An amusing (+1 Funny, +1 Insightful) comment left by Ralph Brandi on Shelley Powers’ weblog, responding to her disagreement with Tim Bray’s too easy acceptance that some fields will ‘always’ be dominated by one sex or another:

“Telephone operators will remain predominantly male for the foreseeable future. Women simply don’t have the proper sensibilities to deal with the complicated machinery of a switchboard.” – a typical telephony pioneer of the 1880s.

It’s a status thing. When software development becomes sufficiently low status, men will abandon the field to women. Always is a long time.

If there’s a weblogging gene, maybe we can breed it out of people…

I did wonder whether telephone operating didn’t get easier as it became lower-status (or perhaps the other way around). Still, you see footage of early female switchboard operators, surrounded by wires and blinkenlights, operating with dexterity and confidence as if it were second nature to them (presumably because that was just what it was). They obviously weren’t suffering from learned helplessness with regard to technology.

Any sufficiently insouciant use of advanced technology is indistinguishable from prestidigitation. (Anybody who’s good with computers will have faced the puzzle of trying to figure out whether other people’s awed responses to the brisk execution of mundane computing tasks are sincere or not). What computing as a field has been enjoying for the past few decades is not just status but prestige. But it’s a dwindling prestige.

I take the current groundswell of revolt against WS-* as a symptom of that decline in prestige. More people understand basic web technologies now - they’ve been around for a while - and it’s beginning to be understood that those technologies can be used by themselves to provide useful services without needing to introduce an enormous stack of new specifications that you need a team of highly-paid consultants to help you implement properly.