Comment by tovej
Men and women. Women were heavily involved in the engineering work at the beginning of the industry. The industry only became male dominated in the late 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing
Men and women. Women were heavily involved in the engineering work at the beginning of the industry. The industry only became male dominated in the late 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing
Women’s work: how Britain discarded its female computer programmers
Britain once led the world in electronic computing. But when the industry squeezed out female employees, it wrote its own epitaph.
In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers deployed by the British 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 its 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.
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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 feminised, 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.
Sure, if you don't use the standard definitions of common words you can argue false things. Children know that. It has no intellectual merit and you should stop playing silly word games to try and "win" an incorrect argument.
The computing industry does not refer to people sitting in rows doing calculations by hand.
Betty Snyder, Betty Jennings, Kathleen McNulty, and Grace Hopper were not doing calculations by hand.
I am obviously not saying that the human computers are the same as digital computers, that's your misinterpretation. I was explaining the context that digital computers grew out of, it was a female field. E.g. Mauchley and Eckert designed the ENIAC to be used for the same tasks as human computers were (firing table calculations), and as digital computers were used in this context, the workforce in the eventual digital computer industry reflected that of the human computer context. If you are interested in learning more, there are many books on the ENIAC project. Just pick one, it will mention the women involved. "ENIAC, the triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" is a good general overview which you can read in a day, free online at https://archive.org/details/eniac00scot
If you're particularly interested in the women involved, there is a shorter text available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20151122025204/http://pcfly.info...
Please read a post before you reply to it. Your reply is emotional and not constructive. Nobody is out to get you, I am only interested in weeding out misconceptions about computing history.
They weren't heavily involved and to claim otherwise is historical revisionism.