Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the Honeywell Corporation, and so was more relevant to the real world
than the magazine's usual fare.
In many ways, however, the idealized gender-neutral profession
described in “The Computer Girls” was already becoming increasingly
divorced from reality. Over the course of the 1960s, developments in the
computing professions were creating new barriers to female participa-
tion. An activity originally intended to be performed by low-status,
clerical—and more often than not, female—computer programming was
gradually and deliberately transformed into a high-status, scientifi c, and
masculine discipline.
Professionalization was crucial aspect of this masculinization process.
As Margaret Rossiter and others have suggested, professionalization
nearly always requires the exclusion of women.
54
Among other things,
it requires segmentation and stratifi cation. In order to elevate the overall
status of their discipline, aspiring professionals had to distance them-
selves from those aspects of their work that were seen as low-status
and routine, work that became increasingly feminized. In addition, the
imposition of formal educational requirements on the part of the profes-
sional societies, such as a college degree, made it diffi cult for women—
particularly women who had taken time off to raise children—to enter
the profession. In 1965, for example, the Association for Computing
Machinery imposed a four-year degree requirement for membership that,
in an era when there were almost twice as many male as there were
female college undergraduates, excluded signifi cantly more women than
men.
55
A survey from the late 1970s showed that fewer than 10% of
ACM members were women.
56
Similarly, certifi cation programs or licens-
ing requirements erected barriers to entry that disproportionately affected
women. Finally, professionalism also suggests a certain degree of mana-
gerial authority and competence—skills and characteristics that were
often seen as being masculine rather than feminine. The CDP examina-
tions, for example, explicitly required candidates to have at least three
years of experience, and the majority of CDP holders worked in middle
management.
57
In his 1971 topic
The Psychology of Computer
Programming
, Gerald Weinberg notes the commonly held belief that
female programmers were incapable of leading a group or supervising
their male colleagues.
58
The more programmers were seen as potential
managers (a new development that came with professionalization), the
more women were excluded.
All of this suggests that as computer programmers constructed a
professional identity for themselves during the crucial decades of the
