Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing by Marie Hicks (review)

The role of women and the politics of gender, once invisible in the history of computing, can now boast a generation of solid scholarship. Marie Hicks’s Programmed Inequality is an important and challenging addition to this literature on several counts. First, her focus on the British Civil Service reveals different dynamics of gender and power than previous studies focused on the US government or private industry. While federal employers in the United States were relatively welcoming to women and enabled some to become recognized as experts, the UK Civil Service as described by Hicks was much more rigidly bound by class and gender hierarchies. Second, she problematizes distinctions between skilled and unskilled computer work, showing how gender and class bias have colored our assumptions about which jobs require skill. Third, she argues for the need to include sexual orientation in gender analysis, noting that historically women have been positioned in the labor force not simply as females but as actual or future wives to male breadwinners. The heteronormative assumption that men would need to support a family while women could depend on a husband’s income was used to justify severe limits on women’s pay and promotion, even in the supposedly meritocratic Civil Service. Fourth, she makes a bold claim that systematic gender bias in the Civil Service shaped the design of computers themselves and thereby undermined the competitiveness of the British computer industry.

The book covers the period 1930–1979. The first chapter, on women’s computer work during World War II, resists treating this period as exceptional, demonstrating that women’s wartime work continued an earlier trend of feminized machine work and that some women transferred directly from wartime to peacetime computing jobs. Hicks describes legal impediments to workplace equality, notably the marriage bar (in place until 1946), which forced women who wanted to keep their Civil Service jobs to marry and have babies in secret. Chapter 2 relates how the government’s fixation on cost-cutting in the lean postwar years led to its exploitation of lower-paid women. As the number of female workers grew, however, their demands for equal pay threatened sex discrimination as a cost-saving measure. The Civil Service responded with a fateful move: it created a new classification called the “machine grades” that would be exclusively female and thus exempt from equal pay laws. While this maneuver ensured savings in the short term, it had the unintended consequence of making it virtually impossible to attract men to computer jobs when the government tried to change course in later decades.

Chapter 3 includes one of Hicks’s most fascinating discoveries: how the British computer industry tried to export its gender-stratified organization of labor to former colonies along with its machines. Computer manufacturers Power-Samas and ICT trained cadres of local women in India and Ghana to occupy the same low-level, underpaid role as their British counterparts. Hicks argues that this labor regime was an imported ideology, not part of the local culture or any technological imperative. She notes, “When Indian companies set up their own computing installations, the gendered mores of British computing usually did not attach,” with male or mixed-gender staffs common (120). Here and throughout the book, well-chosen illustrations convey the semiotics of gender and skill, with female workers foregrounded, receding into the background, or invisible to reflect the prevailing politics of technical labor.

Chapter 4 describes the British government’s shift in the late 1960s from viewing computing as merely technical to seeing it as a management function that called for a new—and specifically masculine—workforce. But the Civil Service’s attempt to regender computing jobs was stymied by its own past success in casting this work as feminized and unskilled. Hicks exposes the bitter irony of this masculinization effort: while government hiring policy was based on the assumption that men were more skilled and more committed to their careers...