Programmed inequality : how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing / Marie Hicks.
Hicks, Mar, author.
2017
HD6135 .H53 2017eb
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Title Programmed inequality : how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing / Marie Hicks.
Author Hicks, Mar, author.
ISBN 9780262342940 (electronic bk.)
0262342944 (electronic bk.)
9780262342926 eBook
0262342928
0262342936
9780262342933 (electronic bk.)
9780262035545
0262035545
0262535181
9780262535182
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]
Language English
Description 1 online resource (x, 342 pages) : illustrations.
Call Number HD6135 .H53 2017eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 331.40941/09045
Summary How Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women. 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. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Print version record.
Series History of computing.
Available in Other Form Programmed inequality.
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Introduction: Britain's computer "revolution"
War machines: women's computing work and the underpinnings of the data-driven state, 1930-1946
Data processing in peacetime: institutionalizing a feminized machine underclass, 1946-1955
Luck and labor shortage: gender flux, professionalization, and growing opportunities for computer workers, 1955-1967
The rise of the technocrat: how state attempts to centralize power through computing went astray, 1965-1969
The end of white heat and the failure of British technocracy, 1969- 1979
Conclusion: reassembling the history of computing around gender's formative influence
Bibliography.

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