The New York Times article “The Secret History of Women in Coding” tells the story of how computer programming contrary to its association with masculinity today, was once in fact seen as “women’s work”. Coding was seen as secondary to the hard work of creating the hardware which is why it was casted unto women. On the job the women were extremely adept at diagnosing problems with hardware as well since they were tasked to understand it so well. Concepts such as compiling and debugging were discovered by the women who worked with the computers. In fact, it was these women who discovered that the code never really worked the first time. Through the story of Mary Allen Wilkes, who became a computer programmer after being discouraged from pursuing a career in law, the article shows how open programming used to be to neophytes. If you didn’t know how to code, you would learn on the job. Despite the sexism and the pay disparities, Wilkes described how the relationship between men and women on the job was actually quite inclusive and close-knit.

When the number of coding jobs exploded in the 50’s and 60’s women were still on the forefront of computer coding,however the year 1984 significantly changes the way computers are being utilized in science and culture at large. The invention of the personal computer meant that boys would now be favored to learn how to code for no particular reason. If a computer was often bought it was almost always put in a boys bedroom and he would then be at an advantage to learn coding himself prior to entering high school. This, in turn, also begins to switch who becomes desirable as someone who codes and leads to many of the culture identities present in large tech firms today that favor these “hardcore” coders over anyone else and seek to reproduce this type of personality. After 1984 there was a significant drop off in the amount of women majoring in computer science and actively pursuing it as a job post grad. These numbers remained on the downward trend until recently when about 26% of computer science majors are women, this too however is still grim and has a matriculation of about 3% of women represented in large industry firms such as Twitter.

The last section of the article dealt with present-day attempts to remedy the problem of exclusionary and homogenous computing. The author mentioned efforts by Carnegie-Mellon to make the computer science program more accommodating and welcoming to people with less experience, an effort which has proven very efficacious in bringing more women into computer science. The author also brought up various coding boot camps and other initiatives that have contributed to the rising interest in coding and computer science by various segments of the population. The article concludes with an interview of three young, prodigious, female coders who won a hackathon in New York City who express the same frustration with the “boys’ club” atmosphere previously discussed in the article.