British tech disaster

[supergee]

The cost of keeping women out [Logic]

Thanx to Metafilter

Comments

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

<3 your icon.

[sartorias]

No surprise, sigh.

[weofodthignen]

Interesting. Freelance Programmers apparently went on to become Xansa, but had to abandon preferential hiring of women after the anti-discrimination law forbade it, and was ultimately taken over. Yes, the notion that a woman should leave her job on getting married was pervasive; it happened with teachers of mine as late as the mid-70s, and my mother was apparently a bit unusual in leaving teaching on getting pregnant rather than on marrying (they needed the money), and returned to various forms of part-time teaching after all of us were in school; by that time it wasn't so absolute a social rule, but teaching may well have been in teh vanguard of acceptance of married women working.

One counter-story: my selective academic high school for girls had an alum who decided to go into computing in the early 60s instead of to college. She spoke to us at a career day 10-12 years later and was quite happy and considered the pay good, though she said there weren't many other women in the field. She worked for IBM, which was indeed very imperialist. Their building towered over one of the open-air District Line stations on my way to school. I think part of the story is that IBM ate the British computer industry for breakfast, and whatever the facts may have been, when I was in school (and considering going into computers, until Nuffield Science closed any science door for me) it seemed like a monopoly. It's quite plausible that IBM's way to conquest was paved by inept, sexist, classist British bureaucrats. But in considering its plausibility, I believe one should factor in the rapacity of American industry—the author mentions the Concorde in glowing terms, and, ahem, look what happened to that and to the British aerospace industry in general—and also that it is almost impossible to overstate the incompetence of British managers. Everybody with an ounce of ability was killed in the war, left in the Brain Drain, or was driven to suicide like Turing. Or, of course, couldn't be a manager because she was a she, but notice that "Steve" was an immigrant.

M