On Sep 15, 2025, at 3:36 PM, Hicks, Mar (avg5bd) via Members <members@lists.sigcis.org> 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.

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

For a 3 min summary on bsky, see here:

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@virginia.edu

marhicks.com

Research Affiliate, Centre for Democracy and Technology, University of Cambridge

Member, Scholars' Council, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA

Associate Editor, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (feel free to ask me about submitting an article if you work on a topic related to computing history)

Books:

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017)

Your Computer Is On Fire  (MIT Press, 2021)

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