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Climb Mount Niitaka - The Path to Pearl Harbor #5

🕑 Added 2022-12-23 18:30:02 +0000 UTC

Comments

chromicacid

@The Extra Credits Channel The subject caught my eye recently when I listened to a Planet Money podcast re-broadcast of a 2016 episode called, "When women stopped coding". https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding The subject matter of the podcast is beyond the upper limits of when Extra History wants to handle, but I thought that you might still find it an interesting listen. In your episodes on Pearl Harbor, I'm hearing about ladies working deep in the math stuff and code breaking, but it seems that people like this just dropped off the radar sometime between then and now. According to the podcast, it appears to have been heavily affected by societal expectations of the kinds of toys that women wanted (clothes, dolls, cooking) vs what boys wanted (machines, electronics, computers), and that resulted in a lopsided boys-vs-girls early-life gain in technical skills that were exacerbated in evolving higher educational expectations that "you should know this by now". A bit depressing, true, but I found it interesting.

Extra History

That would be amazing! We would love to do it, just gotta find the time.

John Cox

I see the artists easter egg of the ice princess. Very good. You know, it'd be interesting to see a short series (or at least a dedicated one-off) on the code breaker ladies.