Review of ‘ Gender Codes : Why Women are Leaving

REVIEW I still think, of all the fields open to women, computer science is the most wonderful one. First of all, as a programmer, no one knows what sex you are, what color you are, what your gender preferences are; they just know: Does it work or not? Did you get it done? Is it fast enough? And therefore, it is the field where you are judged by the output – that " s it. … So I love it for women. Women have not always been absent from computing, nor do they necessarily reject it today, as this quotation from Thomas Misa " s (2010) edited collection, Gender Codes, indicates. In the mid 60s, they entered the field in large numbers. By the late 80s, they made up 38% of the US computing workforce. This was quite untypical of other technical professions – chemistry, physics, engineering – which men soundly dominated. Not so computing. There were proportionately more women in computing than anywhere else in the engineering world. However, in the mid 80s, their presence diminished on a scale unprecedented in any other profession. Why? What happened to put women off, to reduce their representation from over one-third of the computing workforce to the one-fifth of today?