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  • I'm Marie Hicks, I'm a historian of technology.

  • There used to be more women in computing than men.

  • Where did they all go?

  • In the 1950s and the 1960s,

  • computer programming was decidedly women's work

  • but as the 1960s stretched on, women started to be replaced by men,

  • and not just by men, but management-level technocrats.

  • The gender of the field flipped because women were pushed out,

  • not because they didn't have the tech skills.

  • And many women found themselves in the position,

  • of training their male replacements.

  • Not all of the women who were pushed out of the workforce

  • stopped working in computing however.

  • Dame Stephanie Shirley who back then went by the moniker 'Steve'

  • actually started her own freelance software company

  • and Shirley had an explicitly feminist business model.

  • At this point in time, most programming was done

  • with pencil and paper before being run through a machine

  • so Stephanie Shirley's workers could work from home

  • and they could have flexible hours

  • that allowed them to take care of children and families.

  • One of these workers, Ann Moffatt,

  • programmed the black box flight recorder for the Concorde.

  • And you can see her programming at her kitchen table

  • while her young daughter looks on.

  • But many other women just left the field entirely.

  • This produced an enormous skills shortage and a huge labour shortage.

  • Meaning that the people available to do the important work

  • of computerisation were suddenly too few in number.

  • As a result of this, the British government decided that they needed

  • to change the design of the computers that they were using.

  • Since there weren't enough people to run them,

  • they would concentrate and centralise computers.

  • In conjunction with the Ministry of Technology,

  • the British government forced a merger of all of the remaining

  • successful computing companies

  • and this created one big company that was supposed to provide

  • the government and the entire nation

  • with the kind of huge centralised mainframes

  • that could be run by the small number of technocrats

  • who were now remaining.

  • The problem with this however

  • is that by the time the machine was delivered

  • the mainframe was on the way out,

  • and even though ICL's line of computers

  • was highly technically advanced,

  • it wasn't something anyone wanted to buy anymore.

  • This effectively destroyed the British computing industry

  • and today we see similar things going on.

  • Discrimination continues to wreck high-tech economies

  • and high-tech labour markets

  • and the results reverberate out into the rest of society.

  • Right now we see in the United States

  • Silicon Valley having a day of reckoning in terms of how they hire,

  • promote and decide to design their technologies.

  • All of the talent that is lost hurts the industry and hurts the economy

  • but what's more important is that

  • these people lack a voice in designing critical infrastructure

  • that we're all going to have to live with.

  • It can undermine the principles of democracy.

  • By looking at examples from the past,

  • we can find out not just how to build better technologies

  • but how to construct fairer societies.

I'm Marie Hicks, I'm a historian of technology.

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Where did all the women in tech go? | BBC Ideas

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    Summer に公開 2022 年 02 月 02 日
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