The Historic Role of Women in Software Programming

Coders: Who They Are, What They Think and How They’re Changing Our World

By Clive Thompson

Penguin Press 2019

Book Review

For me the most interesting sections of Thompson’s book concern the role of female programing pioneers who have been conveniently erased from history. The first computer programmer in history was Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who wrote the program used the the Analytic Engine to calculate Bernoulli’s sequence in 1843.

During World War II, women programmed the first experimental machines used for code breaking. Post war, they designed the first compilers that allowed people to create coding language by converting binary code to English. At time time, the common assumption was that experience creating and following recipes and engaging in intricate needlework made women especially qualified to produce detailed and accurate coding sequences.

As the computer revolution took off in the 1950s and 1960s, promoting the mainly female keypunch* workforce to coding jobs made intuitive sense, while the male computer workforce focused on the more glamorous work of developing hardware (ie building computers).

Sadly in the late sixties, when it became necessary to promote coders to management positions, few companies saw women as management caliber. As they focused on recruiting more men, the number of female students enrolled in university computer science programs steadily decline. By 2003, it had dropped to 26% (from a high of 35% in 1990).

Even though female and minority enrollment in computer science degrees has improved since then, Thompson details the overwhelming degrading and sexist treatment female computer science students have experienced, not only at university, but in the frat-style environment of many Silicon Valley Companies,

In 2019, when the book was written, many prominent Silicon Valley coders still publicly proclaimed that women were biologically unsuited to coding. Overseas statistics strongly contradict this view (for example India, where women comprise 40% of computer science students, and Malaysia where they comprise 52%).

The low number of female coders in the US, may relate to the tendency of American parents to discourage nerdish computer tinkering behavior (common in boys who go on to study computer science) in girls. In contrast, similar behavior  is equally encouraged in boys and girls in India.

Thompson also devotes major portions of the book to a discussion of Internet surveillance by government and the ingenuity of cyberpunk hactivists in circumventing government spying; the tendency of AI to incorporate the innate biases of the coders who program it; and the philosophy behind the open source operating system Linux and open source software.

I found the final chapter extremely interesting. Here Thompson links the financial motives of venture capitalists who finance Facebook, Twitter and similar social media start-ups and the clickbait algorithms that facilitate the proliferation of so-called “misinformation.” According to Thompson, venture capitalists have no interest in funding “stable” start-ups. They’re only interested in “ferocious” growth, which isn’t possible if users are charged upfront for participating. Exponential growth is only possible with free services that 1) keep users on the site long enough to view lots of ads and 2) collecting personal information about them to on sell to other companies (and the government).

The only way to trigger this type of growth is for Facebook et al to promote compulsive social media use via algorithms that favor posts that trigger strong emotions.

*In the early computers of the fifties and sixties, data was fed into computer via cards with holes punched in strategic locations by (mainly female) keyppunch operators.