Its quite interesting to see how the implication of women in computer science took a sharp and sudden turn down right in 1984
Many people attribute this to the first home computers, and the following advertisement campaigns that were male oriented, promoting gaming for boys, so was the cinema industry: (wargames for example). I also find this a possible explanation.
However it is very interesting to see that the very famous 1984 super bowl ad for Mac
Presented a bright young women running to break the 1984 screen watched by a crowd of grey men, this add was only shown once during the super-bowl and then taken down because the investors argued that since the mac was not yet ready it was to early to make some publicity.
One can easily wonder if this argument didn’t hide other concerns (maybe the representation of surveillance of uniform thinking or the women itself or all of that together…)
Quoted from previously cited Wikipedia article: Revisiting the commercial in Harper’s Magazine thirty years after it aired, Rebecca Solnit suggested that “1984” did not so much herald a new era of liberation as a new era of oppression. She wrote, “I want to yell at the liberatory young woman with her sledgehammer, ‘Don’t do it!’ Apple is not different. That industry is going to give rise to innumerable forms of triviality and misogyny, to the concentration of wealth and the dispersal of mental concentration. To suicidal, underpaid Chinese factory workers whose reality must be like that of the shuffling workers in the commercial. If you think a crowd of people staring at one screen is bad, wait until you have created a world in which billions of people stare at their own screens even while walking, driving, eating in the company of friends—all of them eternally elsewhere.”
