How Government In The UK Pushed Women Out Of Tech

In computing’s early years, when it was considered women’s work, all six programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women

See The First Women in Tech Didn’t Leave—Men Pushed Them Out by Christopher Mims of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself.

Memos from the U.K.’s government archives reveal that, in 1959, an unnamed British female computer programmer was given an assignment to train two men. The memos said the woman had “a good brain and a special flair” for working with computers. Nevertheless, a year later the men became her managers. Since she was a different class of government worker, she had no chance of ever rising to their pay grade."

"The history of computing, in the U.K. in particular, backs up one of their central conclusions—that simply educating more women and other minorities to be engineers won’t solve the problem.

At its genesis, computer programming faced a double stigma—it was thought of as menial labor, like factory work, and it was feminized, a kind of “women’s work” that wasn’t considered intellectual. Though part of the U.K. government’s low-paid “Machine Operator Class,” women performed knowledge work including programming systems for everything from tax collection and social services to code-breaking and scientific research, using punch cards on a vacuum-tube computer.

Then they were systematically pushed out of the field, says technology historian Marie Hicks, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote about it in her recent book, “Programmed Inequality.”

Government leaders in the postwar era held a then-common belief that women shouldn’t be allowed into higher-paid professions with long-term prospects because they would leave as soon as they were married. The result was absurdities such as “retirement parties” for talented women coders still in their 20s.

Instead, the government sought to develop a class of career-minded and management-bound young men.

But replacing experienced women with male novices didn’t go as government bureaucrats planned, according to Dr. Hicks. “They were just hemorrhaging money and time to try and train and recruit this ideal young man, this technocrat who will manage people and machines,” she said.

Not only were the male recruits often less qualified, they frequently left the field because they viewed it as an unmanly profession. A shortage of programmers forced the U.K. government to consolidate its computers in a handful of centers with the remaining coders. It also meant the government demanded gigantic mainframes and ignored more distributed systems of midsize and mini computers, which had become more common by the 1960s and would eventually give rise to the personal computer, Dr. Hicks says.

As a result, the U.K.’s computing industry imploded. By 1968 there was a single firm, ICL, the result of a merger of three other firms. Even with its lock on government contracts, it too struggled."