When my mother got pregnant with me she decided to retrain. She went to university to study computer science. Today this sounds like a very #girlboss thing to do - a brave young woman with a baby in tow sets out to become a computer programmer…
But it wasn’t #girlboss.
It wasn’t unconventional.
It wasn’t some kind of feminist statement.
For my mother it was just a reasonably logical step after having worked in library administration. She wanted a future-proof profession where she could work flexible hours. She wasn’t even that interested in technology. It was just a job after all. Not a whole identity.
This was in the early 1980s. Computing wasn’t yet a male dominated field.
My mother got her degree. Then she got a job. I remember her managers coming to our house. They were all women, respectable ladies with big hair who brought homemade cakes and talked about C++.
This was the image of “tech” that I grew up with.
It wasn’t “male”.
It wasn’t “geeky”.
It wasn’t #girlboss.
It just was.
I was thinking about this the other day when I stumbled upon some people on the internet shouting at each other about a new study on toys and gender. A meta-analysis had overviewed 75 studies on children’s gender-related toy preferences and found that “boys and girls prefer gender-typical toys”.
Obviously this brought out all the people who think that gender-neutral toys are a pointless railing against nature. That boys are hardwired by evolution to like dumper trucks because cavemen used to hunt mammoths using dumper trucks 10,000 years ago or something…
I have always found what Cordelia Fine has to say about this very sensible. She often writes about how we love to exaggerate the differences between boys and girls when it comes to toys.
We make a MASSIVE deal of a study showing that newborn girls preferred to look at faces while newborn boys preferred to look at mobiles. But actually the average difference in looking time was less than 10%...
In fact preferences for toys among children (under three) show a large degree of overlap, she writes. Still, when female monkeys play with stuffed animals we make it mean that girls are biologically destined to love dolls (and therefore also destined for low paid jobs in the care sector.) But when male monkeys prefer stuffed dogs to cars, we don’t draw similar conclusions.
And so on.
The Great Big Toy Debate reemerging this week made me think of my mum because gendered marketing of toys actually played a role in changing the gender of computer programming.
The first programmers in the world were women. For a long time computer programming was seen to merely require an ability to follow instructions. Women were good at that, we thought. Women knitted, sewed from patterns and cooked from recipes. Computer programming was not that different, we assumed, and a lot of women went into the field. Then something happened. In the West, female participation in computer science plunged in the mid-1980s.
It was particularly strange because women in other STEM fields kept increasing. And in countries like India, Malaysia and Nigeria women still make up close to 50 percent of computer science students.
I discuss the economic reasons behind why computing went from “female” to “male” in my forthcoming book Mother of Invention. But one of the aspects I don’t talk about in the book is toys.
In the 1980s home computers emerged and they were marketed as “toys for boys”. We were introduced to the character of the geeky boy with a computer in his bedroom saving the world with code.
Nobody compared coding to cooking anymore… Suddenly women coming into computer science were expected to have played with computers as children. And they hadn’t. Being a programmer became a whole identity intimately connected with a certain expression of masculinity.
Thinking back to it I believe my mother actually had a great freedom in being able to see computer science as just one degree among others. She was free to think of programming as “just a job”. It wasn’t tied to any kind of identity. It was just this thing you could do. Check if you liked. See if you had a knack for. Find out if you enjoyed.
And speaking of toys, isn’t that the kind of freedom that we all want for our children?
Happy Thursday!
Katrine
PS. I'm kicking off my UK book tour with a conversation with the AMAZING Caroline Criado Perez on 23rd June. If you are in the UK tickets include a copy of the book! I’d love to see you there.