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Cover Quote: April 2014
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Employed as technical experts from the very beginnings of digital computing, women were inventing careers and professional identities at the same time that the field itself took shape. Their stories illustrate the power but also the mutability of gender roles. Masculinity and femininity were part of the cultural vocabulary that was used to define what a computer was and who was best qualified to use one. For example, comparing the computer to an adding machine would immediately invoke women as appropriate users; casting it as a management tool would place it in male territory. But technical engagement could also be a means for reshaping gender categories, as female programmers and computer scientists leveraged their status as professionals to fashion new personal identities that united femininity with technical expertise.
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- Janet Abbate
Recoding Gender, 2012
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