Programmed Inequality

Of all the books that I have been reading lately to better understand "how we got here" with respect to technology and AI, this is the one that is the most "traditional" history in terms of its aims and methodology. Hicks is a historian of technology at the University of Virginia, and in this, her first book, she charts the gendered nature of labor in computing in Great Britain after World War II. Great Britain provides an interesting case study because so much of the computer industry was driven by government involvement. The expanding state after the war required a lot of computing power, and many women were employed to program and operate computers. Interestingly, managers saw computer work as "women's work," since it was viewed as routine and unskilled (although using these complex machines certainly was not). Women who sought these jobs in the 1950s and 1960s might have, in an earlier era, gone to work in a factory. Thus, even though these jobs were in offices, they were not viewed by management as "white collar," with the attendant social assumptions that come with those positions.

Women being shunted into "unskilled" labor had implications down the line. For example, when pay equality legislation was finally instituted in Great Britain's civil service, it applied only to fields that employed both women and men; since the job category that included computer work was overwhelmingly staffed by women, the category was not eligible for equal wages. Thus, women's wages remained depressed and they were ineligible to move into supervisory positions. The book is far more complex than this short overview can do justice, but Hicks carefully documents the role that government managers, technology companies, civil service unions, and the women themselves played in this story. For historians of technology, a key lesson here is that it is "not the content of the work but the identity of the worker performing it that determined its status" (16). There was nothing inherent to working with computers that made the work "appropriate" for women, but once that social distinction was made, it had all kinds of implications for wages, job opportunities, and how women were treated day-to-day in the workforce.