Thread by @rachelnabors

“What shocked me was…the more I became recognized as a serious young woman who was aiming high—whose long-term aspirations went beyond a merely subservient role—the more violently I was resented and the more implacably I was kept in my place.” 1950s, yo. logicmag.io/05-how-to-kill…

“They were seen as liminally working-class, temporary workers who should not rise above their current station. To elevate women further would upend the hierarchies of both government and industry, pushing low-status workers into high-status positions.”

“... the British labor market discarded the most important workers of the emerging computer age, damaging the progress of every industry that used computers, the modernization projects of the public sector, and, most strikingly, the computer industry itself.”

“The massive waste of human talent rippled upward, eventually destroying the British lead in computing and the British computer industry.” Dun dun dun.

I’ll never forget the day I came home to find my mother crying in the kitchen, having just quit her job.

I was ten. She was a systems analyst. COBOL. Assembler. Terminal in the room she kept off limits when I was a toddler. She documented processes entire teams relied on.

It took me so long to piece together what happened to her. Now I can only figure it was a combination of burnout and the pressures of rampant sexism at her workplace.

But she was never the same after that.

I wanted to make computer games by the time I was twelve. She steered me toward art instead. Never wrote a line of code with me. Never encouraged me to pick it up, even as I pawed through her boxes of books from her old job in the attic.

Sometimes I hear men, engineers without half the skill of my mother, making snide remarks about women in tech. “Diversity hires.” Documentation.

I just remember my mother sobbing.

I can’t forgive people like that... for making her cry. For changing her. Us.

“Don’t get into programming, Rachel. You wouldn’t like it.”

Well. I’m here. And I do. And there’ll be none of this nonsense on my watch.

Our species is facing some of the greatest challenges in our history RIGHT NOW. Now is not the time to be overlooking those who show an aptitude because they don’t remind you of yourself.

We need all hands on deck. Every mind operating at its maximum capacity.

We cannot keep denying that we have less than half the great programmers that our species is capable of producing.

We have left them behind. We have LOST them. They are MISSING.

There is a great shame and deeper horror in that.

The wrong color. The wrong income bracket. The wrong location. The wrong genitals. Attracted to the wrong genitals.

We have left SO MUCH on the table.

We are missing SO MANY of our greatest minds.

And some people have the nerve to put on airs about who’s deemed “worthy.”

If we cannot pull our heads out of our asses in time and right this, our species really has earned what’s coming to it.

Get with the program.

EPILOGUE

My mother never wrote another line of code.

Her lifetime contribution to the sum of humanity’s computing was cut in half when she quit.

Her daughter’s contributions were similarly cut in half due to her late start.

The isms of this world have cumulative effects.