In computing’s early years, when it was considered women’s work, all six programmers of America’s first digital computer, ENIAC, were women
A programmer, Andrina Wood, at the console of a British Tabulating Machine Co., or BTM, computer in 1958
By
Christopher Mims
Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself.
Memos from the United Kingdom’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 discrimination in the industry, to the controversy over a memo written by a Google employee arguing that women overall are biologically less suited to programming—suggest the steps currently being taken by tech firms to address these issues are inadequate.
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 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 like “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.
From the book, "Programmed Inequality" by Marie Hicks, an undated photo of a ‘retirement’ party of a computer operator who was engaged to be married.
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 PC, according to Dr. Hicks.
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 which even offered family-friendly benefits like working from home—almost unheard-of in its day. (The firm, eventually known as Xansa, 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.”
A programmer, Andrina Wood, at the console of a British Tabulating Machine Co., or BTM, computer in 1958
By
Christopher Mims
Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself.
Memos from the United Kingdom’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 discrimination in the industry, to the controversy over a memo written by a Google employee arguing that women overall are biologically less suited to programming—suggest the steps currently being taken by tech firms to address these issues are inadequate.
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 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 like “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.
From the book, "Programmed Inequality" by Marie Hicks, an undated photo of a ‘retirement’ party of a computer operator who was engaged to be married.
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 PC, according to Dr. Hicks.
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 which even offered family-friendly benefits like working from home—almost unheard-of in its day. (The firm, eventually known as Xansa, 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.”