Review: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing by Marie Hicks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating read on so many levels. On one, it captures the ways in which institutions (named the British government) perpetuates inequalities (namely, sexism) in explicit and implicit ways and then tracks the ways in which that structural inequality results in the loss of opportunity and resources for the nation. Hicks also unpeels a deeply problematic history of erasure of the prominent and important roles that women played in the rise of the computer and digital age, as the original and dominant group of programmers throughout the UK from the 1940s to the 1970s. Through her analysis, interviews, and archival recovery, she shows the ways in which women were muted, perceived as (and undermined as) threats by men for their abilities with computers. She shows how for many years Britain tried to conceptualize programming as a skill-less and feminine role to which women would be suited (temporarily--just until marriage) but to which men should be managing. This created many situations where men were trying to direct people with no real sense of what it is that they did, resulting in women needing to train the men who would replace them as leaders on teams. While reading this book, I was continually surprised (maybe I shouldn't have been) of the various examples and quotes that Hicks pulled from that showed how much of a conscious effort was in place to keep women moving upwards within organizations and how their work (work we consider the cutting edge) was so undermined by Britain. I definitely recommend it as a read for anyone interested in women's history, equal rights, and technology.

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