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ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the history of women in the American workforce. This past week, Newsweek ran a cover story about women in America’s tech industry. And it got pundits talking.

MALE SPEAKER: The article focuses on a sexist culture in the tech industry.

FEMALE SPEAKER: There are people that are losing jobs, getting death threats and threatened and docked on a regular basis because of sexism in tech.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s sort of the system doesn’t seem to be set up to allow women to prove their worth.

ED: That’s MSNBC and CBS News. There and elsewhere, the conversation quickly got derailed by the magazine’s cover image. A lot of commentators accused it of perpetuating the same sexism it was attempting to highlight.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Look at this. The title, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women,” appears beside an image of a woman having her skirt lifted by the arrow of a computer mouse.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s supposed to illustrate the barriers that women face–

ED: Critics say that images like that are the reason women aren’t attracted to computer science in the first place. It’s left companies across the tech industry asking themselves, how do we get women into computing? But when BackStory producer, Andrew Parsons, looked into the history of women in that field, he came away with a different question. How do you get women back into computing? Here’s Andrew with the story.

ANDREW PARSONS: In 1945, a military-run lab at the University of Pennsylvania created one of the first electronic computers to calculate missile trajectories. The job of programming calculations into this machine went to some of the best computing minds in the industry, the ones previously doing the computing.

MARGARET O’MARA: The term, “computer” was first applied to refer to a person. And that person was a woman.

ANDREW PARSONS: This is Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington. She says, for decades before electronic computers, women were human computers, the ones actually doing the math. When electronic computers were invented, the job of programming these machines went to women.

MARGARET O’MARA: Early on, the idea of programming a computer, actually making be the software work, was considered to be kind of a glorified telephone operator or glorified secretary, that all you had to do was plug the wires in the right plug, and then that would make it work, that the real artistry was in designing the hardware of the computer, and that was what the men on the teams did.

ANDREW PARSONS: But these women were more than just secretaries. Most had advanced degrees in mathematics. They were computing complex equations and feeding them into the machines.

All the more, these computers were a massive, wall-sized behemoth. They were finicky and broke down a lot. Computer science historian, Nathan Ensmenger, says the women programming the first computers in the ’40s had to creatively troubleshoot the machines.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: It very quickly became apparent that programming the computer was as hard, if not harder, than building it. And so these women very quickly assumed a much more prominent role in making these computers work.

ANDREW PARSONS: By the late ’60s and early ’70s, Ensmenger says computer programming was seen as a growth industry for women. In 1967, the magazine, Cosmopolitan, known for puff pieces and sex advice columns, ran an article entitled, “Computer Girls.”

JANE ADDAMS: I don’t know of any other field outside of teaching where there’s as much opportunity for women.

ANDREW PARSONS: This is Jane Addams, quoted in the article. She was the Director of Education of the Association for Computing Machinery.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Soon, mothers will be telling their daughters, study your arithmetic, so you can become a computer girl.

ANDREW PARSONS: The Cosmo article quotes the now legendary computer scientist, Dr. Grace Hopper, as saying, “Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.”

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Ensmenger says it might be easy to brush this article off as a puff piece, if not for the actual numbers. He says at least 30% of programmers through the 1970s were women.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: 30% is quite high, at least when we look at comparable professions, like engineering, or accounting, or architecture. That number is quite high.

ANDREW PARSONS: As the 1970s progressed, Margaret O’Mara says computer programming was seen as something that was compatible with mothers who wanted to make their own schedules. They could work from home. It was family-friendly.

MARGARET O’MARA: I found these stories of these companies that are trying this out, and doing it as a way to keep their programming workforce more diverse. And that’s the great irony is that that somehow, very quickly, goes away.

ANDREW PARSONS: Today, our images of computer programmers are very male. Take the HBO sitcom, Silicon Valley, about a group of guys starting a software company and living together in a college-style group house. In one episode, one of the coders brings his girlfriend into the house for a few days, and it throws everything off.

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-Hey.

-Tara, this is the fellas– Jared, Dinesh, Erlich and Richard.

-Well, it’s great to finally meet you guys.

-Huh?

-All right.

-Mm.

-It’s weird having a girl in the house. It’s a very strange energy.

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ANDREW PARSONS: So what happened? How did an industry where programming was all women become one that many say is hostile towards women? Well, first off, in the 1960s, it was clear that programming software was going to be the future of computing. MIT and Stanford founded, now legendary, computer science programs. O’Mara says the distinctively male programmer we see in the media today has its roots in the labs of those universities, in environments that are not welcoming to women.

MARGARET O’MARA: They are pulling all-nighters. They are not showering. They are sitting in front of computer terminals. It’s like a frat house, without the beer. You know, that’s kind of where the legend begins.

ANDREW PARSONS: By the 1980s, the legends were guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The image of the weird, brilliant computer hacker captured the media’s attention.

Now, to be fair, there are many factors that pushed women out of programming in the ’80s. Coding jobs were becoming better paid, attracting more men. Male dominated corporations were also starting to take over.

But that legend mattered. It was showing up in story lines for major movies. And Ensmenger says it started to shape industry notions of who should be a programmer.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: Corporations begin to believe that, in order to be a good programmer, you must also be obsessive and anti-social. They hire programmers who are like that. And before you know it, you have a programming group full of anti-social, obsessive, largely men.

ANDREW PARSONS: Ensmenger says this boy’s club environment crept into standard industry practice too. For example, all programmers know something called a reference image.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: If you want to display your latest graphical filter or your image processing technique, you’ll use a reference image to show how your technique differs for others.

ANDREW PARSONS: Since the 1970s, most programmers have used the same image, that of a Playboy playmate. Don’t forget this was a time when the industry was actually welcoming to women. But that image emerged from, you guessed it, a university lab. And it stuck.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: And it’s been published in hundreds of academic papers. But the fact that computer scientists don’t see it problematic, that this highly sexualized image used in their discipline, I think, is a reflection of the larger culture.

MARGARET O’MARA: Culture really matters. Culture matters in the beginning, middle and end of the story. And when we talk to women who have been really successful programmers, have been very successful technical women, a lot of them will say, well, the way that I did it is I had to get a thick skin. I had to not worry about the fact that I was the special unicorn, I was the only woman in the room.

EILEEN HAGAN: As a software developer, there were many, many days when I would walk into every meeting I was in, I was the only female.

ANDREW PARSONS: This is Eileen Hagan, a vice president at the tech company, Intuit. She was at IBM in the mid ’80s, and says that culture expressed itself in little ways, no handshakes for her at meetings, asking her to go get coffee.

EILEEN HAGAN: I got chastised once for wearing pants to work, instead of a dress or a skirt. You had to work a little harder to gain the respect of your peers. I think it’s just really that simple.

ANDREW PARSONS: The perception of computer programming as a boy’s club has had a big impact. O’Mara says the percentage of women enrolled in computer science programs peaked in the early 1980s, and it continues to decline today.

MARGARET O’MARA: Google just , for example, released its diversity numbers, in terms of gender diversity and racial diversity earlier this year. And at Google, the technical workforce is 17% female, 17%.

ANDREW PARSONS: There’s no silver bullet to solve the tech industry’s diversity problem. Some say it starts with encouraging girls to get into math and science in lower grades. Some say it’s about actively recruiting women into Silicon Valley jobs. And others say it’s about changing the industry culture, so when women arrive in tech, they stay. But Ensmenger says, perhaps, there’s another solution to consider.

NATHAN ENSMENGER: I think it’s telling the history correctly, that the stories we tell about the history of computing are largely mythologies, not real history.

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ED: That story was brought to us by Andrew Parsons, one of the producers on our show. To read more about this history, check out Nathan Ensmenger’s book, The Computer Boys Take Over, and Margaret O’Mara’s, Cities of Knowledge, Cold War Science and the Next Silicon Valley.

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That’s going to do it for us today, but we’ll be waiting for you online. Drop in at backstoryradio.org and let us know what you thought about today’s show. And while you’re there, check out our blog post about super mom comic book heroes and how they struggle to balance motherhood and saving the world in the 1960s and ’70s.

Also, let us know what you’d like to hear on future shows. We’re working on episodes about the history of the middle class, as well as the way history was depicted in last year’s popular media. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

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PETER: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, and Robert Armengol. Our digital producer is Emily Gadek. And Jamal Millner is our engineer.

We had help from [? Foley Elhi. ?] BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks this week to Alice Kessler-Harris and Nina Feldman.

ED: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

ED: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.