Connecting Gender, Women and ICT in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective

Abstract

Cross-analysing the problem of ICT with women and gender’s roles on a long-term perspective, as this collective book aspires to do, may seem challenging. As described in some pioneering historical works, the very notion of computing as a construct calls for a nuanced understanding. Great care is required to avoid amalgams that could introduce an artificial continuity that has no evidentiary basis between human computers, keypunch operators or today’s women labourers in computing (with all the diversity within the milieus of industry, public and private research, education, etc.). Therefore, creating a dialogue that includes diverse ICTs, diverse contexts and various European countries may make this all the more difficult. But the choice to embrace multiplicity seemed relevant from several angles that are discussed in this introductory chapter.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Les Petites Filles modèles Ne jouent plus à la poupée Ne jouent plus à la marelle A la corde à chat perché Branchées grâce au Minitel Sur le marché financier Les Petites Filles modèles S’amusent à boursicoter C’est à ce jeu qu’elles excellent Fruit de la modernité Ah la belle ah la belle ah la belle société (…) Jean Ferrat (1991)

Good Little Girls Do not play with dolls Do not play hopscotch Or tag or ball Connected through the Minitel To the stock market Good Little Girls Play at investing At this game they excel This fruit of modernity Oh high oh high oh high society […] Jean Ferrat (1991) a

1. ^aTranslation by L. Kraftowitz

In his book Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing , Tom Misa describes how the computing industry’s initial trend of increasing female participation¹ was followed by its net reversal, an unprecedented event in labour history.² The field of computing, which seemed ‘woman friendly’ according to Lois Mandel ’s 1967 description in Cosmopolitan,³ witnessed a unique reversal as it lost its female members over the last twenty years. The ACM-W began worrying about this phenomenon and exploring its causes, from pipeline shrinkage to media representation, as early as 2002, in its report, ‘An ACM-W Literature Review on Women in Computing’.⁴

The general public in turn discovers this little-known history, which disrupts the historical canon that carved out a place for men while consigning women to oblivion.⁵ The British series The Bletchley Circle depicted women in Bletchley Park during the Second World War who, though overshadowed by Alan Turing, made contributions to the counterintelligence operations of the British computer centre.⁶ The same can be seen in the recent Imitation Game with Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Joan Clarke , who serves as a foil in the romanticised story of Bletchley Park, but still draws attention to the historical figure’s true role as a talented cryptanalyst.

Social networks also demonstrate these trends. One example is the success of the Twitter hashtag #FeministHackerBarbie that called for a détournement of the Barbie book I Can Be a Computer Engineer, thanks to Kathleen Tuite’s initiative. This independent computer programmer based near Santa Cruz created a website⁷ where people could ‘hack’ the original book and express their creativity, humour and also anger against the stereotypes that were developed in the ‘official book’. ‘In the past few days, her Feminist Hacker Barbie has blossomed into a full-blown and extremely funny Internet meme with thousands of captions’.⁸

These examples echo historians’ efforts to reverse women’s under-representation⁹ and recent decades of invisibility, however, without placing them into a compensatory history, as Janet Abbate, following Charlotte Bunch and Mary Hunt, warns against.¹⁰ Other fields such as educational studies also try to modify representations of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, like the figures of the nerd and the geek that gradually served to conflate the image of the programmer with that of men.¹¹

Despite the ostensible self-evidence of such a remark, it is worth remembering that the interest in women’s role in computing – e.g. the publication of Gender Codes ¹² and Recoding Gender ¹³ – was only recently made possible by the development of research in computing history, a recent field that draws on the dynamic of a growing international community and of gender studies. In recent years, these rapprochements have generated fruitful cross-analyses, like Jennifer S. Light’s article on the ENIAC Girls in Gender & Technology.¹⁴

The interest in women’s role in computing on both sides of the Atlantic coincides with similar interest from other disciplines, particularly the Information and Communication Sciences and Education Sciences,¹⁵ as well as with a general interest in ICTs as seen in numerous French academic special issues, like ‘Le sexe du téléphone’ (Phone sex), in Réseaux (2000); ‘Une communication sexuée’ (A sexual communication), published in 2003 in the same journal; ‘TIC et genre’ (Gender and ICT ), published in TIC&Société in 2011; and ‘Recherches au féminin en Sciences de l’information et de la communication’ (Research on the feminine in the information and communication sciences), published in 2014 in the Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (French Review of Information and Communication Sciences).

Cross-analysing the problem of ICT with women’s roles, as this work aspires to do, may seem challenging. As described in the works of Tom Misa, Tom Haigh or Nathan Ensmenger, the very notion of computing as a construct requires a nuanced understanding. Indeed, computing is not homogeneous but encompasses multiple realities, as Thomas Haigh points out in the article ‘Masculinity and the Machine Man’:

First, computing is not a single kind of work but a collection of hugely diverse jobs across many industries […]. The rhetoric of computing as a single profession first surfaced in the 1960s. […] We should follow the advice of the late Mike Mahoney to look ‘at histories of computing (s)’ rather than a single ‘history of computing’. Thinking of computing as a single area of activity makes it hard to understand why women were inventing programming in the 1940s but made up only a small proportion of the corporate computing workforce a decade later. This situation looks very different if we conceptualize programming as a task carried out in many different social contexts, or in Mahoney’s terms, in multiple Computing each with its own history. Why would we expect the accountant in charge of an insurance company’s project to staff its electronic data processing department in the mid-1950s to be guided by the fact that participants in the experimental military academic ENIAC project believed female mathematicians to have an aptitude for translating mathematical methods into switch and wire configurations?.¹⁶

While the successive generations of ICT have overlapped and hybridised, the history of women and that of gender are certainly not synonymous, and the notion of Europe has also considerably evolved from the end of the nineteenth century until today, inviting consideration of their complex and changing relationships.

1.1 From the Telegraph to Phone Lines to Online Networks: Women Connecting Through Heterogeneity

This book meets the challenge of heterogeneity by bringing together eight various cases, as much by their approaches, methods and sources as by their results, that shed light on the relationship of gender, women and ICT in Europe from a long-term diachronic perspective.

1.1.1 Framing ICT

It is difficult to pin down the number of jobs emerging directly and strictly from the sectors of computing or more broadly of ICT today. But the inclusion of professional activities that more broadly inform women’s investment in ICT seems to in turn shed light on their investment in computing. In this, we follow Kristina Haralanova’s conclusion in her master’s thesis, ‘L’apport des femmes dans le développement du logiciel libre’ (Women’s contribution to open source software development), defended at the University of Quebec at Montreal in 2010:

We find that women perform many activities in and for open source coding. These activities are not related to programming source code but are considered peripheral to programming. On the other hand, while some women are active in open source software communities, others are virtually absent from these appropriation and development groups, placing themselves principally within communities unassociated with open source software . In our study, female participants represent the key persons integrating software within a community because of the activities they undertake, like awareness-raising among decision makers to migrate to open source […].

• female participants carry out activities that are not viewed as contributions because they do not directly impact coding (e.g. its promotion and the organisation of workshops and trainings on open source advocacy);

• they work in spaces that are invisible to the open source community (their primary role being to provide open source to others).

Finally, we wish to conclude with the proposition that the more we consider open source as a social movement not limited to a technical project, the more visible women will be.¹⁷

The question of women’s long-term invisibility and place in the periphery of the information sector deserves a historical analysis. From the telegraph to the social networks , while there are issues relevant to women and technology in terms of use, representation and professionalisation, not all the various technologies are necessarily linked by continuities. So what is the common thread between the demoiselles du téléphone and twentieth-century programmers ?

In Alexie Geers’ analysis of Marie Claire magazine and ‘feminine’ blogs , comparing these two forms of expression geared primarily towards women, significant differences arise, reflecting the change of medium from paper to digital, as well as the changing nature of the producer and receiver of information. Blogs’ thematic aggregation of common topics, or the creation of reading lists using hypertext to invite a potentially more fragmented or circuitous reading style, need not obscure the fact that many women’s magazines , like any form of writing, may also allow for widely varying readings.¹⁸ Nevertheless, there is a fundamental, structural and organisational shift between the two mediums and their structures of authorship, access and readership. But we may also find common codes and approaches, like recurring themes, a voluntarily gendered content and ‘female complicity’ between columnists and readers.

Women’s magazines¹⁹ and blogs provoke questions that are at once common and specific, and we might cite similar contradictions with the telephone , television and computers, three technologies that are also evoked in this collection. What are the commonalities between the demoiselles du téléphone working in France during the telecommunications state monopoly in the early twentieth century, as explored by Dominique Pinsolle; the Spanish free radio that fed the climate of freedom during the post-Franco period, as analysed by José Emilio Pérez Martínez; and the progressive approach to computerisation adopted by British, Danish and French policymakers in the second half of the twentieth century, as Chantal Morley and Martina McDonnell explore?

Indeed, technology distributors and consumers are not comparable. Between an exclusive and elite object like the telephone in the first half of the twentieth century in France , the widespread distribution of public radio in Spain in the 1980s and the evolution of computing from mainframe to mini- to microcomputers over a relatively short period, technology users, like the contexts in which they operate, vary greatly.

But connecting these technologies is not purely rhetorical if we seek a long-term understanding of the relationship between gender and technology . As Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert show in their chapter comparing German and French children’s magazines , these magazines assign artefacts and uses of different ICTs to illustrate the relationship to information and communication of preteen boys and girls, from listening to music to phone conversations. This relationship does not relate to a single technology but is located at the convergence of multiple sectors, including the mobile phone and the MP3 player.

Connecting the telegraph , the telephone and low-status labour in the computing field does not seem like such a stretch if we cross-analyse the primarily female-held occupations within those sectors, like telephone switchboard operators, punchcard operators and other repetitive functions that are considered menial. Women’s position in communication tool production seems to be characterised by a placement on the periphery of power and decision-making, with few notable exceptions. Women hold a more central role in consumption. Dominique Pinsolle’s description of the conflict between a famous actress and the demoiselles du téléphone illustrates the ambiguity of feminine subordination within networking and communications: the female early adopter versus the unskilled female labourer and the wealthy female consumer versus the young woman of modest background. Social roles diagonalise gender relationships without ever truly questioning them.

Of course, not all information and communication technologies are represented in this collection. It would certainly have been interesting to include an analysis of women’s place in television’s landscape and its construction. Their role in television ’s entry into the domestic space, particularly in France , as Claire Blandin highlighted for our conference, and the production of programmes ‘specifically catering to female viewers’, resulting in the soap genre first developed on the radio , would certainly have provided additional paths of analysis. That being said, television is widely studied (see, e.g. the work of the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University), and it gave us a useful theoretical framework and set of ‘confirmation data’ for our working hypotheses on some less developed fields explored here.

In the same vein, video games might also have had a place in this reflection, especially since they are strongly represented in gender studies (see, e.g. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat  ²⁰; and the works of Fanny Lignon, Jessica Soler-Benonie and many others), and gendered boundaries are sometimes pushed to the edge, nourishing fierce controversies like #gamergate, as noted by Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft.

Resolutely programmatic and conceived as an invitation to dialogue, this book intends to open spaces for discussion around the fields of communication and the spaces occupied by women, the feminine and gender, without pretence of exhausting the topic. It seeks less to set boundaries than to map out new areas for collective exploration. Thus, the role of gender and women in early online exchanges, beyond women’s participation in the Internet and Web history, suggests promising material for historical study. In effect, entire sections of contemporary communications culture regarding women’s relationship with technology , with communities of users, uses and popular culture, remain in the shadows and are almost virgin territory for historians.

To mention only one, consider the role of gender and women in telematics , which has not yet received extensive historical study despite the systematic use of women in sales strategies over the 1980s and 1990s. One must only recall the naked women plastered on every wall in France promoting the famous ‘messageries roses’ like Ulla and Aline – chat rooms that sometimes employed behind the screen men pretending to be women so as to keep their male clients online and paying for the connection time as long as possible.²¹ On the Minitel already, ‘nobody knows you’re a dog’! Here was ‘gender trouble’ in the era of the first public networks .

The Minitel became a catalyst for the expression of multiple identities and desires and deeply influenced popular culture. Pop songs featured female protagonists that one could hope to encounter there. From Jean Ferrat’s Les petites filles Modèles (Good Little Girls) to Noë Willer and to Michel Polnareff’s Goodbye Marylou in 1990, they were the widely sung objects of desire:

‘Et j’ai branché mon minitel J’ai choisi le bon code d’accès Style rendez-vous très personnel J’ai commencé à dialoguer {Refrain:} Et je t’appelle sur minitel Mais où est-elle sur minitel ?’ Noë Willer, Sur Minitel , 1986

‘And I plugged in my minitel I chose the correct access code Like I had a personal rendezvous I started to speak {Refrain:} And I call you on the minitel But where is she on the minitel?’ Noë Willer, On Minitel , 1986

‘Quand l’écran s’allume, je tape sur mon clavier Tous les mots sans voix qu’on se dit avec les doigts Et j’envoie dans la nuit Un message pour celle qui Me répondra OK pour un rendez-vous […]’. Michel Polnareff, Goodbye Marylou, 1990

‘When the screen lights up, I type on my keyboard All the voiceless words that one says with fingers And I send in the night A message for she who Will respond OK for a rendezvous […]’. Michel Polnareff, Goodbye Marylou, 1990

These examples invite deepened reflection on female representations in popular culture, for example, in comic strips , as Sylvie Allouche examined during our 2014 symposium in her study of Yoko Tsuno, a character that holds her own alongside television characters like Abby Sciuto (NCIS), Angela (Bones), Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds), the multitalented investigator Kalinda Sharma (The Good Wife) or the fascinating Lisbeth Salander in the thriller trilogy Millennium.

Considering the case of the Minitel also encourages us to revisit domestic uses of this technology . As Jacques Perriault recalled during a workshop held on 28 June 2012 (the day before Transpac and the Télétel services closed) at the Institut des Sciences de la Communication (CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC), women knitted decorative doilies to protect the device or place beneath that little beige box in 1980s design that was a symbol of modernity²² and perhaps to ensure the positive introduction of this new technology into the home.

Of course, the early explosion of online services also raises questions about the female use of the Minitel . Josianne Jouët, a French sociologist who studied the use of telematics and early ‘family microcomputers’, recalls that from the first Minitel experiments of the early 1980s, it took ten years for the gap between male and female use rates to disappear.²³

[…] Overall, women began to distance themselves from Télétel, saying they got little or no use from it at first, then less and less. […] In a competitive environment where correctly using Télétel is considered a demonstration of knowledge and competence, and the relationship to the machine can be a way of judging others, many women tend to devalue their own use by stating that others use it better than they do.²⁴

In terms of female use, chat rooms dedicated to erotic encounters and exchanges have also been analysed by Josianne Jouët, who emphasised not only the ways in which some women have been able to turn them into tools of liberation, but also the point that women’s relationship to technology cannot ignore in parallel the question of masculinity:

In the post-68 era where some men felt a little destabilised by the advances in women’s equality in society and by an ambient critique of machismo, they could, in many chat rooms, behave ‘male’, as ‘guys’. And it became even more important for them that they greatly outnumbered women: in the messageries roses, the woman then became a rare and high-value figure who was courted by several men, who in turn were to confirm themselves as ‘pouvant assurer’ (able to perform well). For women, the Minitel rose was liberating because in contrast to a traditional romantic encounter, where the woman had to wait for the man to take the lead and the opposite would have been unseemly, on chat they could flirt with impunity. But in parallel, many women, including those flirting, presented themselves as sex objects on the Minitel: they took on all the traditional attributes of femininity, playing on their charm and calling for “viril” men. In short, we returned to the traditional canon of feminine and masculine seduction.²⁵

1.1.2 Entwining Temporalities

The long stretch of time covered in this book allows for the linkage of major technical systems over more than a century, e.g. the telegraph and the Web , which nevertheless share in common the attributes of immediacy and ubiquity while also manifesting the different stages of trade globalisation despite various technical, political, cultural, economic and social contexts.

In effect, these temporalities should also be entwined with societal rhythms, and it is not useful to spend too long here discussing the point to which women’s access to employment, their return to work after marriage or childbirth, notions of youth developed by Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert, gendered relationships, consumption and purchasing power, communication practices, etc., have evolved.

Comparing in Chap. 4 the readers of Marie Claire in the 1940s to today’s bloggers, Alexie Geers lays out dramatic changes in women’s relationship to media and ICT , as well as to their body, sexuality and motherhood. She shows how women on the Web express themselves publicly about gynaecological and other intimate aspects of life, thereby allowing topics that had little exposure just a few decades ago, although women already discussed them in small private circles.

Dominique Pinsolle’s study of telephony in the beginning of the twentieth century allows us to take stock of the changes that occurred over its course. Comtesse de Pange ’s vivid description in her memoir Comment j’ai vu 1900 (How I saw 1900) puts our current hyperconnected state in striking contrast:

It’s hard to say what year we installed the phone at the house. I believe it was around 1896 or 1898. My parents made this sacrifice in the spirit of modernity in large part to remedy the remoteness and solitude of my sister who since her marriage to the Marquis de Luppé had lived in a beautiful mansion between a courtyard and a garden, solemn and sad at the end of the Rue Barbet de Jouy. We pitied her […]. The device was placed in our home in a sitting room. It was made of rosewood and nailed to the wall. Its shape somewhat resembled the little toilet paper dispensers in the bathroom. Two speakers hung from hooks on each side and in the centre was a button you could press to connect with the central station. The ringing was shrill and could be heard throughout the house. But we did not run to the telephone . A servant was assigned to this task, picked up the earpiece, inquired what was wanted and went off to find the requested person.²⁶

These technical, societal, political and economic temporalities should be considered when discussing a specific context. As noted by Simone Müller, starting out as a relatively gender-neutral form of employment, the position of telegraph clerk became gendered over the course of the late nineteenth century. The gendering of clerical positions changed yet again with the First World War and the shortage of male labour. The importance of the temporalities and contexts is also obvious in José Emilio Pérez Martínez’s study on the free radio in the post-Franco period. Another is the diverse histories of computerisation across European countries, as described in Hacking Europe ²⁷ or in Chantal Morley and Martina Mc Donnell’s chapter. Such diversity makes a comprehensive, unified European analysis challenging.

Relations between European countries have also evolved. Certainly, universalising goals, idea transfers and circulation and cross-border information sharing were initiated early, for example, with documentation sharing technology . Women’s contributions to the Mundaneum initiative developed by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine are particularly relevant here.²⁸ Alec Badenoch’s work and the Women’s Radio in Europe Network (WREN) researches tell of female (and sometimes feminist ) radio networks , as well as early transnational ICT cooperation, which has become transnational networks.²⁹ More generally, research on European technology by Ruth Oldenziel and Mikael Hård (2013),³⁰ Fickers et al. (2008),³¹ Gerard Alberts et al. (2008)³² and Frank Schipper and Johan Schot (2011),³³ while not all dealing with gender and women, illustrates beyond national specificities the importance of transnational issues, calling for European cross-analysis.

1.1.3 Mapping Europe

There is no more unity in the rate of ICT adoption across Europe than there exists a single political or organisational rule across the continent for addressing technological challenges. Diversity seems to be the rule. Thus, if we examine only the speed of technology penetration in companies and market rates, Europe proves to be a land of contrasts.³⁴

Corinna Schlombs notes that unlike the United States , where punchcard operator was a female profession, one thing in common with some European countries, in Germany this was not the case:

In Germany , for example, Hollerith machines were located in separate rooms that were extremely noisy and dominated by heavy industry […]. In such an environment, tabulating rooms became male-dominated technical dungeons, and punch-card operations turned into a male-only profession. A German insurance manager noted with evident surprise during a visit to the United States in the 1950s that women operated punch-card machines there.³⁵

Nor is there uniformity in the media , as Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert show in their comparison of French and German preteen magazines .

We must therefore think of Europe as lacking generalisability. Eastern Europe during the Soviet era encountered different challenges than its Western neighbours in computer science,³⁶ even if the exchanges between the two regions are not to be underestimated, as Larissa Zakarova has shown (2010, 2012).³⁷ Some questions remain specific. At the LabEx EHNE ‘Women, Gender and ICT ’ (WGICT) symposium, Ioana Cîrstocea described the Network of East-West Women (NEWW) created by a group of New York feminist activists to meet their ‘Eastern European sisters’ at the end of the Cold War and their 1994 launch of the ‘On-Line Project’ to supply them with equipment and Internet training. Karine Bergès evoked contemporary feminist uses of ICT by Spain ’s pro-choice movement’s efforts to impact policy in 2013. However, beyond the societal and religious characteristics of the Spanish context, Karine Bergès described how the movement transcended borders with the #Alertafeminista hashtag, posting photos posing with hangers or knitting needles, symbols of illegal abortions, alongside the message ‘Nunca Mas’ or ‘Never Again’.

Despite these challenges from Spain to Scandinavia , across France and various socio-technical fields, the authors present a first mapping of gendered relations that open new perspectives to consider the relationships between Europeans and technology .

1.1.4 Crossing Issues

To Europe ’s complexity is added that of gender and women. As Janet Abbate articulates in her introduction to Recoding Gender, ‘The second pitfall is to equate studying gender with studying women, as if men and masculine culture were gender neutral’.³⁸

Some of the chapters here focus on ICT female actors as collective figures. Certainly some individual historical figures emerge, like Hedy Lamarr , an Austrian actress and inventor who succeeded to invent an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping presented by Nicola Hille at the WGICT conference, or Mary Agnes Hamilton , a distinguished intellectual and British radio personality who hosted the BBC’s The Week in Westminster starting in 1929, a political programme intended for a female audience, as Audrey Vedel Bonnéry discussed at the LabEx EHNE symposium. But our authors focus primarily on the collective group. Groups include the women workers at the Rothamsted Statistics Department, women using, investing in or working for the telegraph network, the ‘computer girls’ and others. These groups’ collective stories are cross-analysed with individual examples, like that of Brenda Watler and Vera Wiltsher in Giuditta Parolini’s chapter, or with remarkable life stories like that of Dina Vaughan and Stephanie Shirley ,³⁹ as Chantal Morley and Martina McDonnell remind us. The feminine trumps the female in this historical framework that, without laying claim to completeness, strives to achieve a comprehensive and thus a collective approach.

The second axis of the book is a reflection on gendered representations of ICT actors and audiences and their evolutions. Through preteen magazines Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert show how these media can either be vectors of gender construction⁴⁰ or subvert representations through the use of fiction. It’s a reminder that while the media can be a purveyor of stereotypes, it can also project a discourse of empowerment, and that it contains interstitial spaces where minority representation finds expression. Still, empowering discourse may also contain a certain amount of ambiguity, as demonstrated in the case of the ladybirds: ‘As Corn (1979)⁴¹ masterfully shows, ladybirds were deliberately used by airplane manufacturers, salesmen, and flight schools to shame men into flying with the explicit message: If she can do it, flying must be easy and safe; these ships are so durable, almost any pilot (even the flightiest!) will do’, Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft remind us in their chapter.

Our sensitivity to the issue of ‘technological democracy’ and stakeholders born in the Resendem project directed by Pascal Griset⁴² led us to bring a close gaze to the groups involved in ICT that are traversed by questions of gender. While this axis and the others could each merit their own book, they do inform several papers. Dominique Pinsolle’s work shows how, in the conflict between Ms. Sylviac and the demoiselles du téléphone , each party is exploited by consumers’ and labourers’ associations. Simone Müller reminds us that the Society of Civil Engineers applied strict gender directives at the end of the nineteenth century. Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft’s research on the role of professional associations for ICT Practitioners and Commercial Aviators and Martina McDonnell and Chantal Morley’s exploration of the phenomenon of old boys’ clubs in Finland as taken up by Vehviläinen (1997, 1999)⁴³ shed light on the ambiguous role of professional associations and mediating groups that can negatively impact women’s ambition. But these associations’ role is not always discriminatory: Janet Abbate (2012)⁴⁴ recalls the 1974 election of Jean E. Sammet as the first female president of ACM, the 1984 election of Adele Goldberg as the first woman in the IEEE Computer Society, Martha Sloan as its first woman president and so on. Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft in their chapter also draw our attention to other forms of associations: ‘The social identities of occupations can stem from their demographic alignment with certain groups of people, known as physical or nominal association, and/or from their ideational or emblematic alignment with particular embodied identities, known as symbolic or ideological association.⁴⁵ Physical association involves actual or usual practitioners, whereas symbolic association entails figurative practitioners’.

Finally, this book addresses how ICTs produce new spaces for gender expression, e.g. the Hellocoton platform studied by Alexie Geers, and the way feminist movements find a platform in the Spanish free radio that aspires towards ‘giving voice to those who haven’t had the opportunity to appear in the media ’ in José Emilio Pérez Martínez’s chapter.

1.1.5 Diversifying Approaches, Sources and Scales

Distinct approaches and methodologies respond to these various if intermixed problems, depending on where they fall in social, economic, technical or cultural history, or if the subject falls within the rubrics of professionalisation, representations, media or/and computing .

Giuditta Parolini uses an approach based on the history of sciences and computing to address her topic, whereas Dominique Pinsolle anchors her approach in the history of media but also in the history of the telecommunications administration and the implicated groups. For their part, Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft work within the history of occupational identities , while Simone Müller uses a global approach to elucidate women’s role in the telegraph (2014) at the intersection of the history of technology , innovation, business and gender. Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert cross an analysis of gender and age imagery with ICT uses as a way of examining media-on-media discourse, in this case the discourse of ‘technologies of gender’ on other ‘technologies of gender’.

This diversity of approaches can also be seen in the sources, attesting to the wealth of possibilities that a historian has for examining the themes of gender and women: newspaper archives, archives of scientific research, institutional policies of national governments, oral histories, digital archives in the case of blogs or audio archives in the case of radio, etc.

This variety of sources and approaches also promotes diversity in the scale of research. We move from a British research centre specialising in agricultural research analysed by Giuditta Parolini to the national scale with Chantal Morley and Martina McDonnell, to some communities studied by Alexie Geers and José Emilio Pérez Martínez, to producers of information and representations in the work of Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert and to that of employees with Dominique Pinsolle and of female clerks and investors with Simone Müller. The figure of the receiver/consumer whose significance is discussed in the work of Margolis and Fisher (2001)⁴⁶ is also present, though not as acute. Finally, the approaches are at times national (Pinsolle), at others comparative (De Iulio and Dalibert, Morley and McDonnell). They reflect a diversity of historiographical approaches when it comes to thinking the European space. The potential remains to add wide transnational approaches and to work on an international approach that could include, for example, the study of international groups like the ACM-W and the Ad Hoc Committee for Women within Global Knowledge 97.

1.2 ConneXXions

The diverse contributions gathered for this book intersect several historiographical and epistemological fields and multiple methodologies. Those chapters nevertheless address the common question of the relationship between gender, women and technology and more broadly the theme of communications and the ‘revolutions’ it enables.⁴⁷ The chapters gradually connect, and multiple points of commonality can be identified.

1.2.1 ‘The Invisible Women’

The history of computing is marked by extraordinary women like Ada Lovelace , Grace Hooper , Margaret Hamilton , Frances Allen , Elizabeth Jake Feinler and Barbara Liskov . Beyond their exceptional careers and our society’s fascination with the trajectories of great innovators, it is also important to recognise the trajectories of less famous men and women in the field.

Anglo-Saxon research provided valuable insights on the relative and progressive invisibility of women in computing , a topic that weaves through this collection. Certainly, this phenomenon reaches across the Atlantic and into research institutions, as in the British case that Giuditta Parolini analyses here, focusing on the Rothamsted Statistics Department while drawing on Steven Shapin’s idea of ‘invisible technicians’, when she writes: ‘Gender was not the main element that contributed to the invisibility of the female assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department . It was the lack of authority⁴⁸ to preside over scientific work that relegated these women to invisibility’. Giuditta Parolini also applies Janet Abbate’s categories of labour and expertise and more broadly that of assistants and technicians in science.

We can connect her chapter and that of Chantal Morley and Martina McDonnell to Nathan Ensmenger’s observation about the ENIAC Girls , which pointed out that the ‘hierarchical distinctions and gender connotations it embodies – between ‘hard’ technical mastery and the ‘softer’, more social (and implicitly, of secondary importance) aspects of computer work – are applicable even in the earliest of electronic computing development projects’.⁴⁹

The way in which women are confined to tasks considered secondary and how they are seen as ‘low-cost, high-turnover, relatively unskilled workers’⁵⁰ is found in Simone Müller’s discussion of the telegraph analysing the female clerks. She notes that while women were used in domestic routes, female operators were not employed until the First World War on the ‘much more complicated’ ocean lines.

It is evident that a reflection on women’s invisibility must relate back to the framework of subaltern studies, as well as that of occupational identities , as in the research of Karen Lee Ashcraft (2013)⁵¹ and her chapter with Catherine Ashcraft in this book, not to mention the works on gender division in labour.⁵²

This invisibility constitutes a transversal link across many of our studies, especially since its counterpart, visibility, cannot be ignored, in the same way that a study of women’s role cannot be separated from that of men. In Dominique Pinsolle’s chapter, for example, Ms. Sylviac uses visibility to give weight to her position in her conflict with the French administration. Her supporters, for their part, immediately understand the value of media coverage of the conflict. Visibility also plays a role in the motivation of actors on the Spanish free radio to change the portrayal of women, as José Emilio Pérez Martínez notes:

Its clear objective was to denounce the “frustrations produced by the monotonous voice sounding every evening [referring to the pre-existing female oriented radio programmes]”. All the media have exploited women turning them into “a minor voice, a sweet and sensual sound”, presenting them as “a sexual icon, stimulating male desires and always ready to serve them”. These are the reasons why free radios are important as they allow to “listen to another kind of voice, non monotonous, non ritual, a voice that does not advertise, gives advice or talks about chastity”.

1.2.2 The Question of Collectives and Empowerment

Another theme explored in this book is that of the collective group. Some collectives, like the demoiselles du téléphone , are already well documented.⁵³ Others, like the ENIAC girls ,⁵⁴ typists and office workers⁵⁵ and gender patterns in the computerisation of the British civil service,⁵⁶ have been subject to extensive study. Several chapters explore professional groups and collective associations. Giuditta Parolini analyses the Rothamsted Statistics Department’s human computers and keypunch operators ; Chantal Morley and Martina McDonnell discuss IT associations, the French ‘engineering corps’ and the student groups studied by Isabelle Collet (2005)⁵⁷; Catherine Ashcraft and Karen Lee Ashcraft’s essay ‘Breaking the “Glass Slipper”: What Diversity Interventions Can Learn From the Historical Evolution of Occupational Identity in ICT and Commercial Aviation’ focuses on a diachronic construction and gendered perception of two sectors (commercial aviation and ICT) from ladybirds to airline pilots and from computer girls to computer boys. Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert examine representations of preadolescence, a category with its foundations in marketing as much as in culture. Beyond their significance to this study, all these cases show a historiographical tendency towards working around collectives, corresponding to the end of an internalist historiography centred on the machine or the lonely innovator, accounting instead for surrounding social dimensions. We are also far from a compensatory history, engaging fully in the idea that to understand the relationship between gender, women and ICT, we must go beyond studying the major figures and truly face the part of the iceberg that has been submerged by the ‘victors’.

The notion of empowerment also cuts across the contributions in this collection. It is made explicit in the work of José Emilio Pérez Martínez, since free radio became a tool for participation and struggle, and women’s emancipation and action was explicitly radio based. We find a less spectacular form of gender identity and vocabulary appropriation in the work of Alexie Geers, which describes the process of moving from a prescribed to an assumed gender identity in women’s blogs. We observe a desire to act economically, politically and socially in reading about female cable company’s shareholders and women entrepreneurs like Dina Vaughan and Stephanie Shirley , who opened their own businesses in the UK. Janet Abbate, on the other hand, showed how the motivations can vary among actors and must be analysed individually. She pointed out that Stephanie Shirley runs her entrepreneurial adventure ‘as a charity’, while on the contrary, Dina Vaughan leads hers as a businesswoman.⁵⁸

1.2.3 The ‘Hidden History’ of Women in Technology and the ‘Hidden History’ of Technology Through Women

In ‘Making Programming Masculine’, Nathan Ensmenger notes:

The focus of most of this literature has been, understandably enough, on what Judy Wajcman, among others, has called the “hidden history” of women in technology . The goal was to explore what the history of women in computing had to say about women- about their contributions, experiences and abilities.

This essay will address instead the flip side of this question: namely, what has the history of women in computing had to say about computing.⁵⁹

This approach is shared by several of our authors. As Giuditta Parolini notes in her conclusion: ‘To the historian’s gaze the female assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department cannot and should not remain invisible, unless we accept to perpetuate partial histories of the scientific enterprise that neglect the development of scientific practices in favour of theoretical achievements’. Dominique Pinsolle similarly uses the conflict between Miss Sylviac and the demoiselles du téléphone as much to show the history of women and their professionalisation as that of the telephone , since the case brings together questions of the telephone network management and the role of the phone user, who increasingly came to parallel a consumer.

By becoming a backdoor for allowing the exploration of socio-technological issues without using the usual routes, the figure of the woman becomes a new hermeneutics for objects that we may have presumed to know, revealing new facets.

This book’s different contributions also show how the media is at once a tool, vector and vehicle for the expression and construction of gender identity. Whether it regards the magazines studied by Dominique Pinsolle, Alexie Geers, Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert or the uses of the radio , the relationship to media, its function and role is ambiguous and ever changing.

Of course, other media could have been called upon as well. Isabelle Collet’s work (2006, 2011)⁶⁰ in particular provides an analysis on the construction of the figure of the geek and its impact. At the LabEx EHNE WGICT conference, Justine Marillonet presented a corpus of ISP advertisements, applying a semiotic analysis of representations and stereotypes of male–female relationships to the online world and noting that ‘For women, the time to make hours of calls at a reduced price and the ease of a visit from a qualified technician to install their modem; for men, finding their wives in a compromised position with that technician, or surfing almost naturally on every screen in the house without limit’. But she also demonstrated the subversion of some of these stereotypes through humour.

The role of advertising was highlighted by Mary Hicks (2010b)⁶¹ and Aristotle Tympas et al. in the case of Greece , based on a large corpus of 1500 advertisements, depicting women’s and men’s attitudes to computers and the relationship to computing those representations generated.⁶² We find a similar approach in Simona De Iulio and Marion Dalibert’s study, even if the target audience and technological objects differ. The point remains that, as William Vogel demonstrates in his paper ‘Shifting Attitudes: Women in Computing , 1965–1985’, media discourse evolves over time, but also with business trends: images, like politics, with regard to women’s recruitment that were generated by Burroughs differed profoundly from that of control data in the 1960s.

1.2.4 The Role of Professionalisation and Occupational Identities

As Wendy Gagen’s article ‘The Manly Telegrapher: The fashioning of a Gendered Company Culture in the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies’ (2013)⁶³ and Simone Müller’s chapter attest, the question of women’s role in ICT arises just as the first major telecommunications networks appear and runs along the course of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, the parallel in occupational identities that Catherine Ashcraft and Karen Lee Ashcraft show in the fields of aviation and ICT leads us to reflect more broadly on the relationships between women, technology and professionalism. While at first glance the two fields may appear unrelated, upon fuller inspection their diachronic cases are shown to be mutually relevant. We find the phenomenon of a profession’s masculinisation parallel to its institutionalisation, as Nathan Ensmenger also wrote:

Perhaps most significantly, professionalization requires segmentation and stratification. In order to elevate the overall status of their discipline, aspiring professionals had to distance themselves from those aspects of their work that were seen as low-status and routine. This work did not just disappear – it was just done by other people.⁶⁴

We also find in the Finnish case a tendency that Tom Haigh noted in ‘Masculinity and the Machine Man’ of professional associations like the Data Processing Management Association to voluntarily disassociate with the female professional world to enhance their professional status: ‘[…] the push to position business computing as men’s work occurred because of, not despite, the presence of women in the field’.⁶⁵ The phenomena of the glass ceiling and shrinking pipeline are common to many countries. But complete generalisation is impossible, as already shown by the seminal work edited by Canel et al. (2005).⁶⁶ For example, Janet Abbate has described how Stephanie Shirley ’s company tried to solve the problem of motherhood and the social status of mothers of young children in Britain by employing part-time mothers as work-from-home freelancers.⁶⁷ But this model was not as easily exported to Denmark, where childcare was more developed.

1.2.5 Gender/Technologies Co-construction and Intersectionality

Finally, we would like to emphasise that the approaches in this book are based on the idea of a co-construction of gender and ICT . Technology and gender are constantly conceived in interrelation, so as to understand how they form one another through language, cultural and historical processes, representations and discursive constructs,⁶⁸ as evidenced, for example, in Marion Dalibert and Simona De Iulio’s cross-analysis of ICTs, gender and youth. Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft remind us that occupational identity is defined as “an evolving, co-constructed answer to two questions revolved in relation to one another: ‘What is this line of work (e.g., accounting), and who does it (e.g., accountants)?’’’.⁶⁹

This interest in understanding the co-construction of gender and ICTs that runs through this book also leads us to consider forms of intersectionality and particularly questions of low-status jobs, ‘class conflict’ and social status. These are present, for example, in the conflict between Ms. Sylviac and the demoiselles du telephone and in Simone Müller’s chapter, analysing telegraphy at the intersection of gender and class. The status of science, of age, of power relationships and of expertise that pass through the scientific world are as much a presence here as gender.

It remains to be said that politics receives little explicit mention: it would be appropriate to understand why it is so little represented with regard to the economic, social, cultural and technological aspects under discussion. A few mentions of the telecommunications administration, of equal pay policies and of strategic investment in computer industry reflect the fact that the state is not completely absent from the regulation of gendered relations, but little analysis refers to it explicitly. Is this a sign of its peripheral and marginal action, of its indifference or its laissez-faire approach? Or more likely, does this reflect its tenuous but real presence, which occurs not only through ‘politics’ but also specific ‘policies’, like the diversity interventions in ICT professions evoked by Karen Lee Ashcraft and Catherine Ashcraft?

Delphine Gardey, to whom this work’s conclusion returns, underlines by referring to Hoskyns (2005)⁷⁰

the importance of wondering “how politically active is a space.” These are elements for analysis when the transition is made, for example, from the socio-technical infrastructure of the “pool” to that of the “open-plan office ” to the more recent “cybertariat”. Such issues as control, power, agency, empowerment and domination, seem to remain underrepresented in the investigation of the more contemporary forms of organization of the technical and cognitive space of information processing. However, one can hardly study these transformations without considering the distribution of agency and control among humans and non-humans, among social groups, among men and women, and local and outsourced workers

Such questions are further incentive to pursue cross-analytical research on gender, women and ICT on both sides of the Atlantic.