E11 ‘Programmed Inequality’: Women in Technology

From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives,
featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians.

Women were once Britain’s largest computing workforce and a hidden engine of growth in the world of technology. Dr Mar Hicks will explain the ‘gender flip’ that occurred in the world of computing in the 1960s and 1970s, and what this meant for the thousands of women who worked in science and technology.

Dr Amy Edwards
Amy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s.

  / somsproject  
  / somsdramyedwards  
@somsproject.bsky.social
Book: Amy Edwards, Are We Rich Yet: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (University California Press, 2022)
For more about the project: 'The Secret of My Success': Women and Self-employment in Britain, 1970-2000

Professor Mar Hicks
Mar Hicks is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science. Their research explores histories of computing, large-scale digital infrastructures and the relationship of both to wider society. They’ve published a number of books on this topic, including a recent edited collection called Your Computer is on Fire and their award-winning book, Programme Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Both have this real interest in using the history of technology to help us address our current problems with digital structures and technology. Their current project looks more closely at the ways people have resisted powerful digital and technological systems. So hopefully they can tell us more about some of this work today, as well as to teach us something about about what it was like to be a woman working in computing in the twentieth century..

See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice

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