Programmed Inequality [Book Reviews

Abstract

This book examines how the British computer industry has been adversely affected by the inability to promote and attract female programmers. In the 1960s and 1970s the British government sought to rebuild its wartime dominance in the computing sector to restore its position as a global power. This plan necessitated a gender power shift in computing, from viewing computing as low-wage, unskilled secretarial. or “machine grade” work performed by women, to seeing it as high pay and prestigious work performed by men. In Britain’s effort to rebrand computing as “high value men’s work” they booted out their qualified and experienced workforce of women and tried to replace them with inexperienced and largely uninterested men. The fact that the government’s efforts here were a flop necessitated increasing government micromanagement of the private British computing industry. Their inability to attract a sufficiently large male computing workforce (and, of course, now that computing was important work, women could no longer be allowed to engage in it) meant that Britain’s enormous Civil Service sector needed powerful supercomputers that could be “controlled” by a small number of high level, trained male executives. Note that this obsession with supercomputers took place while the rest of the world was focused on the emergence of the personal computer or PC. But the British government insisted on dictating the future direction of the U.K.’s computing industries, shoring them up with government funds and eventually forcing a merger into a single computing company capable of designing and building the colossal supercomputers to run the country. The author meticulously details the story of Britain’s intertwined desire for world power status in computing with its economic woes as well as its stubborn adherence to a strongly gendered workplace. She also demonstrates why this approach caused Britain to fail, sealing the demise of both its reemergence as a world power and its dominance of worldwide computing. Instead of being a fix for Britain’s economic and political power woes, computing and the changes it ushered in simply exacerbated the inherent problems embedded in both systems.