When Computers Were Women

18. Women’s Experience of Role Models in IT: Landmark women, substitutes and supporters

“…One reason for women's difficulties to identify female role models in this field, is the seemingly invisibility of women in IT, including in computing history. Since the 1990s, historians have documented women's contributions in computing as programmers, software developers and machine operators during the 1940s, -50s and -60s (Abbate, 2012;Gürer, 1995;Hicks, 2017;Light, 1999). Abbate's study of women working as programmers in this period, shows that among some, programming was considered women's work (2012).…”

Developing Local Narratives for Objects in National Collections: Lessons Learned from the “Number Please? Working with the Enfield Exchange” Project

“…The telephone was and remains a social object, not just in the sense meant by Simon () that it can “spark conversations” (no pun intended), but rather that the telephone, switchboard, exchange, caller and telephonist were linked in an expansive communications system that travelled between public and private spaces and across a range of scales (local to global). Telecommunications technologies offered a place for women in the workforce as telephonists, typists and programmers (Light ; Webster ) actively shaping socio‐technical relations, but also gave a voice to women who had previously been relegated to the private sphere (Kramarae ; Rakow ). Recent research reveals that the selection of telephonists and the training they received meant that their employer was able to exert control and power over these women, who were supposed to conform to vocal, behavioral and bodily norms (Carmi ).…”

Technicians

“…Women stopped being named in papers as 'discoverers' of new particles shortly before they were removed entirely from the process by new forms of automation. 20 In particle physics, where the cultures of technicians, engineers and experimentalists had to mesh to perform good science, instruments were increasingly 'blackboxed' in the form of subassemblies brought in to the workplace from outside. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in molecular genetics and other forms of 'big science', commercial organizations provide reliable and standardized pieces of equipment that in the previous generation (or decade) would have been produced in house by experimentalists, engineers, technicians, mechanics and postgraduate students.…”