How Women Are Being Excluded from STEM Fields: Planet Money : NPR

In 1958, Elsie Shutt founded one of the first software companies in the United States, with an all-female programmer staff.

Photo courtesy of Elsie Shatter

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Photo courtesy of Elsie Shatter

In 1958, Elsie Shutt founded one of the first software companies in the United States, with an all-female programmer staff.

Photo courtesy of Elsie Shatter

Note: This episode originally aired on October 2014.

Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Most of the big names in tech are men.

But many of the computer pioneers, the people who wrote the first digital computers, were women, and the number of women in computer science has been growing for decades.

But in 1984, things changed. The number of women in computer science leveled off, then plummeted.

Today on the show, we’re going to talk about what happened in 1984 that caused so many women to give up computer science? We’re going to unravel a modern mystery about the American workforce.

music: “Midas Network“”Brain matter,” and”80s Light Show“”.

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