Updated: 2022-06-01
1. War Machines
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Colossus: first digital, electronic, programmable computers
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deployed during World War II
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thousands of women worked at Bletchley
Women were: > […] positioned as a "reserve" labor force impelled into masculine-coded jobs due to the exigencies of war—and dispensed with immediately there-after.
When women do not fulfill the role of inventor or entrepreneur in a way comparable to the men who have up until now been the main focus of computing history, their labor is often regarded as not being integral to the main narrative of computing’s history.
computing’s early beginnings as a feminized field presaged specific gendered labor hierarchies in peacetime—ones that put computing work at the bottom of the white-collar labor pyramid until the rise of technocratic ideals in the 1960s that reshaped the expectations and status of machine workers
Creating Information Workers
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British and American projects employed women as human computers
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IBM UK: was so feminized that management measured production in "girl hours" in 1960s
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Comrie: general-purpose office machines could be used for complex scientific calculation
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young women workers were key to his success
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In addition, their numbers in the labor force were plentiful and, Comrie asserted, they diligently did work that young men saw as boring, dead-end drudgery. Like many other men in charge of computing systems, Comrie saw women’s labor not as an add-on but as foundational to his systems’ success.
Turnover through marriage was supposed to ensure women didn’t tire of the work or require promotion to better—and better paid—work, as that would throw his system out of alignment.
In both the private and public sector, women clustered in low-level office jobs. Often, this work was referred to as subclerical—that is, below real clerical work, an idea later echoed by the informal appellation pink-collar labor. Defined by a lack of authority over other workers as much as by an assumption of skilllessness, subclerical work increasingly became seen as ideal for young women in the twentieth century.
Gendered War Work and High-Stakes Electronic Computing
but the most important and voluminous intelligence work of the war was machine-aided and feminized. Women’s labor formed the nucleus of the British wartime information machine. 1942: shortage of manpower required a total reliance on women trainees from then on. […] therefore that women were as of now "eligible equally with men for all the training," and "as regards the actual curriculum of training, the same course is available to men and women." […] "it has been found that women prove to be equally apt pupils,"
[…] Ministry of Labour also noted that only women who "show[ed] promise" would be "treated in the same way as men"
tried to make the most of available labor pool by increasingly adapting to the living patterns of married women and women with children.
Their labor was important enough to the war effort to warrant the waste and logistical inconvenience of rearranging training schedules and configuring shortened shifts.
From Listening to Morse Code to Breaking Enigma: Codebreaking’s Layers of Data Processing
men and machines formed an unstoppable cybernetic system […] In reality, this relationship was far less neat and far more mediated by layers of communication and data-processing. Given that these young women had family and friends in the line of fire, the idiosyncracies of their machines were as frightening as they were frustrating. In the opinion of leading Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, the only way to speed the pace of codebreaking further—and enhance accuracy—was to use an all-electronic computer.
Killing the Golden Geese
The male-oriented nature of apprenticeship to engineering maintenance work created a dire shortage of maintenance engineers for Bletchley’s machines
As a result, a special nationwide program of recruitment for engineering trainees was established for sixteen- to nineteen-year-old boys. These very young men with no experience were seen as a better investment than women who already worked with the machines because they were expected to have much longer careers, justifying the training involved.
Interestingly, men who supervised machine work were there less to facilitate the work or give guidance to the operators, and more for their own benefit.
One woman from the wireless transmission section at Bletchley tried to make a career in industry after VE day. Having been given over a year’s training as a high-speed wireless operator while in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, she was well qualified. Yet her plans evaporated when she found, to her surprise, that the main cable company was now only accepting men.
The Girls in the Machine
Postwar unemployment for women was worsened by "a recurring demand that such jobs as were available should be reserved for men, and women should go back to the home, whatever that might mean,"
this was not a key factor in computing work, which had been gendered feminine even before the war.
computerization’s history is largely a narrative of how the data-intensive state expands its reach and power by taking for granted, and rendering invisible, ever-greater numbers of information workers.
[…] work itself was meanwhile constructed as feminized and deskilled despite its apparent complexity.
The double-edged sword of feminization both helped and hurt the progress of computing early on, as it defined understandings of how to structure and deploy large-scale computational projects
Another description states that women "tended" the machines, rather than more accurately stating that they operated, troubleshot, tested, programmed, repaired, and even helped build them.
Much of women’s wartime training became wasted—not because they chose to drop out of the workforce, but because they were no longer considered good candidates to hire when men returned to the labor pool.
Only in certain jobs—ones that both retained a feminized image and suffered labor shortages—did women have a fighting chance.
[…] an emerging technological regime based on ever-greater computing power would have a critical impact on women’s labor equality.
As more massive, more complex, and faster data-processing systems took hold in government and industry, these workers were consolidated into an essential underclass of non-working-class, sub-white-collar office labor.
The Civil Service would become ground zero for the changes in computing labor that would define women’s position in the new technology landscape as not only subordinate but as fundamentally separate from their male peers.
Equal Pay, Marriage Bars, and Dead-End Machine Work
Women’s growing numbers and their potential power in the white-collar labor market were fast becoming seen as one of the biggest threats to the national order since industrial labor organization.
In the aftermath of World War II, the gov- ernment’s attitude had changed little from just after World War I, when a War Cabinet report stated: “Girls and women have regarded their work as incidental rather than as a main purpose of their lives.” (50)
“It seems sensible to assume that virtually all men are and always have been and always will be in the market for employment. But experience shows that the proportion of women seeking employment is variable within limits in response to the influence of social forces” (italics mine). (50)
The government’s expectation that women would resign on mar- riage aligned with a general perception of women workers as an elastic and incidental labor force who conveniently inhabited a holding pattern doing unpaid work in the home when not needed in the paid labor force. (54)
Seen as temporary workers, women were usually given less responsible jobs that were not likely to lead to careers. (55)
Successive governments recognized harnessing the power of these early computing systems, which were often untested and unwieldy, as a crucial component of national progress. (57)