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  • Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

  • History of Computing
  • By: Marie Hicks
  • Narrated by: Becky White
  • Length: 11 hrs
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

By: Marie Hicks
Narrated by: Becky White
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Publisher's Summary

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening 30 years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation's inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government's systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce, simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user - the civil service and sprawling public sector - to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy.

Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the 21st century.

Published by The MIT Press.

"A sophisticated work of scholarship: detailed, insightful, deeply researched." (Times Higher Education)

©2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks

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brilliant book

loved the book but the performance was lacklustre. mispronounced terminology and a clear lack of knowledge of British place names or scholar's surnames. glad to see scholarly books being recorded, but more guidance should be available to voice actors in this space

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