After today’s class, write at least 250 words summarizing your reading of the introduction from Marie Hicks’ Programmed Inequality. Based on our lecture and discussion, consider how the enforcement of gender roles in the computing industry has an effect on the technologies made and those technologies’ effect, in turn, on language. During the semester, we’re working toward a glimpse of the complexity behind the connection between language and technology. This reading adds another layer to our overall view of these relationships.
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Marie Hicks’ Programmed Inequality.
In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Hicks highlights groups on women who never under took the title of programmer in a patriarchal culture. That failure sprang from the government’s methodical disregard of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user, the civil service and sprawling public sector, to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. Hicks offers up the British technological exclusion of women as lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force faltered its transition into the information age. Hicks strengthens our understanding of labor as a class and gender, and casts light on the significance of gender as a division in technological organization and design. Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the failure of Britain’s midcentury computer industry is a cautionary tale in which technologies can seldom fix social problems, in this case male patriarchy, and how these technologies can be a deterministic factor in a nation’s technological growth.
In “Programmed Inequality” by Marie Hicks, Hicks discusses the gender inequality in the Great Britain computing technologies. In early Great Britain when computing technologies had just began to rise the dominance of the industry was primarily male. Although being shown as primarily male many women worked in the industry were going unseen. Originally woman had very important roles in programming data processing and building these computers. In the 1940’s computer operation and programming was seen as a woman’s work but by the 1960’s when computing gained popularity and influence men began to push those women out and make it more of a masculine work place. When changes like this happens, one tends to think something in the work filed has changed and thus lead to such. There were roles for women and men in the early computing industry, men were CEO’s while women did all the middle work thus making them experts in their fields. But when a field is mostly feminized it is seen as simple and easy work but when it is seen as masculine it is seen as hard work and complex. This was not the case with early computing. Early computing was quite intricate and difficult but because men gave it to women they sought it to be easy work. When the switch happen, fields in computing become more desirable to men pushing the women out. But because of this Great Britain had a great downfall in the computing industry by 1974. Pushing women out of their work that they were experts in and throwing men, who believed they could do it better, in it revealed to be their biggest mistake. Great Britain had the best computing technology but it all went downhill once that switch was made.
In “Programmed Inequality” Marie Hicks reveals evidence in a shift of roles pertaining to gender. An earth-shattering change in gender roles, how they were enforced in the computing industry of Great Britain.It had the best computing industry in terms of developing state-of-the-art computers. They were the forefront Alan Turing the mathematician who helped broke the enigma code in WWII, it was papers on universal computing that was the foundation. He along with others were there making this development of computer technology possible. But what gets you raced this in that history is how important women were to the early development of computers. If we go further back in what Marie Hicks talks about she’s looking a specific range of dates, but we go further back the history of computing especially in the UK has a longer history. Charles Babbage began thinking about how we could build computing machines and he actually constructed some – the first was the difference engine, the idea being a mechanical clockwork arrangement that can do mathematical computations more quickly and accurately than a human operator because a clockwork mechanism would be repeatable. Despite their being developers of automatons during Babbage’s lifetime, he was more interested in raw computation, essentially a device you can change inputs, numerical values, turn a crank and you get a result. Done over and over again, you could create tables of different results like mathematical equations that would make that kind of work less monotonous, otherwise we have to use the root or the origin of what we call a computer. When we talk about computers what do we mean? It refers to a person, a COMPUTOR is someone who computes, one who does mathematical calculations generating long tables of results.
In Marie Hicks’ article, “Programmed Inequality” Hicks focuses on Britain’s government, limiting women’s contribution towards the computing industry. There was a particular incident in 1959, when a computer operator had a hectic year for a government job. This operator happened to be a women that had to train two new people that were hired, who happened to be men. They had no previous computing experience. She trained them long and hard for the long-term government project. After she finished training them, the men were automatically offered management roles, even though the trainer was clearly a better fit for the role. She was described as “a good brain and a special air”, but was demoted to a position below them, because of her gender. While the computing industry is now a male dominated field, during the 1940s it was dominated by women. In the 1960s men took over the field, and pushed women out. Since then, there has been a major misconception about the difficulty of work in this field. When a field becomes more popular around females, it is often assumed that the work became easier. When the field is taken over by males everyone believes that the work became more difficult. During World War II, Britain led the world in cutting-edge computing technology. In the war, Britain engineered and deployed the world’s first digital, electronic, programmable computers. However, gendered labor change was a part of a top-down government initiative in Britain. It led to structural discrimination against women and was a pivotal moment which led to the downfall of the British computing industry.
In the article Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks she first introduces a story about gender inequality in the Great Britain computers. She introduces how women never took certain jobs as programmers and other types of technical related jobs. The government themselves put themselves up for failure when they disregarded women. Women were completely different from men. In Great Britain several types of issues arose when problems created even more problems and the main problem was gender how everything was all about males. While women were working in technical fields they ended up being pushed out of the industry for a more male community. The work done by the women were the jobs that were the basics which made the women experts on the field, but it was a male type of job. These jobs that were taken showed how you cannot solve this with just masculinity it is a different type of a job more complex and complicated type of job. The British Industry of computers ended up being gutted and extinct. This mistake was almost repeated in the US during the mid-twenty-first century. The job itself is a very tough and difficult one and men tended to hand their work over to women because it was too easy, but when tasked to do the actual job they failed and that’s what let to the downfall of the British computer industry. Technology is something very important and it’s crucial to a nation. These technologies have shown to help develop a nation’s growth.
In this article “Programmed inequality” by Marie Hicks’ talks about the roles and efforts that women had on the world’s technological advances. Computing became recognized as a male-dominated industry in the 1960’s. The article states that when a job is female based it’s easy but when there’s a majority of males working in a certain industry the work became more intricate and perplexing. Britain was known to be the best computing industry in the world and women did have an important role in early computers. For example, women were in charge of magnetic core memory which were woven wire made specifically for computers. Making these wire took a great attention to detail and it was laborious but for some reason, it wasn’t that important in comparison to the work that men did to build computers. Britain which was once soaring in early computers crashed because of their discrimination against women. This lead to an increase in computer programming population in other countries such as America and Japan. Britain’s fall in its power of technology shows you just how important the role women had in advancing toward greater technology. Shoving women away from the field of technology was a big mistake on Britain’s part. Women used to train the men that didn’t have any prior knowledge of computing and once the learned they were offered higher positions while the women had the same stance. This article shines a bright light on women and telling people women had the same passion for building computers just like any other man.