Technology’s “Programmed Gender Equality” – A Historical Sequence
Author: WUNRN
Date: February 19, 2018
In computing’s early years, when it was considered women’s work, all six programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women
December 10, 2017 – By Christopher Mims
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.
Today, in the U.S., about a quarter of computing and mathematics jobs are held by women, and that proportion has been declining over the past 20 years. The situation is generally worse at the biggest tech companies: Only one in five engineers at Google or Facebook is a woman, according to the companies’ recent diversity reports. A string of recent events—from women coming forward about sexism, harassment and discrim
A growing army of women and members of other underrepresented minorities are working on solutions to these issues. 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.
Some women who were pushed out of government and corporations started their own companies of women programmers. One was Dame Stephanie Shirley, who used the name “Steve” in business correspondence to avoid potential sexism with new customers. In the 1960s, she built a tech firm, Freelance Programmers, made up almost entirely of women and that even offered family-friendly benefits such as working from home—almost unheard-of in its day. (The firm, eventually known as Xansa, was sold to a rival in 2007 for nearly $1 billion.)
Dame Shirley has said that when she founded the company, she was seeking not wealth but “a workplace where I was not hemmed in by prejudice, or by other people’s preconceived notions of what I could or could not do.”
In the U.S., as in the U.K., women found programming jobs after World War II. All six of the first programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women. The decline in female programmers coincided with the professionalization of coding in the 1960s, writes computer historian Nathan Ensmenger in his 2012 book “The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise.”
One of the earliest and most-respected coding programs was at Princeton University, which didn’t admit women at the time, according to the author. Within the cloistered computer-science labs of such institutions, an intensely male “hero” culture of programming was fostered.
The proportion of women earning degrees in computer science peaked in 1984 at 37% and has declined ever since. Today, 18% of computer-science degrees are granted to women, according to a 2016 study from Accenture and the nonprofit Girls Who Code. America’s computing workforce is 24% women, and that proportion is falling too, despite hundreds of millions of dollars the industry has spent on diversity and inclusion efforts.
Stephanie Palmeri, a partner at venture-capital firm Uncork Capital, says raising the ratio of women in technology primarily requires having more women in positions of power, both as investors and executives. This is especially critical at the earliest stages of a startup. If a firm has hired its first 10 employees and they are all the same gender or ethnicity, an eleventh who doesn’t look like the rest can face challenges.
Without external influence, you can’t expect a system that prizes “culture fit” to change, says Dr. Hicks. You also can’t expect to rise in a “meritocracy” that doesn’t reward everyone equally. The risks of baking these flaws into the system only become greater in an age when employers are training artificial intelligence to do the hiring for them—and in which AI is learning from pre-existing notions of what constitutes a “good” employee.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-women-in-tech-didnt-leavemen-pushed-them-out-1512907200
Categories: Releases, Slider Featured