Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing by Mar Hicks

Author:Mar Hicks [Hicks, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: employment; Great Britain; sex discrimination; feminism; technocracy; computer science
ISBN: 9780262035545
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The Rise of the Technocrat: How State Attempts to Centralize Power through Computing Went Astray, 1965–1969

Although growing computerization created an exciting and lucrative environment from the perspective of computer workers in the 1960s, the view from above was different. The fruits of Labour’s white hot technological revolution remained economically uncertain and difficult to quantify. First, vastly increased efficiency was not indicated by the government’s manpower studies on its own computing systems, but vast outlays on computing hardware and software continued apace.1 Second, growing labor problems plagued the government. Its installations required an ever-increasing number of skilled computer workers, but in a field with hazy qualifications and no set career path, hiring and retention on the scale needed was becoming difficult. Third, the British computing industry required ever-increasing injections of government funding to stay competitive, in the form of grants, loans, and preferential government purchasing policies for computers used in Civil Service offices and the nationalized industries.

This trifecta of computing problems played out against the backdrop of a protracted economic crisis during the mid- to late 1960s. Britain’s gross national product had increased only slowly from the 1950s on, far outpaced by the growth of the economies of its continental rivals. As former colonies and Commonwealth trading partners increasingly turned to the United States, Britain’s balance of payments suffered. Attempts to reverse the poor trading situation through technological modernization geared to increase production for both domestic and export markets could not produce a quick or dramatic enough change in Britain’s economic outlook, and by the summer of 1965 the economic crisis had sharpened enough to require a government pay freeze and an expenditure reduction policy that necessitated, among other measures, deferring computer purchases—unless they effected major reductions in Civil Service labor costs.2

In November 1967, the pound had to be devalued against the dollar for the second time in under two decades, a move that failed to quell inflation or give British exports the necessary boost.3 The next year, in a scathing report on government inadequacies, the Fulton Committee took the Civil Service’s sprawling bureaucracy to task for amateurism, secrecy, classism, poor management, and wrongheaded organizational practices. In the midst of a nationwide modernization drive, the committee condemned the government’s own infrastructure for being mired in the past, emphasizing the need for more technically minded governance.4

An increasingly dissatisfied British labor force, stung by the economic situation, remained unconvinced by Wilson’s reassurances that the “pound in their pockets” remained sound. In addition, the Britain of the “swinging sixties” and early seventies was rife with sexual and racial discrimination, exacerbating the difficulties many workers faced as the nation was buffeted by economic problems.5 Workers took both official and unofficial measures to try to secure the ever-improving standards of living promised by Labour’s modernization program, and industrial action became increasingly common. Computer workers, despite being the vanguard of Britain’s new high-technology economy, were no exception. International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), the company heavily favored for government data-processing installations (the majority of government computers were ICT)

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