In the nineteenth century, the assistants in companies who wrote letters, kept appointment calendars, and otherwise organized office life were called “clerks.” This was a highly skilled position and...

In the nineteenth century, the assistants in companies who wrote letters, kept appointment calendars, and otherwise organized office life were called “clerks.” This was a highly skilled position and was reserved only for men. In the twentieth century, they’re called secretaries, the positions are filled almost entirely by women, and they’re paid less.

In the 1940s, by contrast, women were hired as keypunch operators, the forerunner to computer programmers, because it seemed to resemble clerical work. In fact, however, it “demanded complex skills in abstract logic, mathematics, electrical circuitry and machinery,” which the women did routinely. Once programming was declared to be “intellectually demanding,” it became attractive to men, who entered the field and drove wages up and women out. Today it is a largely male-dominated field (Donato, 1990).