[SIGCIS-Members] Steve Shirley obit

Mon Sep 15 17:44:57 PDT 2025

Brian,

Thanks for your note!  I appreciate your taking the time to read the piece. And yes, I’m aware. That is why I used the phrase ”all but required” not "required" which reflected what many women interviewees told me, as well as what was represented in the many archival documents (from both workers and management) that I used for my research. I stand by what I said, notwithstanding the changes that occurred throughout the sixties. I am very happy to hear of the counter examples you gave though.

I will also say, however, that from everything I saw in my many years of archival research on this, and talking to women about their experiences, it would be an error to think that this process generally made rational economic sense and as such only affected women once they could not hold full time in-person employment due to having children.

It was unfortunately completely normal for women in computing to be pushed out of their jobs for reasons pertaining to their personal lives, or their perceived personal lives, throughout latter part of the 20th century, even well after the 1960s, and that included engagements and marriages--not just having children. Yes, there were women who pushed back and stayed longer, and there were differences between and even within different organizations owing to specific managers, and these should be acknowledged and even celebrated, but it does not alter accuracy of the statement I made regarding general structural constraints in the industry and pressures on these specific women workers in this time period and context.

Best,

Mar

________________________
Mar Hicks
Associate Professor
School of Data Science
University of Virginia

marhicks at virginia.edu
marhicks.com<https://marhicks.com/>

Research Affiliate, Centre for Democracy and Technology<https://www.mctd.ac.uk/>, University of Cambridge
Member, Scholars' Council, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry<https://www.c2i2.ucla.edu/>, UCLA
Associate Editor, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing<https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an> (feel free to ask me about submitting an article if you work on a topic related to computing history)

Books:
Programmed Inequality<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality>: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017)
Your Computer Is On Fire<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/your-computer-fire>  (MIT Press, 2021)
________________________________
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2025 5:13:58 PM
To: Hicks, Mar (avg5bd) <mhicks at virginia.edu>; SIGCIS <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Steve Shirley obit

Mar,

Thanks for that. May I just comment on one point? You write

"Shirley’s first major “help wanted” advertisement for her new company,
published in the Times of London in 1964, noted that her company
had “many opportunities for retired programmers (female) to work
part-time at home.” In this era, the term “retirement” was used to
describe the situation women, who were as young as their twenties,
found themselves in when they were all but required to leave the workforce
upon getting married (fig. 13.1)."

I very much doubt that the requirement to leave work upon marriage was imposed by the companies, especially by ICL which is the example in Fig. 13.1. I have two counter-examples, as it happens: Ruth Engleback (née Thomson) who was hired by BTM (which became ICT and then ICL) in 1954, then married, but only left her job in 1959 when she had her first child [1]; and my own late wife who joined EELM (which became part of ICL) in 1967 _after_ her first marriage, becoming a programming team leader; she left in 1969 for a better job.

I suspect that Mary Berners-Lee (née Woods) was an earlier counter-example. She left Ferranti when "her first child was born" according to Wikipedia. (The fact that he grew up to invent the Web is beside the point.)

The 1960s was a time of rapid social change in the UK, and the societal expectation that women should quit work upon marriage was also changing rapidly, but came at least as much from families as it did from employers.

I don't mean in the least to downplay Steve Shirley's achievement, but the context was one of social change. Increasingly, it was the first child, not marriage, that forced a career break. Of course, provision for maternity leave was non-existent in those days.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2020.2990647

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 16-Sep-25 07:36, Hicks, Mar (avg5bd) via Members wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Agreed—Shirley was a very interesting player in the software industry. She focused on hiring many of the women being forced out of their jobs in computing in the 1960s and onward, as I talk about in/Programmed Inequality <https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535182/programmed-inequality/>/.
>
> If you’re interested in reading more about Shirley and the gender and labor dynamics at her company, a preprint of my recent chapter in Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick’s new edited collection is below. Notably, Shirley saw the broad societal importance of work from home accommodations in high tech long before most others in the industry: https://marhicks.com/writing/Hicks-BabyAndBlackBox.pdf <https://marhicks.com/writing/Hicks-BabyAndBlackBox.pdf>
>
> For a 3 min summary on bsky, see here:
> https://bsky.app/profile/histoftech.bsky.social/post/3lx2veouoa22o <https://bsky.app/profile/histoftech.bsky.social/post/3lx2veouoa22o>
>
> She definitely had a long, fascinating, and important life.
>
> Best,
> Mar
>
>
>
> ________________________
> Mar Hicks
> Associate Professor
> School of Data Science
> University of Virginia
>
> marhicks at virginia.edu
> marhicks.com <https://marhicks.com/>
>
> Research Affiliate,Centre for Democracy and Technology <https://www.mctd.ac.uk/>, University of Cambridge
> Member, Scholars' Council,Center for Critical Internet Inquiry <https://www.c2i2.ucla.edu/>, UCLA
> Associate Editor,/IEEE Annals of the History of Computing <https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an>/ (feel free to ask me about submitting an article if you work on a topic related to computing history)
>
> Books:
> /Programmed Inequality <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality>//: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing/(MIT Press, 2017)
> /Your Computer Is On Fire <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/your-computer-fire>/// (MIT Press, 2021)
>
> _______________________________________________
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