Marie Hicks

A reminder that when anyone talks about women’s underrepresentation in computer science/programming as a result of choices/“natural” inclinations, that person is at best ignorant. The book is repetitive, but that’s mainly because what happened to women kept happening, decade after decade: women would look for interesting or at least remunerative work, including technology jobs, and the men in charge would insist that jobs with women in them were bad jobs deserving of low pay. Hicks tracks this process through multiple decades, economic conditions, labor conditions, and legal conditions (e.g., when Britain at long last enacted equal pay legislation as a condition of its entry into the EEC, the British government very quickly shifted to worker categories that paid female-dominated lines less and kept those lines out of the promotion track). There are specific moments of outrage, such as the woman who’s forced to train her male replacements (because her job has been reclassified as a good, promotion-eligible one and thus she can’t have it any more) and then demoted to work under them, but mostly it’s about how policies work: in the aggregate, shaping technology more than technology shapes policy.… (altro)