>Incidentally, the SJ management was quite unhappy when they found out that the trainee program brochures had been sent out to both male and female students! There weren't many women who got accepted into the program, but we were a few.
Interesting! My mom learned programming in the same window, getting a civil engineering bachelor's from 1964-68, during which she used Michigan Algorithm Decoder for writing programs that had to be shipped as punchcards to mainframes.
When she took an aptitude test in high school that said she should go into engineering, the school counselor's reaction was, "right, right, but of course women don't go into engineering, so stick with that plan to be a math teacher". (I know because she tells the story about every other day.)
My mom about the same time fought to be allowed to take shop class in high school, but wasn't allowed. My dad meanwhile was the first male to take home economics (different school though, so while it seems likely we can't know for sure that a girl in his school would not have been allowed to take shop).
Even in the 1990s I knew a girl who was told she shouldn't take some sort of engineering class - but when she insisted she was allowed. (3 other girls joined the class when they knew they wouldn't be alone)
Interesting! My mom learned programming in the same window, getting a civil engineering bachelor's from 1964-68, during which she used Michigan Algorithm Decoder for writing programs that had to be shipped as punchcards to mainframes.
When she took an aptitude test in high school that said she should go into engineering, the school counselor's reaction was, "right, right, but of course women don't go into engineering, so stick with that plan to be a math teacher". (I know because she tells the story about every other day.)
Earlier thread about MAD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097032