Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

Abstract

Janet Abbate's Recoding Gender is not only a powerful analysis of the construction and reproduction of gender roles with respect to technological infrastructures of computing—but it is also simply one of the most readable and engaging histories of technology and labor ever written. Stretching from the operation of the ENIAC in the 1940s to the present-day disproportionate lack of women within academic computer science, Abbate retells the story of computing by drawing upon both her broad expertise with the secondary literature and an unparalleled new source of historical data: detailed interviews with fifty-two pioneering women who were engaged in all aspects of the history of digital algorithms, devices, and networks over the past seventy-five years. These deep insights into women's long-standing engagement with the field bring to life both the dream and the drudgery of computing—not only through well-known figures such as Grace Hopper, whose A-0 program was credited as the first compiler, but also through lesser-known actors such as Betty Snyder (Holberton), the fellow UNIVAC programmer whose “sort-merge generator” subroutine inspired Hopper's innovation in the first place (p. 80).