Posted in Uncategorized

The First Women in Tech Didn’t Leave—Men Pushed Them Out – WSJ

Women filled computer-programming jobs in the U.S. and U.K. after World War II, but as government and business professionalized programming, the decline of female coders began.

Find the full article at the Wall Street Journal

If nothing else happened in 2017, this has been a year where women started to assert themselves more into society in a push that hasn’t been seen in decades. In the process of doing so, we are reminding ourselves of where we have been, where we are, and where we should be.  Women in tech has always been a topic of interest here at TechCommGeekMom, because there is a generation (namely mine) that essentially got shut out because our predecessors got shut out.  We found some other ways to work around it, but not always. We need to learn from our history (which is spelled out well in this Wall Street Journal article), and see what we can do to change this. There is no reason whatsoever for the technical field not to be equal between men and women in the workforce doing the same jobs. None.

Think of it like this–they don’t say that “Mother Necessity” is the reason for invention for nothing, right? Women have often been the inspiration for technical advance, and even a few super smart ones were able to break those barriers to the world’s advantage. So why would you want to lock them out?

It is not only up to women to fight for their right to work equally in the tech field, but it’s up to men who understand and appreciate that women are perfectly capable of doing the same jobs for equal pay as well.

What do you think? Include your comments below.

–TechCommGeekMom

Author:

Danielle M. Villegas is a technical communicator who currently employed at Cox Automotive, Inc., and freelances as her own technical communications consultancy, Dair Communications. She has worked at the International Refugee Committee, MetLife, Novo Nordisk, BASF North America, Merck, and Deloitte, with a background in content strategy, web content management, social media, project management, e-learning, and client services. Danielle is best known in the technical communications world for her blog, TechCommGeekMom.com, which has continued to flourish since it was launched during her graduate studies at NJIT in 2012. She has presented webinars and seminars for Adobe, the Society for Technical Communication (STC), the IEEE ProComm, TCUK (ISTC) and at Drexel University’s eLearning Conference. She has written articles for the STC Intercom, STC Notebook, the Content Rules blog, and The Content Wrangler as well. She is very active in the STC, as a former chapter president for the STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter, and is currently serving on three STC Board committees. You can learn more about Danielle on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemvillegas, on Twitter @techcommgeekmom, or through her blog. All content is the owner's opinions, and does not reflect those of her employers past or present.

What say you?

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.