Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

Description

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.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

  • 2017-09-08
  • 259 pages
  • Paperback
  • MIT Press

Similar books

• 

  Family History Digital Libraries

  By William Sims Bainbridge

  One named Sara and Timberlake had 11 male workers, 1 female worker, and 4 children workers, so it might have employed the Minor family.

• 

  Foundation Dreamweaver MX

  By Craig Grannell, Jerome Turner, Matt Stephens

  So here's what we need to do to arrive at our layout: s Create the main table to hold all the page elements. s Deal with the navigation area which is ...

• 

  Cisco CCNA Certification, 2 Volume Set: Exam 200-301

  By Todd Lammle

  This inclusive, two-book set provides what you need to know to succeed on the new CCNA exam. The set includes Understanding Cisco Networking Technologies: Volume 1 and the CCNA Certification Study Guide: Volume 2.

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide: Exam N10-006

  By Todd Lammle

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide with Online Labs: N10-007 Exam

  By Todd Lammle, Jon Buhagiar

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate FastPass

  By Todd Lammle

  S The S reference point defines the point between the customer router and an ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.

• 

  Stranger in the Chat Room

  By Todd Hafer, Jedd Hafer

  A sequel to In the Chat Room With God finds a group of teens contacted by a mysterious and increasingly malevolent character who claims to know about their encounters with the Almighty and challenges their beliefs. Original.

• 

  Error Correction Coding: Mathematical Methods and Algorithms

  By Todd K. Moon

  M M−1∑ k=0 −∞ ∞ k=0 The average energy per signal E s ∫ can be related to the ... we will deal primarily with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), ...

• 

  Security+ Training Guide

  By Todd King

  ... to deal with most , but unfortunately not all , of these potential threats . ... The S / MIME standard implements encryption for message content using ...

• 

  CCDA: Cisco Certified Design Associate Study Guide: Exam 640-861

  By Todd Lammle, Andy Barkl

  S reference point The S reference point defines the reference point between ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.