Connecting Women: Women, Gender and ICT in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

183 Pages·2015·2.32 MB·English

by  Valérie Schafer

History of Computing
Valérie Schafer
Benjamin G. Thierry Editors
Connecting
Women
Women, Gender and ICT in Europe in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
History of Computing
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Martin Campbell-Kelly, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
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Ulf Hashagen, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany
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Jeffrey R. Yost, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
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Valérie Schafer (cid:129) Benjamin G. Thierry
Editors
Connecting Women
Women, Gender and ICT in Europe
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Editors
Valérie Schafer Benjamin G. Thierry
Institute for Communication Sciences Université Paris-Sorbonne
(CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC) Institute for Communication Sciences
Paris , France (CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC)
Paris , France
ISSN 2190-6831 ISSN 2190-684X (electronic)
History of Computing
ISBN 978-3-319-20836-7 ISBN 978-3-319-20837-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20837-4
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Foreword
Women, gender, and information and communication technologies – a grouping of
terms that would have made an utterly impossible and impenetrable title only a few
decades ago. In their current meanings, these words simply did not exist. Genders
were grammatical categories and the French g enres a matter of literature; informa-
tion, communication, and technology were discrete elements, far from the iconic
acronym ICT; and history as well as technology afforded women an equal level of
invisibility. More crucially, associating these terms into a coherent angle of research
would have not been feasible. Research teams focusing on gender and women’s his-
tory very rarely met with academics interested in the history of technological inno-
vation: both groups had to devote most of their time and efforts to developing and
asserting their existence. Today, with an undeniable institutional and historiographi-
cal legitimacy, these fi elds of research can connect, as they did in Paris at the May
2014 symposium organized by the LabEx EHNE. In this volume are presented the
results of a convergence of approaches, the meeting of minds and experiences, and
connections through and beyond the variety of methodologies and interests.
Since the 1970s, women’s history has returned to visibility the half of human-
kind which at best had been present if partially hidden in the world and times of
men, at worst forgotten. While this is not the place for a full account of its
historiography, 1 women’s history, it must be noted, was before all else a social his-
tory of women, making its own the themes of the Nouvelle Histoire . In the fi rst
instance, labor and confl icts, education, and women’s bodies were analyzed as
spaces where male domination exerts itself, but also as the locus of emancipation.
The necessary objective was to assert, against stereotypes, the separation of “the
woman” from the object of nature: historicize “her body” and therefore historicize
medicine, maternity, and sexuality. One essential step was to extract women from
the archives; mostly written by men, they seemed at fi rst glance to have very little to
say of women. Oral history made it possible to fi ll in the “silences of history” for the
more recent periods; archives were helpful, chiefl y for the fi elds where women had
1 See, for example, Thébaud, Françoise, 2007. Ecrire l’histoire des femmes et du genre. Lyon: ENS
Ed.
v
vi Foreword
a strong presence – schools and health-care careers, often very far from technology.
Indeed, technology seemed to be a fi eld of men: why explore it when looking for
women? Then again, why not? From the history of technologies2 to the history of
innovation, approaches to materiality have grown and diversifi ed.3 This historiogra-
phy has integrated the study of large technical systems, of practices and usages, as
well as political economy and the social construction of technological systems.
Combining social and cultural history, this fi eld of research takes into account all
the stakeholders – not only the “key players” but all the agents of history in their
diversity and the variety of their actions, from the “informed” groups of involved
users to the general public. Within this history, through the new spaces and territo-
ries it discovers in its study of networks and apparatus, the history of information
and communication technologies has its own intellectual space, where new
approaches can develop freely.
T he choice of words and concept has had a defi nite impact on the complex tra-
jectories of these approaches. When “sex” – the natural and biological differentia-
tion, in addition to the sexuality, present in both French and English – had to be
separated from a cultural and social distinction between men and women, French
researchers weighted their options (“social sex relations,” “sex difference,” “social
sex”) before settling for the English word “gender” and later the French g enre ,
which still remains controversial. Since the early 1970s, France has added to its
language the new words needed to describe new domains – like t élématique for
innovations such as the national videotext Minitel system and informatique for both
computer science and information technology. The English phrase information and
communication technology was fi rst used in the 1980s; its French equivalent,
Technologie de l’information et de la communication , testifi es to the convergence of
previously separate domains, induced by the development of digital technologies.
The corresponding acronyms are widely used in both languages: ICT and TIC are
commonly found in the technological domain, but also in education, where trans-
mission of knowledge must always fi nd new forms and where technological and
social mutations must be followed. To both fi elds, a stigma seems to be attached –
the shame of a common “anglophone original sin?” In 2014, while “gender” seemed
a naughty word that the French Ministry for National Education endeavored to erase
discretely, the British government, taking the advice of the Royal Society,4 replaced
the phrase “ICT” and its “negative connotations” by “computing.”5
2 Pestre, Dominique (ed. in collaboration with Yves Cohen), 1998. Histoire des techniques.
Annales, Histoires, Sciences Sociales 4/5.
3 G riset, Pascal and Yves Bouvier, 2012. D e l’histoire des techniques à l’histoire de l’innovation.
Tendances de la recherche française en histoire contemporaine (From the History of Technologies
to the History of Innovation. Trends of French Eschare in Contemporary History). Histoire, écono-
mie et société, HES 2: 29–43.
4 Royal Society, 2012. Shut down or restart? The way forward for computing in UK schools: 18.
“The term ‘ICT’ should no longer be used as it has attracted too many negative connotations.”
5 h ttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-pro-
grammes-of-study . Accessed 15 March 2015.
Foreword vii
Nevertheless, the history of women, gender, and information and communication
technology, as it appears in these pages, makes a strong case in favor of the combi-
nation of approaches. The study of the fi eld does not amount to tracking down the
presence of women in ICTs – a compensatory history against which Charlotte
Bunch and Mary Hunt, and later Janet Abbate, have warned researchers; instead, it
is the investigation into why this domain was and still is too often considered mas-
culine. Albeit in unbalanced proportions, men and women are agents of the concep-
tion, production, and use of these technologies. Yet, in terms of dynamics, the lesser
visibility of women leads to a very stereotyped image of their agency. Small, nimble
hands carry out simple, repetitive tasks, from switchboard operators to computer
girls; feminine voices are fi t for phone receptionists and the sensual overtones of
evening radio shows. In contrast, men understand tools, master technologies, and
control networks. A closer look at reality shows a much more complex world, where
the “demoiselles du téléphone” (female “switches”) are everything but passive
when it comes to their social condition, as Dominique Pinsolle tells us; where
Spanish radios libres (free radios) are a vehicle of female activism, as José Emilio
Pérez Martinez describes; and where the glass ceiling and pipeline shrinkage in
computer science careers are historical constructs, as shown by Giuditta Parolini’s
research on the Rothamsted Statistics Department since the 1920s.
S ince the last years of the twentieth century, researchers have described a num-
ber of aspects of what can be analyzed as another mode of male domination. Their
perspective follows the deconstruction of culturally persistent images and relies on
the study of the various domains of information and communication technologies,
from their conception – here, in the chapter on computing, by Martina McDonell
and Chantal Morley – to their representations, as exemplifi ed by the works of
Marion Dalibert and Simona de Iulio. These approaches are necessary if the “glass
slipper” is ever to be shattered, as Catherine Ashcraft and Karen Lee Ashcraft sug-
gest. The variety of sources used in this book (institutional archives and archives of
research centers, oral testimonies and the press, as well as born-digital heritage, in
the chapter by Alexie Geers) is an invitation to travel from one scale to another,
from individuals to groups to networks. The range of sources also allows the reader
to consider the many aspects of what has been at play, over the last two centuries, in
the relation between women and men. Relegation to subordinate positions and con-
testation; pioneering personalities; female, feminine, and/or feminist uses of infor-
mation technologies; and the relations between gender and occupational identities:
the issues and questions are as abundant today as they were in the fi rst days of the
telegraph, presented by Simone M. Müller in her research.
F rom the cultural and societal standpoints, the conceptual issues are crucial.
However, they should not make us forget that, beyond all the forms of academic
debate, any approach – in any domain – where any group of agents of the develop-
ment of a fi eld is overlooked, overestimated, undervalued, or forgotten, is bound to
be incomplete and distorted.
This is the reason why, within the long-term project of a new history of Europe,
it appears as imperative to process and study in conjunction the issues of European
fl uxes as products of a material civilization and the questions raised by a continent
viii Foreword
where sex and gender relations are an integral part of a common history.
Connecting Women. Women, Gender, and ICT in Europe is a human connection of
themes and histories; one can only hope that its promising research will lead to
new explorations.
Paris, France Pascal Griset
22 April 2015 Fabrice Virgili
Pref ace
Both sides of the Atlantic marked the year 2015 with a celebration of the bicenten-
nial of the birth of Ada Augusta Byron , best known as Ada Lovelace . The polemics
over her contribution, referred to “Deleting Ada Lovelace from the history of
computing ,”1 fortunately do not deter her standing as a symbol of women’s contri-
butions in the history of computing, as shown by the ADA Awards, for instance.
Women’s contributions to the fi eld are also being recognized in the proliferation
of academic initiatives. In 2015, the annual meeting of the Congrès de la Société
Informatique de France (SIF, Convention of Computing Society in France) focused
entirely on the theme of “Women and Computing” before an audience composed
primarily of computer scientists concerned about the two-decade decline of women
in the fi eld. 2
H istorical work allows us to recover the signifi cant female presence that existed
in computing research and industry until the 1980s, as we have seen in the work of
Tom Misa (2010),3 Janet Abbate (2012),4 Nathan Ensmenger (2010),5 or Mary
Hicks (2010),6 to name but a few. This trend in historical research leads us to view
women’s current peripheral status as neither structural nor static.
C ertainly, great care is required to avoid amalgams that could introduce an artifi cial
continuity that has no evidentiary basis between h uman computers, keypunch operators,
or today’s women laborers in c omputing (with all the diversity within the milieus of
1 The Ada Initiative, 2013, h ttp://adainitiative.org/2013/08/deleting-ada-lovelace-from-the-history-
of-computing /Accessed 5 March 2015.
2 Margolis, Jane, and Allan Fisher. 2001. Unlocking the clubhouse. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
3 Misa, Thomas J. (ed.). 2010. Gender codes: why women are leaving computing? Hoboken: Wiley
and IEEE Computer Society.
4 Abbate, Janet. 2012. Recoding gender: women’s changing participation in computing. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
5 Ensmenger, Nathan. 2010. The computer boys take over: computers, programmers and the poli-
tics of technical expertise . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
6 Hicks, Mary. 2010. Only the clothes changed: women operators in British computing and adver-
tising, 1950–1970. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32(4): 5–17.
ix