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San Francisco Chronicle

The pattern of discriminatory pay stretches back to the birth of computing. Women programmed the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, without the help of high-level languages or floating-point arithmetic, and performed ballistics calculations at the raw binary level. This would be fiendishly difficult for modern software engineers. A Illinois Institute of Technology study showed that women hardware operators in the United Kingdom during the same era were paid less for supposedly “monotonous” and “routine” machine work while the men doing the “clean and cerebral” calculations on that hardware were handsomely compensated. The pay follows the person, not the skill, and certainly not the merit.