Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920-2020 by Elisabeth Griffith

Author:Elisabeth Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY

The ubiquity of computers in the workforce diminished the number of jobs on factory floors and in offices, laying off secretaries, bank tellers, grocery clerks, and retail workers. New jobs frequently came with variable, unpredictable schedules, which made childcare arrangements even more difficult. With the disappearance of manufacturing and the growth of service jobs, women’s participation in labor unions increased. Flight attendants, clerical workers, teachers, and nurses challenged the assumption that women could not be organized. Women union members lobbied for comparable pay, maternity leave, childcare, flextime, and affirmative action. With nearly 50% female members, the AFL–CIO established a women’s department. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized hospital staff, home care aides, nursing home workers, local and state government employees, janitors, security officers, and food services workers. Las Vegas became a base of labor feminism when multiethnic hotel maids turned the city’s Hotel and Culinary Workers into the largest union local in the country.85

Feminism and technology collided as women confronted bias in science and Silicon Valley. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2007, he symbolized the hoodie-wearing, garage band, male dominance of tech entrepreneurs. The AAUW reported that the number of female programmers declined from 35% in 1990 to 26% in 2013. The irony was that women had been the original human computers. In the 1840s, British mathematician Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace and Lord Byron’s daughter, helped engineer the first mechanical computer. Beginning in the eighteenth century, mathematically minded women were hired for computation, because they worked for less than men and tolerated the tedium of rigorous, repetitive calculations. In the nineteenth century, to economize, the Harvard Observatory employed only female computers, frequently their wives, daughters, and housemaids. Women calculated algorithms in astronomy, navigation, and surveying. During both world wars, they calculated artillery trajectories. Because the work was considered low status, African Americans, Jews, and polio survivors were also employed.86

Coding became another pink-collar, sex-segregated ghetto. Only recently has attention been paid to women like Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, among eighty Black women employed by NASA in the 1950s, the “Hidden Figures” of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book and a feature film. These mathematicians transferred their skills from computing with pencils to programming computers. The first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was programmed entirely by women working for the Army. Not one received credit.87 Women were not encouraged to pursue math and science. Those who made it to graduate schools in physics, astronomy, engineering, or technology found themselves in a small minority, rarely mentored, invited to co-author papers, or selected for fellowships.88

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