I'm Marie Hicks, I'm a historian of technology.
There used to be more women in computing than men.
Where did they all go?
In the 1950s and the 1960s,
computer programming was decidedly women's work
but as the 1960s stretched on, women started to be replaced by men,
and not just by men, but management-level technocrats.
The gender of the field flipped because women were pushed out,
not because they didn’t have the tech skills.
And many women found themselves in the position,
of training their male replacements.
Not all of the women who were pushed out of the workforce
stopped working in computing however.
Dame Stephanie Shirley who back then went by the moniker 'Steve'
actually started her own freelance software company
and Shirley had an explicitly feminist business model.
At this point in time, most programming was done
with pencil and paper before being run through a machine
so Stephanie Shirley's workers could work from home
and they could have flexible hours
that allowed them to take care of children and families.
One of these workers, Ann Moffatt,
programmed the black box flight recorder for the Concorde.
And you can see her programming at her kitchen table
while her young daughter looks on.
But many other women just left the field entirely.
This produced an enormous skills shortage and a huge labour shortage.
Meaning that the people available to do the important work
of computerisation were suddenly too few in number.
As a result of this, the British government decided that they needed
to change the design of the computers that they were using.
Since there weren’t enough people to run them,
they would concentrate and centralise computers.
In conjunction with the Ministry of Technology,
the British government forced a merger of all of the remaining
successful computing companies
and this created one big company that was supposed to provide
the government and the entire nation
with the kind of huge centralised mainframes
that could be run by the small number of technocrats
who were now remaining.
The problem with this however
is that by the time the machine was delivered
the mainframe was on the way out,
and even though ICL's line of computers
was highly technically advanced,
it wasn't something anyone wanted to buy anymore.
This effectively destroyed the British computing industry
and today we see similar things going on.
Discrimination continues to wreck high-tech economies
and high-tech labour markets
and the results reverberate out into the rest of society.
Right now we see in the United States
Silicon Valley having a day of reckoning in terms of how they hire,
promote and decide to design their technologies.
All of the talent that is lost hurts the industry and hurts the economy
but what's more important is that
these people lack a voice in designing critical infrastructure
that we're all going to have to live with.
It can undermine the principles of democracy.
By looking at examples from the past,
we can find out not just how to build better technologies
but how to construct fairer societies.