The First Women in Tech Didn’t Leave—Men Pushed Them Out

In computing’s early years, when it was considered women’s work, all six programmers of America’s first digital computer, Eniac, were women

By Christopher Mims

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Dec. 10, 2017 7:00 a.m. ET

Sexism in the tech industry is as old as the tech industry itself. ... Memos from the U.K.’s government archives reveal that, in 1959, an unnamed British female computer programmer was given an assignment to train two men. The memos said the woman had “a good brain and a special flair” for working with computers. Nevertheless, a year later the men became her managers. Since she was a different class of government worker, she had no chance of ever rising to their pay grade.

Today, in the U.S., about a quarter of computing and mathematics jobs are held by women, and that proportion has been declining over the past 20 years. The situation is generally worse at the biggest tech companies: Only one in five engineers at Google or Facebook is a woman, according to the companies’ recent diversity reports. A string of recent events—from women coming forward about sexism, harassment and discrimination in the industry, to the controversy over a memo written by a Google employee arguing that women overall are biologically less suited to programming—suggest the steps currently being taken by tech firms to address these issues are inadequate.

A growing army of women and members of other underrepresented minorities are working on solutions to these issues. The history of computing, in the U.K. in particular, backs up one of their central conclusions—that simply educating more women and other minorities to be engineers won’t solve the problem.

At its genesis, computer programming faced a double stigma—it was thought of as menial labor, like factory work, and it was feminized, a kind of “women’s work” that wasn’t considered intellectual. Though part of the U.K. government’s low-paid “Machine Operator Class,” women performed knowledge work including programming systems for everything from tax collection and social services to code-breaking and scientific research, using punch cards on a vacuum-tube computer. ... Then they were systematically pushed out of the field, says technology historian Marie Hicks, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote about it in her recent book, “Programmed Inequality.”
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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com