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

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nations inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age.

In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the governments systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nations largest computer user--the civil service and sprawling public sector--to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.