Programmed Inequality. How Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing

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Winner of the Wadsworth Prize for Business History, 2017. Scholarly work. Deals with how labour feminization and gendered technocracy undercut British efforts to sustain a leading computer industry post 1945; notably how its emergence as male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s created labor issues that grew into structural ones and how gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user - the civil service and public sector -- to make decisions that were disastrous for the computer industry. Contents include: 'Britain's computer "revolution" '; 'War machines - women's computing work and the underpinnings of the data-driven state, 1930-46'; 'Data processing in peacetime - institutionalizing a feminized machine underclass, 1946-55'; 'Luck and labor shortage - gender flux, professionalization, and growing opportunities for computer workers, 1955-67'; 'Rise of the technocrat - how state attempts to centralize power through computing went astray, 1965-69'; 'End of white heat and the failure of British technocracy, 1969-79'; 'Conclusion - reassembling the history of computing around gender's formative influence'