Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3.6
According to the original caption for this cartoon, “Programmers are crazy about
puzzles, tend to like research applications and risk-taking, and don't like people.”
William M. Cannon and Dallis K. Perry, “A Vocational Interest Scale for
Computer Programmers,”
Proceedings of the Fourth SIGCPR Conference on
Computer Personnel Research
(Los Angeles: ACM, 1966), 61-82.
only logical thinking and pattern recognition, but others required formal
training in mathematics—a fact that even
Cosmopolitan
recognized as
discriminating against women. Still, the kinds of questions that could be
easily tested using multiple-choice aptitude tests and mass-administered
personality profi les necessarily focused on mathematical trivia, logic
puzzles, and word games. The test format simply did not allow for any
more nuanced, meaningful, or context-specifi c problem solving. And in
the 1950s and 1960s at least, such questions did privilege the typical
male educational experience.
Even more obviously gendered were the personality profi les that rein-
forced the ideal of the “detached” (read male) programmer. It is almost
certainly the case that these profi les represented, at best, deeply fl awed
scientifi c methodology. But they almost equally certainly created a
gender-biased feedback cycle that ultimately selected for programmers
with stereotypically masculine characteristics. The primary selection
mechanism used by the industry selected for antisocial, mathematically
