Early Computer Memory

My uncle Mike worked for a company called Honeywell designing tracking systems for nuclear missiles, or maybe it was answering phones--in my memory, it was missles--and anything tech-related we ever had as kids came from him. I remember when he asked us to drive him to the store to buy socks and he came out with a microwave, which had just been invented and which we were all a little afraid of. 

Another time, he brought us an Apple IIe, one of those green screen early PC's and said: "this is the future." I wondered a bit why we stored "the future" in the attic and I don't remember if you could do anything with it: Oregon Trail, maybe. Soon, I learned Basic programming language from some friends at school. We would make backslashes have sword fights before going out to recess and having our own. It helped probably that we lived in the Pacific Northwest, where people's dads might have worked at early tech companies, but apart from that exposure in around fourth grade, computers didn't really figure in my life again until college, when suddenly we had to type papers. 

Girls are Strong

​People like this Paul Ford fellow, who wrote this otherwise excellent article about computer coding, are always holding up statistics like the following, presumably for our collective horror: “less than 30 percent of the people in computing are women.” We’re supposed to say: Can you imagine? That’s disgusting. etc. etc.

But man, 30%! That’s great! That’s way better than I imagined we were doing as a country! Not that programming computers is somehow noble, something to which all and sundry should aspire, but still, it’s (often) lucrative, which is something. But given that there are fewer women in the US workforce generally (47% according to the BLS) and that that number isn’t really right since, according to the same official statistics, 27% of those work only on a part time basis–presumably because they’re busy doing better things like birthing or raising the next generation of human beings so that there will be someone to use all this equipment–and since computer jobs tend not just to be full time, but all-consuming (hence the beds and food service at those “campuses”) so we’re really dealing with something like 35% of the workforce, and then peeling off the disproportionate employment of women in excellent, worthwhile, life-changing careers like education, then we’re down to something like perfect gender parity in computer-related fields. Which, again, doesn’t really matter any more than it matters that we achieve gender parity in sanitation collection–which we don’t have and no one complains about–but still, the tone bothers me. The mouth agape, “I thought we had evolved” look they all pose. Like we’re all supposed to be ashamed that some women tend to prefer spending time with other human beings, rather than staring into a blue-lit square for days on end, or that, worse still, the supposed imbalance is somehow calculated, somehow indicative of a pattern (to pull a metaphor from the both the worlds of coding–pattern recognition–and clothing, both fields to which women have complete access).

Note: all U.S. girls who have access to books or TV or films or other people know they can do anything they want with their lives. “Imbalance” based on self-selection is no cause for collective rue, still less for finger-wagging.