Programmed Inequality: The consequences of gender-bias in the British computer industry

Thu 27 May 2021

Online on zoom

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing, but thirty years later the British computer industry was all but extinct. How did this happen?

Four years ago a historian of technology, Mar Hicks, provided the first deeply-researched answer in a study of how the British industry changed by redefining computer-related employment in gendered terms.

Women had played a major role in computing in the wartime and post-war eras.
But as the technology advanced, and successive governments began to perceive its industrial significance, they were consistently excluded from high-level computing jobs in the public sector because of their supposed lack of “leadership potential”, and computing-related work was correspondingly undervalued.

One of the consequences of this gender bias was the eventual obliteration of the domestic mainframe industry.

Now that the consequences of gender-bias and imbalance in the modern tech industry are becoming striking, the Minderoo Centre is holding a Webinar to look back on this pathbreaking study.

Join us online to hear Mar Hicks, Dame Wendy Hall FRS and other scholars in conversation.

Date: 27 May at 17:30 BST

Cost: Free