24/11/2017 When Women Stopped Coding

Hi,
This week we had to listen a very interesting podcast on the National Public Radio, When Women Stopped Coding (Link here), which explained why the majority of women dropped their computer science studies or choose to study something else in 1984.

Their researches proved that this was mainly due to the stereotypical and sexist society of those years. For example the advertising for the new computers were exclusively involving men and boys, even because some of the advertising was about games and as a common thought guys like playing games.

In the podcast they were talking about the increasing presence of women in nearly every other field, but by my experience I do not agree.

First of all I think there still is a huge difference between men and women in computer science now, especially in some countries (Italy, for example), and unfortunately this reflects in other fields, like a lot of types of engeneering for example.

It made me remember of the movie "Hidden figures" by Theodore Melfi, that talks about these women working for Nasa during the Space Race.






Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#/media/File:The_official_poster_for_the_film_Hidden_Figures,_2016.jpg 

Bye bye,
Eleonora

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