Status Updates From Programmed Inequality: How ...

I love this book but can't read more than a couple pages at a time because it's so much information to retain.

Really interesting so far

Into the 1970s now

Been forgetting to update. Really interesting book, I'm enjoying it as much about the computing history as for an explanation of why labour changed the way it did. It's quite dense, so it's taken me a while to get through it, and I'm still only halfway.

Me, on the left-hand page: "This is outrageous. How can people be so stupid?"
Right-hand page: "Hold my beer."

As David Edgerton has shown, projecting our obsession with innovation into the past gives a false sense of futurity, obscuring the technological and social continuities that complicate our view of progress.

Also: the dream of propping up and invigorating the British colonial vision through computing is WILD. The government orchestrated mergers between British computing companies and gave them secret preferential contracts. The hope was to drum up an export market for British computing and stave off IBM's increasing market share.

"Yet the department used these same workers, who were judged inadequate for promotion, to indefinitely cover vacant higher executive officer posts. General aptitude was a highly gendered construct. In everything but name, these women were in fact the computer experts that the government was desperately seeking to hire. Gender and class, much more than skill, determined workers’ roles in the computing hierarchy."

Great note here about how computer history narratives tend to focus on remarkable individuals and "reflexively and unconsciously privilege those with the most power and implicitly endorse an ahistorical fiction of technological meritocracy"

Oh the rage!!!! My rage, not the author's. She's continuing to present the history of computing in the UK, side by side with a focus on how gendered issues influenced it. It just makes me rage when I think about how the industry was literally built on women's work, and they were pushed out of its professionalization. One chapter and the conclusion to go (a good third of this book is notes).

Done with chapter 3. A lot of good history in this chapter. I've always heard about Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web), but now I know about his Mom, too. :) Computing marketing in the 60s was discussed a lot in this chapter as well, which I found especially interesting because I'm a marketer for an IT company. But mostly this book is making me rage. The underpayment of women was so purposeful.

Can this book be required reading for anyone who ever had an opinion on equal pay? It's fascinating. Put aside, for a sec, that a labour gov't actively suppressed wages & embraced austerity, while implementing large-scale social programs post WWII. I'm American, (didn't know that). I see so many parallels to how companies are screwing over folks today - but instead of rebuilding a country, they line their pockets.

So, the stupid Google memo debacle got my husband to buy this book for himself. It's his industry, and he figures he should learn more about sexism within it. But I stole it to read a few pages and have had it in my possession all evening. Oops! I finished the first chapter (after a dry, but informative intro). It makes me want to delve further into labor history. Fascinating stuff!