Programmed Inequality

This is a ground-breaking book that centres women as a class of labour in the history of computing in postwar Britain. In doing so, it demonstrates that technology can be used as a conservative force to entrench existing social hierarchies. Marie Hicks emphasizes that the history of British computing is especially tied up with the state, and therefore with the history of women as a growing proportion of state workers during the twentieth century. The relationship between the state and technology has begun to be explored by Jon Agar in The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Hicks significantly extends the analysis and integrates gender for the first time. The chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning in the 1930s and concluding with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Hicks outlines that by the interwar period, computing was considered a form of ‘sub-clerical work’ and was so associated with female labour that IBM measured their production in the UK in ‘girl hours’ instead of ‘man hours’ (p. 21). During the Second World War, women were drafted to Bletchley Park, but the skilled nature of the work was obscured contemporaneously and has continued to be underestimated in the historiography. Hicks previously worked for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Harvard and mobilizes detailed technical knowledge to illuminate the complexity and centrality of the tasks female computer workers performed at Bletchley. Hicks implicitly draws on feminist economic theory to argue that their technical work was constructed as deskilled and that this ‘fiction of deskilling’ (p. 68) continued into the postwar period with material consequences for women. Chapter 2 shows that as the state expanded after the war, governments from across the political spectrum increased women’s labour and automation to ‘hold down costs and enhance efficiency’ (p. 60). In the late 1940s, the civil service was reorganized to create a predominantly female machine operator class that had different pay scales and limited promotion prospects. This consolidated the belief that computing work was low-status and allowed the government to exclude female machine workers from equal-pay provisions. Chapter 2 is cogently argued, although it could have been further strengthened by engaging more fully with the latest historiography on the nuances of women’s lives during the 1950s

Archaeology · Economic history · Government (linguistics · Historiography · History of technology · IBM · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Computing Technologies · History of Science and Medicine · History

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