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I'm Marie Hicks,
I'm a historian of technology.
There used to be more women
in computing than men.
Where did they all go?
In the 1950s and the 1960s,
computer programming was
decidedly women's work
but as the 1960s stretched on,
women started to be replaced by men,
and not just by men,
but management-level technocrats.
The gender of the field flipped
because women were pushed out,
not because they didn’t have
the tech skills.
And many women found
themselves in the position,
of training their male replacements.
Not all of the women who were
pushed out of the workforce
stopped working in computing however.
Dame Stephanie Shirley who
back then went by the moniker 'Steve'
actually started her own
freelance software company
and Shirley had an explicitly
feminist business model.
At this point in time,
most programming was done
with pencil and paper
before being run through a machine
so Stephanie Shirley's workers
could work from home
and they could have flexible hours
that allowed them to take care
of children and families.
One of these workers, Ann Moffatt,
programmed the black box
flight recorder for the Concorde.
And you can see her programming
at her kitchen table
while her young daughter looks on.
But many other women
just left the field entirely.
This produced an enormous skills
shortage and a huge labour shortage.
Meaning that the people available
to do the important work
of computerisation
were suddenly too few in number.
As a result of this, the British
government decided that they needed
to change the design of the
computers that they were using.
Since there weren’t enough
people to run them,
they would concentrate
and centralise computers.
In conjunction with the
Ministry of Technology,
the British government forced
a merger of all of the remaining
successful computing companies
and this created one big company
that was supposed to provide
the government and the entire nation
with the kind of huge
centralised mainframes
that could be run by
the small number of technocrats
who were now remaining.
The problem with this however
is that by the time the
machine was delivered
the mainframe was on the way out,
and even though ICL's
line of computers
was highly technically advanced,
it wasn't something anyone
wanted to buy anymore.
This effectively destroyed the
British computing industry
and today we see similar
things going on.
Discrimination continues to
wreck high-tech economies
and high-tech labour markets
and the results reverberate
out into the rest of society.
Right now we see in the
United States
Silicon Valley having a day of
reckoning in terms of how they hire,
promote and decide to design
their technologies.
All of the talent that is lost hurts
the industry and hurts the economy
but what's more important is that
these people lack a voice in
designing critical infrastructure
that we're all going
to have to live with.
It can undermine the
principles of democracy.
By looking at examples from the past,
we can find out not just how
to build better technologies
but how to construct
fairer societies.
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