#576: When Women Stopped Coding

Planet Money

• Episode: #576: When Women Stopped Coding
• Website: Planet Money
• Feed URL: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510289
• Published: 2014-10-18 02:03

Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Most of the big names in technology are men. But a lot of computing pioneers, the ones who programmed the first digital computers, were women. And for decades, the number of women in computer science was growing. But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged. Today on the show, what was going on in 1984 that made so many women give up on computer science? We unravel a modern mystery in the U.S. labor force.