Download or read book Recoding Gender written by Janet Abbate and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Programmed Inequality written by Mar Hicks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty 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, Mar 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 twenty-first century.

Download or read book Kicking Butt in Computer Science written by Carol Frieze and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are women really kicking butt in computer science? National statistics show little progress in the participation of women in computing; this in spite of numerous studies, reports and recommendations on the topic. Some might say the reasons for the situation remain a mystery. However, at Carnegie Mellon University we do not believe that the situation is either so mysterious or such an intractable problem. Indeed, women are kicking butt in computer science in some cultures and environments. This book tells the Carnegie Mellon story, a positive story of how one school developed a culture and environment in which both women and men could thrive and be successful in computer science.

Download or read book Unlocking the Clubhouse written by Jane Margolis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding and overcoming the gender gap in computer science education. The information technology revolution is transforming almost every aspect of society, but girls and women are largely out of the loop. Although women surf the Web in equal numbers to men and make a majority of online purchases, few are involved in the design and creation of new technology. It is mostly men whose perspectives and priorities inform the development of computing innovations and who reap the lion's share of the financial rewards. As only a small fraction of high school and college computer science students are female, the field is likely to remain a "male clubhouse," absent major changes. In Unlocking the Clubhouse, social scientist Jane Margolis and computer scientist and educator Allan Fisher examine the many influences contributing to the gender gap in computing. The book is based on interviews with more than 100 computer science students of both sexes from Carnegie Mellon University, a major center of computer science research, over a period of four years, as well as classroom observations and conversations with hundreds of college and high school faculty. The interviews capture the dynamic details of the female computing experience, from the family computer kept in a brother's bedroom to women's feelings of alienation in college computing classes. The authors investigate the familial, educational, and institutional origins of the computing gender gap. They also describe educational reforms that have made a dramatic difference at Carnegie Mellon—where the percentage of women entering the School of Computer Science rose from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000—and at high schools around the country.

Download or read book Gender Codes written by Thomas J. Misa and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The computing profession faces a serious gender crisis. Today, fewer women enter computing than anytime in the past 25 years. This book provides an unprecedented look at the history of women and men in computing, detailing how the computing profession emerged and matured, and how the field became male coded. Women's experiences working in offices, education, libraries, programming, and government are examined for clues on how and where women succeeded—and where they struggled. It also provides a unique international dimension with studies examining the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Norway, and Greece. Scholars in history, gender/women's studies, and science and technology studies, as well as department chairs and hiring directors will find this volume illuminating.

Download or read book Women Work and Computing written by Ruth Woodfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although few dispute the computer's place as a pivotal twentieth century artefact, little agreement has emerged over whether the changes it has precipitated are generally positive or negative in nature, or whether we should be contemplating our future association with the computer more with enthusiasm or trepidation. Specifically with regard to the relationship between women and computers, a diverse body of commentary has embraced the views of those who have found grounds for expressing pessimism about this association and those who have favoured a more optimistic assessment of the current situation and its probable future development. This book undertakes a thorough evaluation of the legitimacy and predictive power of the optimistic commentary. Using a large body of original qualitative data, it interrogates the bases of what it identifies as three waves of optimism and in doing so provides answers to some of the key questions asked in this field today.

Download or read book Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing written by William Aspray and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines in detail the issue of the underrepresentation of women, African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics in the computing disciplines in the U.S. The work reviews the underlying causes, as well as the efforts of various nonprofit organizations to correct the situation, in order to both improve social equity and address the shortage of skilled workers in this area. Topics and features: presents a digest and historical overview of the relevant literature from a range of disciplines, including leading historical and social science sources; discusses the social and political factors that have affected the demographics of the workforce from the end of WWII to the present day; provides historical case studies on organizations that have sought to broaden participation in computing and the STEM disciplines; reviews the different approaches that have been applied to address underrepresentation, at the individual, system-wide, and pathway-focused level; profiles the colleges and universities that have been successful in opening up computer science or engineering to female students; describes the impact of individual change-agents as well as whole organizations.

Download or read book Cracking the Digital Ceiling written by Carol Frieze and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global examination of what influences women's participation in computing and what can be done to fix the gender gap.

Download or read book The Computer Boys Take Over written by Nathan L. Ensmenger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contentious history of the computer programmers who developed the software that made the computer revolution possible. This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the people who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, it tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legions of computer specialists—programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers—who transformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of the modern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, these specialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact of electronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general. In The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan Ensmenger traces the rise to power of the computer expert in modern American society. His rich and nuanced portrayal of the men and women (a surprising number of the “computer boys” were, in fact, female) who built their careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power, identity, and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerized society. In his recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyes of its principle revolutionaries, Ensmenger reminds us that the computerization of modern society was not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but was rather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.

Download or read book Women Work and Computerization written by A. Frances Grundy and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1997-05-20 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the submissions to the 6th International IFIP-TC 9/WG 9.1 Conference on Women, Work and Computerization WWC 97. The conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and users in the field of information technology. In this book the authors discuss how different areas of society are being transformed by computer technology, but with particular emphasis on changes in women's work and life and how these have come about. Such transformations include the transitions from women's traditional work to work based on modern technology; from communicating within personal communities to communicating within virtual communities; from traditional job gendering to new perspectives on "who does what".

Download or read book How Computers Work written by Nancy Dickmann and published by Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computers are everywhere. Even a smartphone is a mini computer. With digital technologies so prevalent in today's world, it's important for young learners to know how they work. This book introduces kids to the design and function of the hardware and networks that digitally connect us. Utilizing colorful infographics and simple language, this book discusses the history of the first computers, different types of computers, and the important parts that make a computer run. It makes learning about computers easy for young readers, and it will inspire your budding engineers.

Download or read book Your Computer Is on Fire written by Thomas S. Mullaney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.

Download or read book A People s History of Computing in the United States written by Joy Lisi Rankin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.

Download or read book Stuck in the Shallow End updated edition written by Jane Margolis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why so few African American and Latino/a students study computer science: updated edition of a book that reveals the dynamics of inequality in American schools. The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study and profession. In Stuck in the Shallow End, Jane Margolis and coauthors look at the daily experiences of students and teachers in three Los Angeles public high schools: an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school, and a well-funded school in an affluent neighborhood. They find an insidious “virtual segregation” that maintains inequality. The race gap in computer science, Margolis discovers, is one example of the way students of color are denied a wide range of occupational and educational futures. Stuck in the Shallow End is a story of how inequality is reproduced in America—and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change the system. Since the 2008 publication of Stuck in the Shallow End, the book has found an eager audience among teachers, school administrators, and academics. This updated edition offers a new preface detailing the progress in making computer science accessible to all, a new postscript, and discussion questions (coauthored by Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode).

Download or read book Women Work and Computerization written by Ellen Balka and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ELLENBALKA Simon Fraser University ebalka@Sfu. ca 1. INTRODUCTION In developing the call for papers for the 7th International Federation of Information Processors (IFIP) Women, Work and Computerization Conference, we sought to cast our net widely. We wanted to encourage presenters to think broadly about women, work and computerization. Towards this end, the programme committee developed a call for papers that, in its final form, requested paper submissions around four related themes. These are (1) Setting the Course: Taking Stock of Where We Are and Where We're Going; (2) Charting Undiscovered Terrain: Creating Models, Tools and Theories; (3) Navigating the Unknown: Sex, Time, Space and Place, and (4) Taking the Helm: Education and Pedagogy. Our overall conference theme, 'Charting a Course to the Future' was inspired in part by Vancouver's geography, which is both coastal and mountainous. As such, navigation plays an important part in the lives of many as we seek to enjoy our environs. In addition, as the first Women, Work and Computerization conference of the new millennium, we hoped to encourage the broad community of scholars that has made past Women, Work and Computerization conferences a success to actively engage in imagining--and working towards-- a better future for women in relation to computers. The contributions to this volume are both a reflection of the hard work undertaken by many to improve the situation of women in relation to computerization, and a testament to how much work is yet to be done.

Download or read book Life in Code written by Ellen Ullman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

Download or read book The Only Woman in the Room written by Eileen Pollack and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in STEM fields—“beautifully written and full of important insights” (Washington Post). In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer’s institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.