Marie Hicks – Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing


The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035545, English, 352 pages, 2017, USA

After the Second World War, Britain’s aspiration to become a world leader in computer technologies was a plan, after the women-driven code-breaking technologies which were developed during the war at Bletchley Park (later classified and so never publicly acknowledged). But after surrendering to a heavy genderisation of the workforce, especially in the strategical Civil Service, the UK computer industry declined, giving up to the more rampant US. Hicks reconstructs this marginalisation of women in UK computing between the 1940s and 1980s, deeply researching it. She draws on a vast amount of original material, interviewing workers from the 1960s and analysing the management and infrastructural dynamics. To complement the documental research there’s a rich iconography, constituted by photographs, magazine articles and advertisements which clearly show the ’secretarial’ role attributed to women in this sector. The value of this book goes beyond its gender inequality documentation, or giving justice to women programmers who were not even acknowledged as such. It makes a detailed historical and symbolic case for suppressed and unvalued women talent, and bad management for a whole country in a strategical sector. And beyond its tangible historical value, it calls for the recognition and support of skills regardless of any imposed category.