[SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

[Marie Hicks]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 10:17 PM, Deborah Douglas <ddouglas at mit.edu> wrote:

>  I do have questions about the impressions of those who have explored this
> subject more fully:  Do you consider the experience of women in computing
> to be anomalous or typical?  Do you view them (the way those of us who
> study women in combat aviation consider our subjects) as the “tip of the
> sword” or “bellwethers” for what is going on more broadly in society?  How
> is the experience different from one country to another?


I think Debbie hits the nail on the head with her comments and her
questions. As someone who works on this topic, here are my attempts to
answer:

1. I think the experience of women in computing is slightly anomalous in
that women were able to remain in the field in relatively high numbers in
the US and Britain once the field had already acquired a certain level of
cultural prestige (and when the jobs were quite lucrative). On the other
hand, the pushing out of women from a field as it professionalizes is a
very common story. So computing is not highly anomalous in the history of
gender and labor. I think it just seems so because there was a "delay" so
to speak in women being pushed out, because of the work's feminized,
supposedly deskilled origins. I think it also seems anomalous because we
(Americans) have been conditioned by the media telling us for ~20-30 years
that computing is aligned with (white, middle class) men's interests,
capabilities, and accomplishments. So it still seems strange and new to
many people when, say, Walter Isaacson "discovers" women in the history of
computing.

2. I think that yes, women in computing are a bellwether of sorts. Their
gradual removal was a harbinger of the fact that computing was becoming
less about computing and more about management. (I resist calling it
"flight" or saying they "left" because that is an inaccurate way of
describing the changes wrought by structural discrimination.) Women were
fine when the work was seen as technical; not so much when the work became
aligned with figuring out how to wield (managerial) power most effectively.
I also think women will be a bell wether in the reverse: the more women we
get into programming, the more likely it will be a sign of the field once
again becoming seen as deskilled or less skilled. The abuse of H1-B workers
in the US is a harbinger of that trend.

3. I am sure the experience of women in computing is quite different from
one country to another, but I'll just talk about the differences between
Britain and the US, since that's my bailiwick. In Britain, the rationale
for actively chasing women out of computing in the 1960s (except in times
of labor crisis) is very clear, and it comes directly from the top--i.e.
the government. It's a clear example of the nation's largest employer
deciding that computer work of any sort (operating, programming, systems
analysis) was too important to be left to supposedly unreliable,
lower-level workers who did not have management potential, and who were
more aligned with labor than management. It was an issue of both gender and
class (with class itself being a gendered category). This seems different
than the historical literature on the US context, where there is more focus
on how discourses of gender affected people and (it seems to me) somewhat
less focus on very discrete, large-scale cases of structural discrimination.

I think your insights and questions also resonate with the concern I voiced
earlier, Debbie. In paying so much attention to the seeming tragedy of
women in Anglo-American computing over the past few decades, and trying to
produce historical answers that can be translated into solutions for
women's underrepresentation today, are we in fact strengthening the systems
of privilege that created this problem in the first place? I often worry
about being a participant in that, given my work on this topic.

Best,

Marie



______________________
Marie Hicks, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor, History of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL USA
mhicks1 at iit.edu | mariehicks.net <http://www.mariehicks.net> | @histoftech
<http://twitter.com/histoftech>
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