IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 10

Jenna P. Carpenter

Programmed Inequality
Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists
and Lost Its Edge in Computing.
By Marie Hicks. London, U.K.: M.I.T. Press, 2017, 239 pages.

ur awareness and
underst a nding of
t h e key r o l e t h a t
women p l a ye d in
codebreaking and
computing efforts during World War
II has grown significantly over the
last decade. While some stories,
like that of pioneer computer programmer Grace Murray Hopper,
have been known for some time, a
more extensive story of women's
impact has been painted in the last
five to ten years by documentaries

The term "Computers" was
originally coined to describe
women who did mathematical
computations by hand.
like Top Secret Rosies: The Female
"Computers" of WWI [1], popular
mov ie s such as The Imitation
Game [2], and books, including
Margot Shetterly's recent Hidden
Figures [3]. Marie Hicks' book, Programmed Inequality adds to this
narrative by telling the story of the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2018.2839219
Date of publication: 31 May 2018

critical role that women "computers" played in Britain from World
War II through the 1970s. However,
Hicks seeks to go farther, recording
not only the impact of women on
the rise (and fall) of the computing
industry in the U.K., but showing
how the fortunes (or more accurately, the lack thereof) of women in the
computing workforce were intertwined with Britain's inability to
capitalize on the worldwide lead
they enjoyed in computing at the
end of WWII. Hicks also argues that
this story is relevant today,
given burgeoning U.S. computing workforce needs,
positioned a g a i n s t the
shortage of qualified computing workers. Indeed, like
Britain, the U.S. wo r ke r
shortage is exacerbated by
the outmigration of women
from the computing workforce that started at the
end of WWII and accelerated in the early 2000s with
the rise of the computing gamer
culture [4].
How doe s H ick s's stor y go?
Starting in the late 1800s, human
"computers" (the term was originally
coined to describe women who did
mathematical computations by
hand), were employed to support
weather applications and astronomical research. Their calculations were
done by hand and, later, with the
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aid of a series of desktop (electro)mechanical machines (the predecessors of what we today think of as
"computers"). Computing was actually viewed as a viable career path
in the late 1800 and early 1900s for
young women who showed mathematical talent. Around the 1920s
in the U.S., the number of women
entering college had grown to the
point that people feared there would
soon be too few slots for men, so a
quota system was implemented to
keep women out of fields like mathematics and science. But computing
with the aid of desktop machines,
even large floor-standing models
like the IBM tabulator, were viewed
as "secretarial work" - low-skilled,
rote, minimally-valued. Therefore
computing continued to be considered suitable work for women into
the 1930s. Even the manufacture
of computing machines at IBM in
Britain was dominated by female
employees, so much so that IBM
measured its production in the
U.K. in "girl hours," instead of the
more common "man hours" until
the 1960's. Layered on all of this
was the gendered expectation that
women's primary goal in life was
to marry and have children. Working was a temporary diversion for
young women in their late teens,
early twenties. When women married, they were expected to drop out
of the workforce. After all, their
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june 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018