I don't think people necessarily understand which career they choose. When girl wants to become ballerinas it is presumably because they have some idea that it is glamorous, not that it entails working hard under strict discipline for many years. They figure that out later.
What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.
Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.
How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.
"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."
As a boy, and a "nerd", I grew up on the VIC20 and C64 from grades 4 to 9 in the 80s, later to become one of the "Amiga generation" I guess. My friends were other boys who liked to tinker / obsess with computers. We weren't amongst the cool crowd then, but it didn't matter (too much). Number of girls I met who ever tinkered with one? None. It just didn't happen. (Asterisk: This was true for a sample size of one Norwegian school; YMMV.)
We would have loved it if anyone did, alas that wasn't the case. I'm glad things have changed and you're no longer an outcast if you're a geeky kid; I feel that I paid a big personal price for being that way inclined, but later on there was a payoff in that it was easy to get into programming as a career, when the Internet started happening in the mid late 90s.
If my next kid is a girl, she'll have no shortage of computer science ahead of her. My son's already way deep. :)
What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.
Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.
How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.
[0]
1977 Atari 2600
1977 Apple II
1981 Sinclair ZX81
1981 BBC Micro
1982 Commodore 64
1983 WarGames (movie)
1983 Nintendo Entertainment System
1985 Amiga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers
[1]
"When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64."
"My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school."
"1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program."
"In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work."
"My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD."
"I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it."
"I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879
[2]
"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."
http://www.linfo.org/linus.html