Libro de Marie Hicks: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (History of Computing)

Women used to be present in compu­ter work in higher percen­ta­ges than they are today. Ever wonder what happe­ned? Turns out that the story of gender and the progress of compu­ting are a lot more tightly linked than we once thought…

Program­med Inequa­lity: How Britain Discar­ded Women Tech­no­lo­gists and Lost Its Edge in Compu­ting by Marie Hicks (MIT Press, Janu­ary 2017)

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 nati­on’s inabi­lity to manage its tech­ni­cal labor force hobbled its tran­si­tion into the infor­ma­tion age.

In Program­med Inequa­lity, Marie Hicks explo­res the story of labor femi­ni­za­tion and gende­red tech­no­cracy that under­cut British efforts to compu­te­rize. That failure sprang from the govern­ment’s 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 nati­on’s 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.

Drawing on recently opened govern­ment files, perso­nal inter­vi­ews, and the archi­ves of major British compu­ter compa­nies, Program­med Inequa­lity takes aim at the fiction of tech­no­lo­gi­cal meri­to­cracy. With over 30 images–in­clu­ding period photo­graphs and carto­ons–the reader gets a feel not only for what happe­ned, but the cultu­ral texture of the time. Hicks explains why, even today, posses­sing tech­ni­cal skill is not enough to ensure women will rise to the top in science and tech­no­logy fields. Program­med Inequa­lity shows how the disap­pe­a­rance of women from the field had grave macro­e­co­no­mic conse­quen­ces for Britain, and why the United States risks repe­a­ting those errors in the twenty-first century.

You can view more details about the book on the MIT Press website.

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Repu­bli­ca­mos aqui un arti­culo publi­cado en la revista 5 «Failu­res» de Logic donde nos cuenta su inves­ti­ga­cion.

How To Kill Your Tech Industry

by Marie Hicks

In World War II, Britain inven­ted the elec­tro­nic compu­ter. By the 1970s, its compu­ting industry had collap­sed—t­hanks to a labor shor­tage produ­ced by sexism.

Visu­a­li­za­tion by Celine Nguyen.

If the incre­di­ble rise of compu­ting is one of the biggest stories of the twen­ti­eth century, then the failure of the nation that inven­ted the elec­tro­nic compu­ter to capi­ta­lize on it is undoub­tedly one of history’s most impor­tant cauti­o­nary tales.

In 1944, Britain led the world in elec­tro­nic compu­ting. The top-secret code­bre­a­king compu­ters that the British deployed at Blet­ch­ley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day, and the Alli­es’ win in Europe. At a time when the best elec­tro­nic compu­ting tech­no­logy in the United States was still only in the testing phase, British compu­ters lite­rally chan­ged the world.

After the war, British compu­ting breakth­roughs conti­nued, and British compu­ters seemed poised to succeed across the board, compe­ting with US tech­no­logy on a global scale. But by the 1970s, a mere thirty years later, the country’s compu­ting industry was all but dead.

What happe­ned? The tradi­ti­o­nal history of compu­ting would have you unders­tand this change through the biograp­hies of great men, and the machi­nes they desig­ned. It would gesture towards corpo­ra­ti­ons’ grand global stra­te­gies, and the marke­ting that those compa­nies pushed to try to define what compu­ters were for an entire gene­ra­tion of workers. It would not, howe­ver, focus on the workers them­sel­ves. And by igno­ring them, it would miss the reasons for this catas­trop­hic failu­re—a failure that remains a cauti­o­nary tale for many other coun­tries today, parti­cu­larly the United States.

Early Reti­re­ment

In 1965, a young compu­ter worker named Anne cele­bra­ted her reti­re­ment. Decked out in a punched paper tape train that was made to resem­ble a bride’s veil, Anne cele­bra­ted the end of her career with her fellow twenty-somet­hing women colle­a­gues at the compu­ter company. To modern eyes, a reti­re­ment party thrown for a woman in her twen­ties might seem incon­gru­ous—all the more so because Anne’s tech­ni­cal skills were much in demand. British busi­nes­ses and govern­ment agen­cies were scram­bling to hire people who had compu­ter skills, and yet here was a compu­ter worker reti­ring from the work­force at the begin­ning of her career.

A few years earlier, a novel called Anne in Elec­tro­nics—Anne was a popu­lar name in Britain in the mid-twen­ti­eth century—­had been publis­hed. Young women might read a light, pulpy novel like this as they rode to work each day on the London Tube, or youn­ger women might read it to see what they had to look forward to. The book reflec­ted the expe­ri­ence of many working women, but made it more glamo­rous and exci­ting.

The real-life Anne shared many of the same talents and charac­te­ris­tics as the ficti­o­nal one. She was also young, white, and had tech­ni­cal skills. The ficti­o­nal Anne enjoys an exci­ting career in a growing field, as she proves her knack for tech­ni­cal work, labo­ring with quiet dili­gence each day on a secret, high-tech airplane project. She even­tu­ally shows up her male supe­ri­ors by figu­ring out a criti­cal engi­ne­e­ring error that was holding up the project. While they floun­der, trying despe­ra­tely to figure out the flaw in their design, she hesi­tantly points it out, afraid of embar­ras­sing them. In the process, she not only saves the project but she wins the heart of the male cowor­ker she had her eye on—and allows him to take credit for her breakth­rough.

As women, neit­her the real Anne nor the imagi­nary one was making an unusual deci­sion to put their career behind their other life goals. In fact, each was making the soci­ally expec­ted, and strongly encou­ra­ged, choice. In the book, Anne stays in the work­force after marri­age, but only after being admo­nis­hed that she must put her husband’s career first. Even in fanta­sies, women weren’t allo­wed to think that their care­ers could come first—the best Anne might do was to try to juggle her work, her family, and her husband’s needs, knowing that if a ball needed to drop, it would be her career.

A young woman named Anne Davis wears a punch tape dress at her “reti­re­ment party” as she leaves her job to get married.

In the real world, this juggling act was diffi­cult, and often impos­si­ble. Middle-class women who had the mettle and the privi­lege to try it encoun­te­red major obsta­cles. And the fact that it was still seen as comple­tely inap­pro­pri­ate for women to hold autho­rity over men in the work­place meant that women who strug­gled to stay in their jobs rarely got very far. So the real-life Anne cele­bra­ted her reti­re­ment with half a dozen other young women compu­ter workers—­most of whom would go down the same path in the next few years.

Collec­tive Failu­res

When we talk about compu­ting history, we rarely talk about failure. Narra­ti­ves of tech­no­lo­gi­cal progress are so deeply ingrai­ned into our ways of seeing, unders­tan­ding, and descri­bing high tech that to focus on failure seems to miss the point. If tech­no­logy is about progress, then what is the point of focu­sing on failure? Up until recently, we also rarely talked about women in rela­tion to compu­ting.

The first silence is rela­ted to the second. Women, after all, were seen as having largely failed in compu­ting until recent histo­ri­ans’ attempts to correct that assump­tion. But as it turns out, tech­no­lo­gi­cal failure and womens’ erasure are inti­ma­tely rela­ted in more than one way. When we put these facts toget­her—our avoi­dance of failure, our igno­ring of women in compu­ting, and our tendency to see women’s contri­bu­ti­ons as less impor­tant—­cu­ri­ous patterns start to emerge.

The failure of one unna­med and igno­red post­war compu­ter worker is a good place to start. In 1959, this parti­cu­lar compu­ter program­mer faced a very hectic year. She needed to program, operate, and test all of the compu­ters in a major govern­ment compu­ting center that was doing criti­cal work. These compu­ters didn’t just crunch numbers or auto­mate low-level office work—t­hey allo­wed the govern­ment to fulfill its duties to British citi­zens. Compu­ters were begin­ning to control public utili­ties like elec­tri­city, and the massive and growing welfare state, which inclu­ded the Nati­o­nal Health Service, requi­red complex, calcu­la­tion-dense taxa­tion systems. Though the welfare state was crea­ted by policy, it was tech­no­logy that allo­wed it to func­tion.

In addi­tion to doing all of her normal work, our program­mer also had to train two new hires. These new hires didn’t have any of the requi­red tech­ni­cal skills. But once she trai­ned them, which took about a year, they step­ped up into manage­ment roles. Their trai­ner, meanw­hile, was demo­ted into an assis­tants­hip below them. She succe­e­ded at her job, only to fail in her career.

That the trai­ner was a woman, and that her trai­nees were both young men, was no coin­ci­dence. Nor was it coin­ci­den­tal that, as a woman, she had the tech­ni­cal skills for a job like this while they did not. That’s because before compu­ting became elec­tro­nic, women were seen as ideal for what was consi­de­red mundane calcu­la­tion work. Though this work often requi­red advan­ced mathe­ma­tics know­ledge, it was percei­ved as unin­te­llec­tual. Before a compu­ter was a machine, it was a job clas­si­fi­ca­ti­on—t­hese women workers were lite­rally called “compu­ters.”

Even when elec­tro­me­cha­ni­cal and then elec­tro­nic compu­ters came in, women conti­nued to do compu­ting work. They program­med, opera­ted, trou­bles­ho­o­ted, tested, and even assem­bled these new machi­nes. In fact, IBM UK measu­red the manu­fac­tu­ring of compu­ters in “girl hours” (which were less expen­sive than “man hours”) because the people who built the machi­nes were nearly all women. Meanw­hile, the British govern­ment, the largest compu­ter user in the nation, called their compu­ter workers the “machine grades” and later, the “exclu­ded grades”—exclu­ded from equal pay measu­res brought into the Civil Service in the 1950s. Because their work was so femi­ni­zed, the govern­ment decli­ned to give them equal pay and raise their pay to the men’s rate on the basis that the men’s wage was almost never used. There­fore, the lower, women’s wage became the default market rate for the work. So concen­tra­ted in machine work were women that the majo­rity of women working in govern­ment did not gain equal pay.

By the mid-to-late 1960s, howe­ver, the low value assig­ned to compu­ting work was star­ting to change. Not because the work itself was chan­ging, but because the percep­tion of the work was. Instead of being seen as inti­mi­da­ting behe­moths that were only good for highly tech­ni­cal tasks, compu­ters were now beco­ming widely inte­gra­ted into govern­ment and industry. Their great power and poten­tial was growing more appa­rent. Suddenly, low-status women workers were no longer seen as appro­pri­ate for this type of work—e­ven though they had the tech­ni­cal skills to do the jobs.

So the UK faced a major problem: all of the workers who could do this work were no longer the type of workers that manage­ment wanted doing the work. Instead, mana­gers wanted people who would even­tu­ally become mana­gers them­sel­ves to control these newly impor­tant machi­nes and all of the deci­sion-making that was being program­med into them. That exclu­ded women. In this era, women were not suppo­sed to be in posi­ti­ons of power over men. Both impli­cit and expli­cit prohi­bi­ti­ons preven­ted women from mana­ging men or mixed-gender work­for­ces.

Moving Out, Moving Up

Around the same time that the woman program­mer trai­ned two men to replace her, a young woman named Step­ha­nie Shir­ley embar­ked on a tech­ni­cal career at the pres­ti­gi­ous Dollis Hill rese­arch stati­on—the same govern­ment agency where the Colos­sus code­bre­a­king compu­ters had been crea­ted during World War II. Shir­ley had been a child during the war, born in Germany, and she was Jewish. She was evacu­a­ted out of Nazi-occu­pied Europe with 10,000 other chil­dren on the Kinder­trans­port, a huma­ni­ta­rian refu­gee program desig­ned to take Jewish chil­dren to England. By compa­ri­son, the United States allo­wed in little more than 1,000 chil­dren through a simi­lar program.

Grate­ful for the chan­ces affor­ded by her adop­tive country, Shir­ley set out to make the most of them. Yet early in her career she began to chafe at the confi­nes of British culture. With a degree in math, a good work record, and a master’s degree on the way, Shir­ley was the perfect candi­date for promo­ti­on—or so she thought. As she was denied promo­tion after promo­tion, she star­ted to unders­tand that her role was being defi­ned by things other than her tech­ni­cal skill and educa­ti­on—t­hat the much-vaun­ted “meri­to­cracy” of the govern­ment service was anyt­hing but. “What shoc­ked me was the disco­very that, the more I became recog­ni­zed as a seri­ous young woman who was aiming high—w­hose long-term aspi­ra­ti­ons went beyond a merely subser­vi­ent role—the more violently I was resen­ted and the more impla­cably I was kept in my place, ” she wrote in her memoir.

After being denied anot­her promo­tion, one that she’d earned seve­ral times over, she even­tu­ally lear­ned that the men evalu­a­ting her were resig­ning from the promo­ti­ons board rather than making a deci­sion on her case. “They disap­pro­ved on prin­ci­ple of women holding mana­ge­rial posts, ” she found out, so they would rather resign than consi­der her for a promo­tion. “I was devas­ta­ted by this: it felt like a very perso­nal rejec­tion, ” she reca­lled.

After hitting the glass ceiling first in govern­ment and then in industry, Shir­ley did what women were suppo­sed to do—w­hat the two Annes and so many other women had been encou­ra­ged to do—she got married and resig­ned from her posi­tion. But, unlike the Annes, she wasn’t happy about it. She still had the skills, the inte­lli­gence, and the drive to work in compu­ting, and she knew many other women who were in the same situ­a­ti­on—­being stymied in their care­ers not because they weren’t good enough, but because they were women.

Because she saw the need for compu­ters growing, she knew that people who could program would be essen­tial. Only they could figure out how to unlock the poten­tial of the new main­fra­mes that so few mana­gers unders­tood, even as those mana­gers earmar­ked hundreds of thou­sands of pounds to buy them. So although Shir­ley got married and star­ted a family, she conti­nued to work. In 1962, she star­ted her own soft­ware company, Free­lance Program­mers, out of her home. When she had stati­o­nary made for her new company she half-jokingly put the name all in lower­case, because “we had no capi­tal at all.”

Never­the­less, she began to recruit women who had simi­larly been forced into “early reti­re­ment” by having chil­dren or getting married. Once her busi­ness began to grow, she publis­hed an ad seeking people for full-time program­mer posi­ti­ons, in the clas­si­fied section of the Times of London. It read: “Wonder­ful chance, but hope­less for anti-femi­nists.” In other words, the company had a woman boss. The ad also announ­ced that there were “oppor­tu­ni­ties for reti­red program­mers (female) to work from home.” In 1964, this was revo­lu­ti­o­nary.

Shir­ley’s free­lance program­mers worked from home in an era when compu­ter time was so expen­sive that most program­ming was done on paper before being punched onto cards and then tested on an actual machine. Program­ming from home was there­fore not a problem, as long as you had a telep­hone to colla­bo­rate with your co-workers. Indeed, one of her program­mers was once chas­ti­sed by a company for using too much compu­ter time to debug a program. Program­ming without a compu­ter was chea­per—and prefer­red.

Program­ming from home also allo­wed women to simul­ta­ne­ously take care of their young chil­dren and fulfill their domes­tic respon­si­bi­li­ties. To make things seem more profes­si­o­nal, Shir­ley played a tape recor­ding of typew­ri­ter sounds in the back­ground when she answe­red the phone at her house, in order to drown out the sounds her young son might make. And when she was unable to get contracts early on, she took her husband’s sugges­tion that she start signing her letters with her nick­name instead: “Steve.” With Steve Shir­ley as the public face of the company, busi­ness began to take off.

The Real Ann(e) in Elec­tro­nics

Like many star­tup foun­ders, Shir­ley was meeting a consu­mer need that was still barely unders­tood. In the early 1960s, most soft­ware came packa­ged with the compu­ter itself or was writ­ten in-house after a company purcha­sed a main­frame. Soft­ware was not consi­de­red a product in its own right—and few people expec­ted that custo­mers would actu­ally pay for it sepa­ra­tely after spen­ding so much money on a compu­ter.

Shir­ley reali­zed that they would. She had seen the need in both govern­ment and industry for program­mers who could unle­ash the poten­tial of expen­sive hard­ware with good soft­ware. Without soft­ware, after all, compu­ters didn’t do anyt­hing, and with poor soft­ware they couldn’t fulfill their poten­tial or justify their cost. Shir­ley also knew that British industry and govern­ment were getting rid of most of the people who had program­ming skills and trai­ning because they were women, thereby star­ving the entire country of the criti­cal labor that it needed to moder­nize effec­ti­vely.

Shir­ley scoo­ped up this talent pool by giving women a chance to fulfill their poten­tial. Offe­ring flexi­ble, family-friendly working hours and the ability to work from home, her busi­ness tapped into a deep well of discar­ded exper­tise. Because people who could do this work were an abso­lute neces­sity, the govern­ment and major British compa­nies hired her and her growing team of women program­mers to do mission-criti­cal compu­ter program­ming for projects ranging from payroll and accoun­ting to cutting-edge projects like program­ming the “black box” flight recor­der for the first commer­cial super­so­nic jet in the world: the Concorde.

A woman named Ann Moffatt led the Concorde program­ming team. And unlike the ficti­o­nal Anne from Anne in Elec­tro­nics, she kept the credit for her work. Working from home, Moffatt mana­ged a team of women who also worked from their homes. In fact, this was the first time that Free­lance Program­mers had under­ta­ken a project mana­ged and staf­fed exclu­si­vely by remote workers—­rat­her than being over­seen by one of the four full-time mana­gers who opera­ted out of the small office space Shir­ley had rented a few years after star­ting the company out of her house. The arran­ge­ment of using remote workers to manage projects worked so well that Ann would go on to become tech­ni­cal direc­tor at the company, in charge of more than 300 home-based program­mers.

Moffatt sits at her kitchen table in 1966, writing the code for the Concorde, while her baby looks on.

Much like Step­ha­nie Shir­ley, Ann had begun working in tech­ni­cal roles in the 1950s, but had encoun­te­red a road­block once she had chil­dren. The femi­nist busi­ness prac­ti­ces of Free­lance Program­mers let Ann conti­nue her career and take care of her home and chil­dren, all the while contri­bu­ting to Britain’s high-tech economy. In addi­tion to being a major project for the company, the Concorde was a symbol of British high-tech­no­logy pride and pres­ti­ge—it flew success­fully for deca­des, the only super­so­nic passen­ger airplane to date. And Ann’s concur­rent project func­ti­o­ned for even longer: the baby in the photo­graph is now fifty-three years old.

Losing The Lead

While Shir­ley, Moffatt, and hundreds of other women program­mers crea­ted soft­ware that helped Britain advance further into the acce­le­ra­ting digi­tal age, British industry and govern­ment strug­gled to hire, train, and retain their compu­ter workers. Women had the tech­ni­cal skills, but were not suppo­sed to be mana­gers. Even the fact that women were wiel­ding more power by contro­lling compu­ters was viewed as dange­rously out-of-bounds.

As compu­ting became incre­a­singly inter­wo­ven with all of the func­ti­ons of the state—­from the Bank of England to the Atomic Energy Autho­rity—­com­pu­ter workers grew indis­pen­sa­ble. By the late 1960s, the govern­ment began to fear losing control of the machi­nes that allo­wed the state to func­tion because they did not have a well-trai­ned, perma­nent, reli­a­ble core of tech­ni­cal experts. The women who had the tech­ni­cal skills were judged unre­li­a­ble because they were not alig­ned with manage­ment. They were seen as limi­nally working-class, tempo­rary workers who should not rise above their current station. To elevate women further would upend the hierar­chies of both govern­ment and industry, pushing low-status workers into high-status posi­ti­ons.

So deter­mi­ned were minis­ters within govern­ment that they needed a cadre of male, manage­ment-orien­ted tech­no­crats that they began, coun­te­rin­tui­ti­vely and in despe­ra­tion, to lower the stan­dards of tech­ni­cal skill needed for the jobs. Lowe­ring stan­dards of tech­ni­cal profi­ci­ency to create an elite class of male compu­ter workers didn’t work, howe­ver. In fact, it made the problem worse, by produ­cing a devas­ta­ting labor shor­tage.

Well-heeled young men tapped for the posi­ti­ons often had no inter­est in derai­ling their manage­ment-bound care­ers by getting stuck in the “back­wa­ter” of compu­ter work, which had still not fully shaken its asso­ci­a­tion with low-level, femi­ni­zed labor. Machine work in gene­ral was viewed as unin­te­llec­tual and working-class, ensu­ring that men of the desi­red back­ground had little inter­est in being swept up in the “indus­tri­a­li­za­tion of the office.” Most men who were trai­ned for these posi­ti­ons, at great employer expense, left to take better, non-compu­ting jobs within a year. As a result, the program­ming, systems analy­sis, and compu­ter opera­ting needs of govern­ment and industry went largely unmet. Although there were plenty of women who had the requi­red skills, the govern­ment all but refu­sed to hire them, and private industry largely refu­sed to promote them.

Steve Shir­ley, Ann Moffatt, and their cowor­ker Dee Sher­mer.

Soon, the most power­ful people within the Civil Service had become convin­ced that the govern­ment could no longer func­tion by trying to get more young men into compu­ting: the numbers simply weren’t there. The shor­tage of “suita­ble” compu­ter labor had risen to the level of a nati­o­nal secu­rity issue in the eyes of the state. Even low-level women compu­ter workers held great power: when the all-women punching staff went on strike for better pay and working condi­ti­ons, the massive new VAT (value added tax) system ground to a halt, derai­ling months of plan­ning, to the horror of the men at the top. So they deci­ded to appro­ach the problem from a diffe­rent angle: if there weren’t enough men for compu­ter jobs, the number of these jobs needed to be redu­ced. They needed to find a way to do the same amount of compu­ting work with fewer compu­ter workers.

This meant ever more massive, power­ful main­fra­mes that could be run by centra­li­zed control and command. On the advice of the Minis­ter of Tech­no­logy, the UK deci­ded to force the largest remai­ning British compu­ter compa­nies to merge into one huge firm that could provide govern­ment and industry with the sort of massive, centra­li­zed main­frame tech­no­lo­gies they needed. In 1968, Inter­na­ti­o­nal Compu­ters Limi­ted (ICL) was born, and orde­red to produce the machi­nes that would allow Britain to meet its digi­tal needs with its newly mini­mi­zed and mascu­li­ni­zed compu­ter labor force.

Unfor­tu­na­tely, this change occur­red right as the main­frame was on its way out, in a period when smaller and more decen­tra­li­zed systems were beco­ming the norm. This meant that by the time ICL deli­ve­red the product line they had been tasked with crea­ting, in the mid-1970s, the British govern­ment no longer wanted it, and neit­her did any other poten­tial custo­mers. As the govern­ment reali­zed their mista­ke—t­hough not the underlying sexism that had caused it—t­hey quickly with­drew their promi­sed support for ICL, leaving the company in the lurch and finis­hing off what was left of the British compu­ter industry.

Hiding Tech’s Mista­kes

Step­ha­nie Shir­ley’s company succe­e­ded by taking advan­tage of the sexism inten­ti­o­nally built into the field of compu­ting to exclude talen­ted and capa­ble tech­ni­cal women. At the same time, the rest of the British labor market discar­ded the most impor­tant workers of the emer­ging compu­ter age, dama­ging the progress of every industry that used compu­ters, the moder­ni­za­tion projects of the public sector, and, most stri­kingly, the compu­ter industry itself.

By utili­zing just a small portion of this wasted talent, Shir­ley rescued many women’s skills from being discar­ded enti­rely and helped British industry and govern­ment fulfill some of the promise of compu­te­ri­za­tion. But for every woman Shir­ley employed there were always seve­ral more appli­cants she could not. The massive waste of human talent rippled upward, even­tu­ally destroying the British lead in compu­ting and the British compu­ter industry.

In compu­ting, discri­mi­na­tion is as old as the field itself. And discri­mi­na­tion has shaped the field in ways we are only now coming to unders­tand and admit. The tech­ni­cal labor shor­tage in the UK was produ­ced by sexism—it did not repre­sent a natu­ral evolu­tion of the field, nor a reflec­tion of women’s talents, goals, or inter­ests.

Compu­ting history shows us that the “compu­ter revo­lu­tion” was never really meant to be a revo­lu­tion in any social or poli­ti­cal sense. People who were not seen as worthy of wiel­ding power were deli­be­ra­tely exclu­ded, even when they had the requi­red tech­ni­cal skills. To a great extent, that process conti­nues today. Now, as then, hierar­chies are cons­truc­ted through high tech to preserve power­ful social and poli­ti­cal struc­tu­res.

That we have histo­ri­cally igno­red the impact of women on compu­ting—­both the women who stayed in the field and the many more who were pushed out and shaped the field through their absen­ce—s­hows how narra­ti­ves of tech­no­lo­gi­cal progress hide the mista­kes of the past. Often, failu­res teach us more. But by assu­ming the tauto­logy that tech­no­logy always leads to progress, we become blin­ded to all of the situ­a­ti­ons in which the oppo­site has occur­red.

For the contem­po­rary US, the British exam­ple is a chilling lesson. In twen­ti­eth-century Britain, compu­ters helped re-insti­tu­ti­o­na­lize ideas about women’s second-class status in soci­ety. They took away women’s ability to parti­ci­pate in the digi­tal economy under the pretext that they should not be in charge of power­ful machi­nes even if they had the tech­ni­cal know-how.

Though these atti­tu­des may seem anti­qua­ted today, a closer look at our own tech­no­lo­gi­cal lands­cape reve­als that we conti­nue to ignore the role of women and other mino­rity groups in tech­no­logy fields—and the impact of tech­no­logy on those mino­ri­ti­zed groups. When Twit­ter or Face­book is accu­sed of doing somet­hing that hurts women, it is seen as a niche concern. Women do not stand in for “people” in gene­ral in the eyes of tech­no­logy behe­moths—a major problem when those tech­no­lo­gies incre­a­singly define every aspect of how we live. The issues affec­ting white women and women of color, people of color of all genders, the LGBTQ popu­la­tion, and other groups are repe­a­tedly cons­truc­ted as not being of primary impor­tance by the tech­no­logy compa­nies that struc­ture our poli­ti­cal and econo­mic envi­ron­ment—­per­haps because to view things in that way would reveal how badly tech­no­logy is failing us.

The British aspi­ra­tion to build a new tech­no­lo­gi­cal empire through compu­ting should sound fami­liar: it is eerily akin to our own current situ­a­tion. The US appro­ach to high tech­no­logy in the Cold War was baldly impe­rial. But what many fail to realize is that it has remai­ned so long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The stock market bubble of the first inter­net boom did not herald a warmer, fuzzier era of more demo­cra­tic compu­ting. It inau­gu­ra­ted a new era of “greed is good, ” and in the process, Sili­con Valley lear­ned that it could acti­vely profit from social inequa­lity. The only catch was it had to be willing to manu­fac­ture ever more of it, selling tech­no­lo­gi­cal “advan­ces” that were acti­vely harm­ful to a progres­sive civil soci­ety under the guise of tech­no­so­cial progress.

The dyna­mic conti­nues to this day. Sili­con Valley reaps enor­mous profits at the expense of the majo­rity of users, and calls it progress. But tech­no­logy’s align­ment with actual progress has a long and uneven history, and its effects are rarely straight­for­ward or fully fore­seen. Real progress isn’t synony­mous with buil­ding anot­her app—it invol­ves recog­ni­zing the problems in our soci­ety and confron­ting the uncom­for­ta­ble fact that tech­no­logy is a tool for wiel­ding power over people. Too often, those who alre­ady hold power, those who are least able to recog­nize the flaws in our current systems, are the ones who decide our tech­no­lo­gi­cal future.

This piece draws on the rese­arch for, and inclu­des mate­rial from, the author’s book, Program­med Inequa­lity: How Britain Discar­ded Women Tech­no­lo­gists and Lost Its Edge in Compu­ting (MIT Press, 2017). Learn more at program­me­di­ne­qua­lity.com.

Marie Hicks is a histo­rian of tech­no­logy and a profes­sor working on the inter­sec­tion of gender, sexu­a­lity, tech­no­logy, and power.