Thread by @pomeranian99

Behold Mary Allen Wilkes -- in the early 1960s, she wrote the operating system for the first personal computer. She walked into MIT with no experience; they hired her. Why? Women were considered *naturals* at coding. nytimes.com/2019/02/13/mag… (From my book CODERS, out 3/26!) 1/x

This is mini-thread because the @nytmag has just published an except from CODERS -- adapted from my chapter on the history of women in coding. Some highlights to follow ... 2/x

Anyway, back the 50s and 60s, coding was extremely open to women because it was a new field that prized aptitude and talent. If you could pass a test -- if you could prove you were good at thinking logically and meticulously -- you'd get hired. That's how MIT hired Wilkes! 3/x

In fact, the reason she went into coding? It 1959, it was *far less sexist* than law. She'd wanted to be a trial lawyer, but nope.

"The computer business was in a literal way my *fallback*," she told me, drily, last week. (Director's cut quote, not in the piece!) 4/x

One reason coding was so open to women was that the sexism worked in reverse. Men back then thought the difficult, glorious stuff was making the *hardware*. Software, eh: who cares? So women did it. The entire team of programmers for the ENIAC were women ... 5/x

... and man alive, coding back then was *hard*. Gnarly weird challenges abounded, and there wasn't any helpful Google or @StackOverflow to see if anyone could help out with your bug. 6/x

Despite the racism of the age, even some black women got opportunities; hiring was truly merit-based. Here's Arlene Gwendolyn Lee's story up in Toronto, which her son @raganwald (an awesome coder whose JavaScript books I own!) told in his blog post: braythwayt.com/posterous/2012… 7/x

But here's the thing: That early culture of openness and merit died. In 1960, when Wilkes was coding, 27% of programmers were women. That reached a peak of 35% in 1990. Then it plummeted, so by 2013 it was 26% -- *lower* than the 60s. What happened? 8/x

I'll let you read the rest of the piece to solve that mystery -- the story of how coding closed up to women and people of color is complex, with no single cause. I dive into the super historical work of Janet Abbate, @histoftech, @NEnsmenger, and Jane Margolis. 7/x

But for anyone who wonders, why don't more women go into coding?

They did. They were foundational, back when it was a brutally hard craft, and they rocked at it. Here's Mary Allen Wilkes again: Likely the first person on the planet with a personal computer *in her home*. 8/x

If you liked this thread, and the piece, there's a *lot* more in my book CODERS -- a fun dive into the world of programmers, how they think, and how they're reshaping the world.

Out March 26; preorder it NOW! Links to online stores are at my web site clivethompson.net