Programmed inequality
This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.
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7recommend
12mentions
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2017–2026years
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- No true scotsman?
This is a good book on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Inequality-Discarded-Techn...
- There's a short book that covers this period of British computing history: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.
It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
- In addition to the great books listed here, a few more that might be of interest:
- Turing’s Cathedral, by George Dyson
- Black Software, by Charlton McIlwain
- Programmed Inequality, by Mar Hicks
The Dyson book is a rigorous and deep historical dive into the philosophical and practical origins of digital computing, and is really great.
The other two are equally great and deep but cover computing history through different lenses. The Hicks book in particular may be of interest for you, as its emphasis is on the history of computing in the UK. They’re less directly about how computers “work”, as such, and more about how computers and society have interacted with one another in interesting and non-obvious ways, and how those interactions have impacted the ways in which technologies have developed.
- A good history of early British computing is Programmed Inequality. Gets at why that country squandered its WW2-era computing lead (spoiler alert: sexism was part of it). https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality
- Programmed Inequality by Mar Hicks, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality
On the history of women in programming in Britain and how they got discarded from the profession.
- There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business.
Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history.
As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened.
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