Recoding gender
Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male "computer geek" seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine "software engineering." She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science.
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What Hacker News says
- Lot's of nice photos here.
The eminent Computer historian Janet Abbate's Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participating in Computing (2012) is an history (and historiography) of women in computing. Highly recommended.
- I read a book called Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing, thought it was very good
- Make a private IRC channel. It's a pretty hardcore technical filter, but such are the times.
> [...] employers of the 1960s regarded programmers as unmanageable, citing contemporary sources that branded programmers as "prima donnas" who were "arrogant," "egocentric," and devoid of social skills.
> [...] a manager at IBM and Diebold bemoaned the fact that programmers' labor-market power undermined "the normal employer-employee relationship, which, in part, depends on the fear of termination or disciplinary action."
> Weinberg, who managed large software projects at IBM [...], argued that software was produced most effectively in egalitarian teams that emphasized open communication among members. [... He] contrasted his approach with what he saw as the macho attitude of many managers: "Managers tend to select themselves from the 'aggressive' component of society... They are especially at a loss to understand the smooth functioning of a programming group based on mutual respect for individual talent and cooperation in the common cause."
Janet Abbate - Recoding Gender, p93-95
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