Sci-Fi posters put women off tech jobs!

Yes you're quite right, I'm sure it ends up becoming self-perpetuating.

Back in the late 60's my sister trained using punch cards and there were many women training then they went to work for the banks.

My guess is that just as with other technical professions, getting started left room for women and after getting established women were squeezed out. By squeezed out I mean that men were offered more money and that was one less inducement for women to apply.

As I mentioned before during the 80's I worked at the MSU Cyclotron where one of the heads of the IT department was a woman as far as I know she may still be there.

Bletchley Park was almost completed staffed with women doing the calculations and decoding, and setting the bombes; the donkey work, but the heads of department, the mathematicians and Post Office engineers were all male. As tinkerdan says, banks used women to run the punched cards and data tape systems. However, that was the same in all professions at that time.

When my school got a Commodore PET in 1977 it was all boys who took Computer Studies; the girls were not interested. It was the boys fighting to get time on the new toy. Some of my peers wrote games and sold them for actual real money - they were all male. I'm sure that was not a problem with my school because we had such a high proportion of girls taking Physics that inspectors came to find out why. Therefore, there has to have been a more all-encompassing reason why the girls did not get as excited about the computer and programming it.

Mouse said:

This is one of the things* I hate about The Big Bang Theory. Even after they introduced Bernadette and Amy, there were still no geeky women. Penny doesn't even seem to know any pop culture stuff, like the Hulk or Buffy. There are no women into comics, none of them like sci-fi or fantasy. Even that woman who Raj meets in the comic store was only in there by accident!

The only thing that show does really well, is Raj (after they got rid of the awful 'can't speak to women' crap), for daring to make him feminine and straight.


*the other being Sheldon, who is vile.

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I HATE that show. The only real and true actual rocket scientist I know is probably the most socially graceful person I've ever met too. He's worked with some of the most advanced mathematics luminaries in the world, yet you would never know it to speak to him. He just appears a charming ,interesting and sophisticated person, very approachable and without an ounce of pretension. If we had stereotypes where a bunch of Aframs sat around eating watermelon and playing dice all day everyone would go crazy, but we act like physicists are these airy-fairy sorts who can't speak to women, are obsessed with comic books and know nothing of the real world.


And Sheldon isn't a geek, he's just a jerk. Everybody used to go on about how all the Seinfeld characters were unlikable, but at least they weren't downright MEAN.

I have to agree with you one hundred percent on this, Joan. However we do seem to be in a minority. I've never understood its attraction, I just find it immensely painful to watch.

While it may not be a very nice way to put it, the most common criticism for The Big Bang Theory that I hear is that it is 'blackface for geeks.' I myself have only seen one episode, but most of the self-described geeks or nerds I know characterize it that way.

SFF Chronicles News said:

16th December 2009 04:05 AM

David Allen

When you look around the IT dept at work you will notice a distinct lack of women working there, this of course has nothing to do with working with technology, what it does have to with is the type of person already working there.
According to a recent survey, one of the main reasons for the lack of women in the industry is more to do with science fiction than computer science.
For women there is nothing more off putting in the work place than empty games machines, coke cans and science fiction posters, amazing as it may seem science fiction gets into the places that other genres fail to reach.
However, on this occasion it seems that by displaying the love of sci-fi publically it has a detrimental effect on encouraging women into the IT industry.

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Perhaps I can use this reason in the future, if I want to resign myself?



Coke cans can be found in any office-job though, not just the IT-industry. Lol at this survey.

Dave said:

...there has to have been a more all-encompassing reason why the girls did not get as excited about the computer and programming it.

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This graph has been posted on Reddit a couple of days ago and discussed on Twitter:


I think that whatever the problem was, it began in 1984. Isn't that when Microsoft released PC DOS 3.1?

I think it was when it became mugs game of insane specs, negatively long hours, moving goal posts, total mismanagement etc.
I wish over the last 30 years I hadn't been involved in Software or PCs. I think all those other careers are smarter.

@Dave
Did you listen to the npr broadcast that accompanied that graph?
Though they came up with one plausible scenario I think they were short sighted.
Their thought was that the new toy the pc was brought into the homes and placed with the boys and not girls-which is somewhat true.[giving boys a better chance.]
But at the same time salaries for computer science were beginning to rise and there was a renewed interest in getting a piece of that pie.
We still had inequity in wages between men an women.
So giving the boys a jump-start with almost an assurance that they would get the higher wages would have flooded that field with new interest so that even the women with high scores in mathematics could not keep up and had less incentive to do so.

All of the above though kicks this back to 1977 seven year earlier when all those college students were teens and the first personal computers were coming out in 1976 and 1977. Which is not really mentioned in the broadcast.
The commodore the apple and the tsr-80 end up in the hands of the young male enthusiasts giving them a technical advantage. In 1977 few people would bat an eye at the possibility of the exclusion of young girls in the enjoyment of this hobbyist activity.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

Well this might explain why only 5% of my beloved EVE online's player base is female.