers had been accessible to me at all I would have been on them like Biggs Darklighter on a womp rat.
I was already pretty heavily involved in geek culture: I liked Star Trek and Star Wars, I read science fiction, I listened to (and played) jazz, often the kind inspired by Lord of the Rings. I watched Monty Python and Doctor Who on Saturday nights, just like my friends from school. I loved video games in the arcade; we all did. I have to say that I was maybe even a little more into video games than most of my female friends, and I spent a lot of time and tokens working on my Tempest game.
Our group was fairly evenly distributed between male and female. We didn’t call ourselves geeks or nerds; those were still derogatory terms back then. We went to science fiction conventions, sometimes in costume. We all tried D&D, although most of us didn’t stick with it. We went to Rocky Horror at the midnight movie every weekend. And none of us—not one—went on to major in computer science (my friend who did lived in another town, and had less-geeky interests, like Debate Club).
Maybe I’m an outlier here, but I honestly don’t think either the lack of a computer at home or an emphasis on male geek culture was key to my not discovering coding until I was in my 30s. I’m not saying that Planet Money is wrong, but the reasons they listed for women dropping out of computer science suddenly in 1984 would not have been the reasons I didn’t pursue it. The main reason it never would have occurred to me to even consider computer science is my awful experience with high school math.
High School in the 80s
My friend who majored in CS moved to a tiny rural town when we were in ninth grade. There was a small state college in town, and a lot of kids from the high school took classes there. One of the classes they could take was a computer class. That was where she figured out that she had an aptitude for computers, and was encouraged to pursue computer science. A friend I met in college also took a computer class in high school; she also lived in a rural town, where the high school was at a loss for what to do with kids who wanted to take math past Algebra II, so they taught them to use computers. There were about five kids from her high school who all got to leave school and go to the local college a few times a week for computer class.
At my high school in a medium-sized city, a class called “Computer Math” started up in my junior year. It was taught by a woman, and was mostly attended by two groups of students: geeky underachievers and kids in the gifted & talented program who had run out of math classes to take. Several of my friends were in Computer Math; as somebody who fell squarely in the “geeky underachiever” category, I’m not sure why I wasn’t, except that I was still trying to fool myself into thinking I should be taking college-prep courses (which, for some reason, didn’t include Computer Math), so I was busy failing trig.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single Computer Person, male or female, I have ever told that I failed trig hasn’t believed that’s a thing someone could actually do. Most of them apparently breezed through trig, barely breaking a mental sweat, on their way to calculus and other advanced math classes I never took. But most of them didn’t have my trig teacher.
My trig teacher was a legend among the college-bound kids in my school. He’d been there forever. He was generous and big-hearted— he had eight kids, mostly adopted from the many kids he and his wife had fostered. He’d had an incredibly interesting life and career, and he liked to tell us about it.
The other thing he liked to tell us, though, was that girls shouldn’t bother taking math, because we were just going to be housewives anyway. It wasn’t just every once in a while, either; he said it at the beginning of the year, he tossed it into lectures occasionally, he said it when he handed back failed tests. Honestly, I thought he was joking; I’m still not sure he wasn’t. But over the last 30 years or so I’ve talked to quite a few grown women who gave up on math after taking a class from him. Some thought he was joking, and some didn’t. But even those of us who thought he was joking still had that suspicion that maybe he wasn’t — that he honestly thought we didn’t belong there. You either fought to prove him wrong, or you accepted that he was right (and, I’ll note, so did every single boy in the class). Even though there were other math teachers at the school, including a couple of women, he was the only teacher who taught trig and beyond. If you were failing his trig class and didn’t want to wreck your GPA, the only option was to drop it and give up on higher math.
So I dropped trig for drafting, where I was the only girl, but somehow I did belong. Much like Computer Math, it was a class full of geeks and underachievers (or as I like to call them: my people). I sat at a drafting table in a sunny corner, surrounded by freshman boys, and talked about Anne McCaffrey and Star Trek while we drew shapes and objects and floor plans. The teacher was probably old enough to be the trig teacher’s father, and rumored to be strict and unpredictable, but he didn’t seem to have a problem with having a girl in his class — even though I’m pretty sure he didn’t have more than three or four girls a year in his classes. (When it came to blow-off classes, boys were shuttled into drafting and auto mechanics; girls were sent to sociology and concert chorus. That was the 80s, at least at my high school.) He seemed to appreciate that I listened to him, followed directions, turned in my work on time, and helped the freshman boys who didn’t understand his instructions (usually because they hadn’t been listening or following directions, but whatever).
In retrospect, maybe I just went to a lousy high school (although it was supposed to be one of the best in town, both then and now). Maybe I just made bad choices in the classes I took, going more by my friends’ recommendations than by any serious consideration of my academic future. I was going to be a music major; why would I ever need to know about computers? I say, remembering how my CS-major friend loved Thomas Dolby (“We do have MTV,” I remember her saying when I arrogantly assumed that people in small towns only listened to country music). I think it’s a bad idea to have just one teacher for all math from Algebra II up to Differential Equations, but the financial reality of public school, both then and now, is that you’re lucky to have even one teacher for advanced classes in any topic. Certainly I could have used a little more parental guidance, but that wasn’t something that was going to happen for a number of reasons.
My Conclusion
Well, I don’t have one. This is just a story about my high school years. But here’s my suggestion for anyone who’s seriously looking into why women abruptly quit coding in the 80s: Look at public education from the early 70s to the mid-80s. Find some data on school funding, on math teachers’ gender and gender attitudes, on enrollment. I bet it will make an interesting infographic.
Postscript (2017)
If you were in high school or college in the 80s, what was your educational experience like? Did you have a lot of access to computers, and if so, was it at school or at home, or somewhere else (like the local college)?
