International Women’s Day: Who gets to build the future?

“I’m especially proud of this year’s theme,” Zeien Cheung, co-founder of Asians Are Strong, said. “So many women do the invisible work behind life’s successes and it’s time we celebrate that tremendous impact.”

For most of American history, the invisible labor that women have carried was compulsory largely due to structural denial of economic independence. Women managed households, raised children, maintained family relationships, and held communities together while being legally prohibited from owning their own financial lives. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, a married woman often couldn’t apply for a mortgage on her own, a single woman needed a man to vouch for her finances, and no matter how much labor she contributed to the family, the economic identity belonged to someone else.

As women gained access to credit and financial independence in the industrial economy, what was happening in children’s toy aisles affected who got to participate in building the digital economy. In 1975, less than 2% of toys in Sears catalogs were explicitly marketed to boys or girls — things like building kits, science sets and construction toys were gender neutral. Then in 1984, deregulation of children’s television allowed toy companies to turn shows into extended advertisements, and gender became the primary differentiator. When personal computers hit stores they were marketed to boys, dolls and princesses to girls.

The pipeline consequences may have been unintended, but they were real. Women earned about 37% of U.S. computer science bachelor’s degrees in 1984. Over the following decades that share fell sharply, eventually dropping to under 20% in many programs. Computer science became the major STEM field in which women’s representation significantly declined while most others moved toward parity. Researchers later found that the rise of the home computer mattered: Families were far more likely to buy computers for sons, and early exposure translated into confidence and preparation by the time students arrived on college campuses. Introductory courses increasingly assumed prior experience, meaning many young men were continuing a hobby while many young women were encountering programming for the first time.

Silicon Valley was built during this period, which means the systems that shape modern life were overwhelmingly designed without women’s perspectives at the table. Problems that disproportionately affect women were deprioritized less because they weren’t important and more because the people experiencing them simply weren’t in the rooms where solutions were funded and built.

Early exposure to computing in the 1980s helped decide who arrived prepared to participate in building the digital economy. For much of the 20th century, access to financial systems determined independence, and by the end of the century, technical fluency determined who could shape those systems in the first place. The barrier had moved from banks to childhood. 

Today, AI-assisted tools begin to move that barrier again by reducing the education and experience once required to write software. Professional software developers now use these tools in everyday work to write, review and debug code, not just newcomers experimenting with them. Over the past two years, I returned to coding after a long absence and was able to quickly build and deploy working projects with their help, something that previously would have required more formal training.

International Women’s Day this year is a celebration of a moment where you no longer need a computer science degree or years of experience to build a production-grade product. “Now is the moment where nontechnical people can build real products and services with AI-assisted coding,” Christine Rimer, a former tech executive who is heavily involved with AI, said.

When anyone can build, the set of problems that get solved expands to include the ones that were ignored for decades because those affected simply weren’t in the room. Today’s tools lower the barrier to entry in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago. What matters now is who chooses to participate. Social change often looks like legislation, but sometimes it arrives as infrastructure … or even a simpler user interface.