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Programmed inequality : how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing
Hicks M., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017. Type: Book (9780262035545)
Date Reviewed: Jun 29 2017

Marie Hicks, the author, has to be congratulated as an American historian of technology for tackling the paradox of the UK’s leadership in the development of computers and computer applications during World War II, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, before crashing from its leadership role. The crash occurred despite attempts by the British government to reignite the forces that had led to its earlier success.

A major part of the study is devoted to a detailed analysis of the role played in the development of computer use by the legion of data preparation, operating, and computer maintenance staff in keeping the then unreliable technology going and delivering the expected results. In a vivid account of the now well-known code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, she notes that the success of the operation, spearheaded by the likes of Alan Turing, William Tutte, Max Newman, and Tommy Flowers, depended critically on the work of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), a group of women responsible for taking down the massive numbers of coded messages, and filing and distributing them to the decoders--a major data management task.

Much of the book is devoted to a study of the way the British civil service--one of the UK’s largest employers of computer staff--graded its staff. The three top grades--the administrative, executive, and clerical grades--provided well-defined career paths. The systems designers and programmers employed in government offices were almost exclusively recruited from the executive grades, and many were granted the possibility of attending relevant university diploma or master’s courses to develop the required understanding and skills. But, as the author points out, the on-the-job training for those selected from the higher grades was undertaken by lower-grade staff--often women--who reverted to their lower roles once training was complete.

Marie Hicks traces the notion that the work of the predominantly female computer operators was consistently undervalued in terms of the intelligence and skills required--often defined as equivalent to that of a light industrial worker and thus to women’s work. She shows that these notions were underpinned by the computer manufacturers’ public relations (PR) and advertising, attempting to demonstrate how easy it was to use a computer. In the civil service this viewpoint was reflected in the grading structure, which defined staff below the level of programmers as excluded from the three higher grades with all their career development opportunities.

This gender grading was based on the assumption that it was not economical to fully train a female entrant as though she was starting a lifetime career when she was likely to leave after a few years to marry and start a family.

Despite the rapid expansion of computer use both in the private and public sector starting in the mid-1950s, accompanied by the increasing shortage of computer staff in all sections, but in particular in the programming and analyst categories, the civil service persisted with its policy of closing the door to career advancement to the excluded categories, in part at least in an effort to keep down costs. Yet as the author demonstrates, the skills exhibited by these categories included an understanding of all aspects of managing the operations of a computer--often in conditions of stress--including the way applications were constructed and the basics of hardware and software underlying each application.

If the main theme of the study is the social and organizational history of the often-forgotten cadre of computer operators and data preparation staff, a secondary theme is the rise and fall of the native British computer industry and the rising dominance of the American computing industry. Marie Hicks traces the process from its early pioneering work in code breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II, through, by way of an illustrative example, the establishment by the catering company J. Lyons of the first business computer in 1951, LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), to its virtual demise by 1975. She highlights the efforts by government both to assist the UK industry by preferential purchase policies and subsidies and to exercise control over it by organizing, in 1968, its rationalization into one major champion for business and administrative computing, International Computers Limited (ICL).

With respect to both primary and secondary themes, the study concentrates on the role of the UK government, and the civil service as the largest single employer of computer staff. With the exception of her case study of LEO, what is going on in the private sector during this time is largely neglected and its contribution--if any--to the decline of the UK computing industry not studied.

The cover of the book states:

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.

That is a very bold claim. Many commentators have tried to explain why the American computer industry and IBM in particular became the dominant force worldwide in the supply of computers, only challenged for a time by the Japanese electronics industry. Most argue that the size of its domestic market permitted IBM to devote more resources to research and development than its UK competitors, and that it had developed a finely tuned and superior marketing strategy. They point, too, to the support the US industry gained from association with the American defense industry and institutions, like ARPA and NASA. The synergy stemming from this close association was denied the British computer industry in that the government-sponsored industry rationalization of 1968 deliberately split ICL from the defense and real-time related industry, which was itself unified as one company.

None of the other commentators on the evolution of the British computer industry, to the best of my knowledge, even mention that class and gender discrimination in the civil service were a causal factor in its development and ultimate failure.

The author brings new evidence to the argument, by examining the British experience from a very different perspective, backed by diligent research in the national archives and interviews of actual participants. But the linkage between the undoubted discrimination and neglect within the civil service of the critical role in computer management and of operating and data preparation staff “into making decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole” is at best speculative, and in my opinion very dubious. Perhaps the author should have asked the question “how and why did the American computer industry come to dominate the world?” as a complement to the question “why did the British industry collapse?” Was there less gender discrimination in the US?

The book provides a valuable insight into the persistent gender and class discrimination in the British civil service, which held back generations of primarily women workers from rising to higher positions in the public sector computer hierarchies. Instead of mitigating the acute shortage of programming and systems staff, the policy prevented a large cadre of competent staff from realizing their own potential while making a possibly significant contribution to overcoming the skills shortage.

That story, and her demonstration of the critical role played by operating staff, has been widely neglected in conventional histories of information technology (IT). It is a story that needs to be assimilated into the history of the field.

The author’s bold claim that the story she tells of gender and class discrimination was responsible for the downfall of the native British computer industry cannot be sustained by the evidence provided in the book. However, it suggests the value of much more research into an area of IT history that has been neglected.

A final word: the author’s use of end notes for each chapter, citing the sources of her research, are exemplary and of great help to the reader.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Frank Land Review #: CR145394 (1709-0601)
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