Gender & Computing

Of the historical research that I have done, none has attracted as much attention as the work I have done on gender and computer programming.

My first book, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise is a labor and social history of computer work as it emerges in the mid-20th century. One of the surprising conclusions in the book (now widely accepted, but at the time novel) is that computer work was initially gendered female --- meaning not only were many of the earliest computer programmers women, but computer programming was *expected* to be women's work.

Over the course of the 1960s, however, a remarkable sex-change occured in computer work, as programming was "made masculine." I detail this process in "Making Programming Masculine," in Tom Misa, ed. Gender Codes (Wiley, 2010)[PDF]

With the emergence of computer science as a high-status academic discipline, stereotypes about the computer "hacker" emerge in popular culture, and help make computing an increasingly foreign and unfriendly environment for women in computing. This is the subject of my article "Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism: Culture & Identity within the Computing Professions." Osiris 30:1 (2015), pp. 38--65.[PDF]

I often speak and teach on issues related to gender and technology, and as part of a graduate seminar that I taught on gender created an on-line syllabus for the course, along with an extensive bibliography that is available via Github. Feel free to clone or fork. I would like this to be maintained and extended to serve as a useful resource for other scholars and students working in this field.

In addition, you might find useful this list of women and gender non-conforming people writing about technology.

Since my research in this area receives so much attention in the popular media, I have posted about it before. If you are interested in learning more, please visit the following earlier entries:

More Tech & Gender (6/6/2018)

Tech, Gender, and the Environment (12/14/2017)

Contextualizing the Google Manifesto (8/12/2017)

The History of Women in Engineering (1/31/2017)

History of Computer Dating (7/23/2016)

Fact Check: Tech Has Never Been Just a Man’s World (2/15/2016)

Debugging the Gender Gap (7/5/2015)

Historicizing Masculinities Colloquium (5/5/2015)

The History of Women in Programming (2/8/2015)

The Cult of Masculinity in Computing (10/14/2014)

I also write about these topics on the blog associated with my book The Computer Boys Take Over.