I recently listened to the NPR podcast "When Women Stopped Coding," which suggests that women and girls weren't into computers during the 1980s due to a lack of marketing, and I disagree with the podcast's assertions. However, I should begin by saying that I used to love NPR; for at least a decade they were my morning and evening source of news as I commuted. That being said, the quality of NPR's reporting has gone down considerably over the past two decades, to the point where I no longer listen to NPR. In my opinion, this podcast is typical of what I mean.
Let me put things in perspective: I was into computers long before the 1984 shift in marketing strategies that this podcast is basing it's thesis on, and here is my personal experience: around 1980, math classes in High School were 50/50 between boys and girls. However, computer classes were almost entirely male. The advertising that is quoted as the cause of this inequity had yet to come along, so what else could have caused this disparity? The answer is simple, although it is unpopular with people who want promote the idea that sexism was the key factor.
The reason why girls weren't into computers in the early 1980s was because there was no "cool factor" to them. If you were a girl in high school at that time, and you were into computers, you were going to be unpopular. Advertising had nothing to do with that; it was all about peer pressure. On the other hand, many guys had no problems with being unpopular, and there was an entire segment of society that sprung up in the late 1970s as the perfect base for the home computing market - the group of social misfits that evolved during that era was known as: the nerds. These were the boys who were into Dungeons and Dragons, played with Rubik's Cubes, and read fantasy books by authors like Tolkien. However, speaking in general terms, girls weren't into those sorts of things, because - for the most part - girls didn't WANT to be seen as social misfits. It is true that Hollywood and marketing types would soon launch a series of movies and advertisements that capitalized on this growing separation within young society, but this social shift is more of a "Chicken and Egg" scenario than NPR's podcast seems to suggest. (e.g. Advertising followed the social trend, and not the other way around.)
The group of boys who were already social misfits continued to be social misfits as they shifted from nerdy games to computers, which were seen as an extension of their nerdiness. While at the same time, girls - even those who were great at math - drifted further away from computers as they grew in popularity.
That being said, it is true that schools could have done much more to promote computers to both genders, and in that respect public education is partly to blame for creating the environment in which we find ourselves. And to that end, it is great to see so many schools today that are promoting STEM subjects to girls at a young age. It is for that reason that my niece is well on her way to a promising career in astrophysics, with a dream of working for NASA one day. In addition, I love the fact that a major part of Girl Scouts' vision is to promote STEM subjects to young girls. I'd love to see the Girl Scouts launch an advertising campaign that says, "Buy a cookie, create an astronaut." (Or a scientist, or a chemist, etc.)
By the way, in the interests of full transparency, one of the people who first mentored me on computers was the girl next door, Ellen. She wasn't typical of the girls at our High School, and I can't say if she was ever considered a social outcast, but I can say this for certain - she clearly didn't care. Ellen was one of the smartest people I knew, and it's undoubtedly a good thing that she didn't know I had a major crush on her at the time, because I would only have dragged down her IQ through prolonged exposure to me. Nevertheless, both her and her brother's influence during my early flirtations with computers are probably why I chose computer science as my career. But as I mentioned earlier, when I took my first computer classes, there were almost no girls in attendance, and this was before Hollywood seared that image into the public consciousness.
In other words, girls like Ellen were into computers "way back when," but it took the right kind of moxie to be willing to go against the flow. And yet, that concept is completely lacking in NPR's story. In that respect, I think this podcast suffers from a problem that's endemic to a lot of NPR's "reporting" these days: it is a bias in search of data.
UPDATE: This post is one of several that I had written that I later discovered had never been set to "public."