IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 12

appropriate for women but beneath
men. The "machine grades" succeeded in devaluing women's work,
pay, and computing careers in the
U.K. for decades. The creation of
the "machine grades" also successfully convinced the British people
that computing was a low-level
occupation that required no real
education or skills. By the time the
British government realized that
computing was revolutionizing how
work was done in the latter part of
the 20th century, it was too late. No
one believed the new government
propaganda that computing was a
high-level job offering a lifetime of
career opportunities.
After WWII, the British government took over about one-fifth of
the country's private industries and
continued to enforce wartime practices such as rationing. The socialist agenda of the British government
during the post-WWII period did not
encompass equal pay for women.
Although this issue was revisited

"Machine grades" succeeded
in devaluing women's work, pay,
and computing careers in the
U.K. for decades.
multiple times in the ensuing years,
the perpetual argument was twofold. First women did not need to
make as much as men (who had to
support a family). After all, a single
woman only had to take care of herself and a married woman had her
husband's salary on which she could
rely. The second argument against
equal pay was that the government
could not afford to pay women the
same salaries that they paid men.

Neither of these arguments was
accurate. Many families needed the
extra income that a working woman
provided. In fact, Hicks points out
that the government spent far more
than needed to fund equal pay for
women on social programs aimed
at accomplishing the same results
that equal pay would have achieved.
The British Civil Service worked to
implement major cost reductions
during this time, but believed that
keeping inflation in check could be
accomplished by hiring cheaper
women workers and by transferring
much of their work from humans to
computers. Therefore, Britain was
vested in keeping women's pay artificially low as a matter of national
economic policy and they devoted
enormous resources over several
decades toward that goal. Britain
failed to foresee that their computing needs, in terms of both equipment and trained workers, would
mushroom and consequently so
would the financial resources re quired to maintain them.
In the end, neither artificially depressing women's
wages nor relying on computers as a cost reduction
measure was a viable economic strategy.
In the 1960s and 1970s
the Br itish gover nment
sought to rebuild its wartime dominance in the computing sector to restore its
position as a global power.
As noted above, this plan necessitated a gender power shift in computing, from viewing computing as
low-wage, unskilled secretarial. or
"machine grade" work performed by
women, to seeing it as high pay and
prestigious work performed by men.
In Britain's effort to rebrand computing as "high value men's work"
they booted out their qualified and
experienced workforce of women
and tried to replace them with inexIEEE Technology and Society Magazine

perienced and largely uninterested
men. The fact that the government's
efforts here were a flop necessitated
increasing government micromanagement of the private British computing industry. Their inability to
attract a sufficiently large male computing workforce (and, of course,
now that computing was important
work, women could no longer be
allowed to engage in it) meant that
Britain's enormous Civil Service
sector needed powerful supercomputers that could be "controlled"
by a small number of high level,
trained male executives. Note that
this obsession with supercomputers
took place while the rest of the world
was focused on the emergence of
the personal computer or PC. But
the British government insisted on
dictating the future direction of the
U.K.'s computing industries, shoring
them up with government funds and
eventually forcing a merger into a
single computing company capable
of designing and building the colossal supercomputers to run the country. Hicks meticulously details the
story of Britain's intertwined desire
for world power status in computing
with its economic woes as well as
its stubborn adherence to a strongly
gendered workplace. She also demonstrates why this approach caused
Britain to fail, sealing the demise
of both its reemergence as a world
power and its dominance of worldwide computing. Instead of being
a fix for Britain's economic and political power woes, computing and
the changes it ushered in simply
exacerbated the inherent problems
embedded in both systems. Only in
the late 1980s did the British government finally engage in efforts to specifically recruit women into formerly
male computing jobs. They hoped to
alleviate the decades-long computing worker shortages and outflow of
even minimally trained men to the
more lucrative private sector. Yet
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june 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018