Janet Abbate

The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases. Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male "computer geek" seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine "software engineering." She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science. Abbate's account of the bold and creative strategies of women who loved computing work, excelled at it, and forged successful careers will provide inspiration for those working to change gendered computing culture.

Women's Changing Participation in Computing

Recoding Gender

Abate sees the key to the internet's rapid and seemingly chaotic growth as the result of a decentralized, user-driven environment. She traces the development of networked resources from Cold War think tanks and the ARPANET to the present successful free-form applications.

Inventing the Internet

Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain; programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). This BIT offers a chapter in this untold history of women and computing, describing women's career stratagems in academic computing—recounting both the obstacles female scholars have faced and their resourceful strategies for gaining credentials and finding alternative ladders to visibility and career advancement.

A BIT of Recoding Gender

Gender in Academic Computing: Alternative Career Paths and Norms, digital original edition

Stephanie Dick

"This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--

New Histories of Computing and Society

Abstractions and Embodiments

Brian Kahin

Although there are many competing visions of information infrastructure, there is universal agreement that standards will play a critical role. The history of OSI, the Internet, and industry consortia shows that standards development has become a rich, multifaceted process, critically linked to market strategy and major issues of public policy. The thirty-three contributions to this book present a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in standards development for information technology and the options for federal policy. The book includes both independent analysis and the perspectives of major stakeholders and other interested parties--such as AT&T, the American National Standards Institute, the European Commission, and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. A Publication of the Information Infrastructure Project at Harvard University

Janet Abbate

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