Luck and Labor Shortage: Gender Flux, Professionalization, and Growing Opportunities for Computer Workers, 1955

Computers would play the most important role in Labour’s vision for the future. While christening a new computer center at the English Electric factory, Wilson positioned the electronic computer as critical to national growth, likening its role to that of the steam engine in the industrial revolution.² That the industrial revolution had enabled British imperial endeavors was no coincidence: Skillful use, design, and sale of British computers, Wilson hoped, would turn the tide of Britain’s imperial contraction.³ Labour’s rhetoric implied that technological might would stand in for military might; after the dismantling of the British Empire under the previous two administrations, computers might be the tool to return Britain to the top of the global heap. Technology would once again function as a tool for colonization—in this case, a softer sort of economic and political colonization. Under Wilson, the Labour Party scored points by reviving the idea of British exceptionalism and appealing to national pride. If British computing could succeed at home and abroad, the country stood a good chance of riding the electronic paradigm shift back to superpower status, many believed.

However, even though the public image of computing heading into the 1960s presented it as a powerful tool, the reality was quite different. Most computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were little more than faster, electronic versions of punched card systems. Even as late as 1965, for instance, the popular ICT 1901 mainframe—perhaps Britain’s closest comparator to the IBM System/360—was described as being “especially designed for former punched card applications.”⁴ This evolution rather than revolution in hardware was mirrored in the labor for the systems. The machine grade workers who had run the government’s pre-electronic computing carried over into electronic systems. Computers and computer workers existed on two planes: first as cultural ideals that represented a new, modern, technological society, and second as actual artifacts and actors within a world that was changing less quickly than rhetoric might make it seem. The image and the reality of computing coexisted uneasily into the sixties, often coming into direct conflict with each other.

The existing drive for government efficiency through automation continued to gain steam, but the platform of technological revolution proclaimed as part of Labour’s effort to win power in 1964 was meant to be as much a social revolution as a narrowly technical one.⁵ “In science and industry we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players,” Wilson scoffed.⁶ A working-class success story, and firm believer in meritocracy, Wilson insisted that amateurish men catapulted to positions of high power owing to their class connections were crippling the nation’s ability to effectively modernize and compete. Computer technology, he felt, could become a new engine of meritocracy: It would undo these social patterns because only the most talented would be able to master it. Wilson believed that technology, carefully guided by government, would save the modern proletariat by creating a skill-based meritocracy: “Since technological progress left to the mechanism of private industry and private purpose can only mean high profits for a few, a high rate of employment for a few, and mass redundancy for many, if there had never been a case for socialism before, automation would have created it,” he reasoned.

Soon after becoming prime minister, Wilson set up a new Ministry of Technology to enact this vision of technosocial change. Dubbed MinTech for short, it was briefly headed by Frank Cousins, but the second minister of technology, Tony Benn, became its most memorable and dynamic leader. A true believer in Labour’s technosocial project, the young and dynamic Benn pursued Labour’s dream of national salvation through technological advance with mixed results.⁷ Wilson’s government institutionalized the concept of strong, centralized, top-down guidance for technology in industry through MinTech, which tried to control the shape and growth of all British computing. MinTech brokered computing company mergers and orchestrated large government loans and investments for the industry. It also attempted to direct computer purchasing, use, and labor policy in both private industry and the massive public sector, which included the national government, the nationalized industries, and the National Health Service.

By directing computing policy and leading by example through large installations of British computers, the government injected much-needed capital into British computing. It did so for the sake of a technological future in which British tools, machines, and techniques would hopefully once again have world-changing influence. Labour’s belief in the transformative power of computing would prove misplaced, however. Labour’s technological revolution was a bundle of contradictions, promising equality at home and hegemonic power abroad. These contradictions were mirrored in computer work in the 1960s. Computing was quickly becoming an exciting field and labor shortages were pulling both women and men into it, but it also was defined by the older models of office automation on which it was based and it was still shaped by the staffing and labor expectations for those jobs.

Britain’s technological revolution would be halting and ultimately unsucessful because it became a reconsolidation of traditional hierarchies—not a revolution at all. Complicated by faulty systems, labor shortages, and organizational growing pains, the era of White Heat extended British cultural and economic mores into a new high-technology future rather than breaking with the past. Labour’s utopian, socialist visions fell short, even by the party’s own standards, and Wilson’s government continued to shape computing policy around fundamentally old-fashioned social ideals. Under him the Civil Service continued to build its computing edifice around computer workers who embodied the government’s antimeritocratic hierarchies.

This chapter discusses these contradictions by comparing the perspectives of actual workers with the advertising discourses that determined how computing appeared to the government, the public, and managers in private industry. Although advertising and the popular press made computing look seamless and automatic, in reality the labor of many women, and soon men, impelled into early computing jobs was critical to the success of computer installations because they were not, in fact, automatic or well-functioning. As the sixties wore on, not only did these workers’ skills begin to be recognized, but they also stopped being low-cost labor. In an era when electronic machines still regularly “broke down,” most computers offered more speed but less stability than established electromechanical systems. Operators continued to be a critical human link in the data-processing chain—facilitators more than “human brakes”—and their labor allowed government and industry to take on ever more data-intensive projects. Although machines were still sold with the image of a low-skill, feminized staff, operator work was starting to become recognized as skilled. In the flux of the mid-1960s, actual and perceived computer labor shortages first helped women stay in the field, then eventually removed them from it, by inflating the status and pay for computer work out of the realm of “women’s work.” By juxtaposing the conflicting popular discourses of computing with the personal accounts of men and women who worked in early computing installations, it is possible to gain some sense of how the computing revolution simultaneously meant many different things to different people, and how the trajectory of the field tended toward reinstating older forms of labor hierarchy rather than upending them.

The Fiction of Full Automation

A survey by the London Times of computers installed in the United Kingdom between 1953 and 1960 discovered over £16.3 million worth of computer purchases, not including peripherals.⁸ At an average cost of just over £100,000 per computer, this put the number of new computer installations at more than one hundred for these years, or about ten new computing installations on average per year before the start of the 1960s. Computers were still being deployed only in small numbers heading into the heyday of the mainframe. By 1960, the government only had twenty-two electronic computers, but these numbers would pick up quickly. By 1963, computers in government numbered sixty-three and all together had cost close to £7 million, and by the end of the decade there would be well over two hundred mainframes in the central government, totaling over £36 million.⁹

These numbers, and a focus on hardware, obscure the nature of computer use during this period. Brought in to replace time-tested electromechanical systems, early business computers had little field testing. Throughout the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, systems were prone to failure. Presented to consumers and the public as “electronic brains” that worked with minimal human intervention, early computers were anything but self-actuating or fully automatic. Nevertheless, they were increasingly put to ever-greater use in offices to solve workflow problems in businesses and government. From the mid-1950s on, computers were purchased and installed for a variety of business uses rather than for the mathematical and scientific uses to which they had previously been put.¹⁰ The fault-riddled state of these systems helps reconstruct an image of the low-level, day-to-day, human control required for early computers to function, and it humanizes a labor force often taken for granted as a mass of interchangeable workers.

J. Lyons & Co., the British teashop and bakery conglomerate, was an unlikely but very successful computer pioneer, creating an in-house computing division first to solve its own nationwide inventory problems and later to market its machines and expertise throughout Britain, Britain’s former colonies, and Commonwealth countries.¹¹ Lyons was first in the field of applying electronic computing to business endeavors—not just in Britain, but globally—and was arguably the most successful company to use the new technology early on. Ironically, Lyons initially had to look to America after World War II for ideas on electronic computing. A fact-finding mission to the United States by several Lyons managers in 1947—several years after the secret destruction of most of the Colossus machines—sparked the project that would become LEO. However, it was ultimately the EDSAC project at Cambridge University that enabled LEO: Lyons bought and successfully adapted the plans for the EDSAC to its needs.¹²

Initially, Lyons applied electronic computing to the problem of a large, complex, nightly production and inventory cycle. The speed of an electronic machine was the only way to complete the daily task in the time allotted, especially as the company grew. After setting up a pool of “girls” at their London headquarters who telephoned shop manageresses throughout the nation at the end of each day, Lyons collected inventory data to feed to the LEO I so that each teashop could be shipped neither too much nor too little of its perishable bakery products each morning. Soon, Lyons also transferred seven thousand of its employee payroll accounts onto the new computer. This change, made in 1954, eliminated twenty-three clerical and accounting staff members who previously did the payroll with conventional accounting machines.

In the following months, thousands more Lyons employees had their pay transferred to the computerized system as it proved its reliability.¹³ However, even the apparently seamless work of the original LEO machine, engineered specifically for Lyons’s needs, belied an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes troubleshooting and maintenance. Operators worked literally around the clock to ensure that the inventory and payroll systems continued to function, with little chance for system downtime and maintenance. Stress levels ran high while operators tried to perform precise work with imperfect tools. Lucy Slater, an operator and programmer of the EDSAC computer upon which the LEO was based, remembered the recalcitrant machine overheating and catching on fire. Slater recalled that sometimes she would give the machine “a hearty kick” to get it working again—or at least to vent frustration.¹⁴ In addition to standard problems caused by programming or punching errors, there were often phantom errors that had to do with the machine’s robustness. Mary Coombs, an early LEO programmer, recalled one particularly maddening program fault that turned out not to be a program error at all: The machine was malfunctioning due to the proximity of an elevator whose workings interfered with the hardware’s state.¹⁵ Colin Hobson, a Lyons computer operator, likewise recalled that “the earliest machines were very temperamental ... Some of the early applications needed a lot of nursing.”¹⁶

Large retailers like the grocery chain Sainsbury’s and the pharmacy Boots, along with large banks and many insurance companies, also made efforts to computerize early on. Nationalized industries like British Rail, the dockyards, and numerous national and local government departments similarly led the way in installing business computers ranging in price from roughly £50,000 to £350,000 between 1955 and 1960.¹⁷ By comparison, the annual salary for an office employee in this period ranged from £300 to £1,500. Advantages of cost were by no means guaranteed. The first dedicated administrative computer for central government, an ICT 1201, was purchased for the Post Office in 1957 and installed in the fall of 1958.¹⁸ From this point on, more computers were installed rapidly within the government.

It was still usually an open question whether or not electronic machines would work as reliably as the electromechanical systems they replaced, much less result in dramatic increases in work speed or gains in productivity. Administrative systems had not yet reached a point of maturity and stability, and carefully engineered solutions to specific problems of workflow, like the LEO I, were the exceptions rather than the rule. In 1959, well into the era of computerized payroll, thousands of men went unpaid at the Rosyth dockyards due to a computer failure in which not one but two payroll computers “broke down” simultaneously.¹⁹ With no manual fallback system, the men paid for their trips home by drawing IOUs for train tickets. Many received meal vouchers to tide them over or received an advance on their next day’s pay in a haphazard fashion, being overpaid by as much as £10 as the payroll office struggled to portion out money until the machines could be brought online again. At a time when a normal yearly salary was between £500 and £1,000, being overpaid by £10 for one day’s work represented an enormous error.

Computer hardware itself was not solely to blame for all computing failures. Poor systems analysis and implementation often hindered effective use. In 1960, the large chain of pharmacies, Boots, installed an Emidec 1100 computer at its headquarters in Nottingham to handle inventory for over sixty thousand different products stocked by the company. In order to arrive at the “the transfer of orders from the shops to computor [sic],” the company undertook a pilot study lasting more than two years’ time. In part, this was because input needed to go through several steps in order to become part of the database. Instead of simply inputting the data directly, items had to be transferred by hand onto a special card using mark-sense lead, in a piecemeal fashion by nondedicated staff. The card was “then converted to a punch card by a mark-sensing punch and ... passed to the card reader.”²⁰ The enormous advance offered by the machine was hobbled by an uneconomic and poorly thought out implementation system. In the end, it was only utilized for the more common products stocked by the pharmacy. The outlay for the machine and its associated start-up costs were never recouped.

The physical infrastructure of midcentury office environments also added to the creakiness of the endeavor to modernize. Old buildings lacking air conditioning or even sufficient power made British industry almost inimical to computerization on a physical level. Vacuum tubes often broke in environments without temperature control. Punched card entry could fail due to moisture-warped cards or for other reasons. A spectacular failure at LEO during this period occurred “one very hot summer” when Colin Hobson and his staff of young men were working “stripped to the waist, with all the windows open.” At that point, “a plague of newly hatched black flies came in from the playing field opposite.” The flies “got everywhere and caused data failures when the card readers tried to read them,” recalled Hobson.²¹ More commonly, however, open windows were used to bring the computers themselves in. Many photos from the era show mainframes being brought in through upper-story windows by means of cranes in order to bypass the tight stairwells and hallways characteristic of many older buildings.

Proper electrical systems also could not be taken for granted, even in the offices of a business computing pioneer like Lyons. This created dangerous situations for both machines and staff. “Our chief operator was paralyzed from the waist down” and got around in a wheelchair, remembered Hobson. “He used to help himself along by grabbing the card punches on one side of the aisle and the card sorters on the other.” One day, he stood up, “for the first time in years.” Unfortunately, “it turned out that the punches and sorters were on different power supplies and the earth [ground] on one was faulty, catapulting him into the air.”²² Even though computing advertisements showed an idealized tableau in which computers were arranged in clean and spacious machine rooms, this sort of immaculate modern office was still very much in the minority. Internal computer company magazines talked about the spectacular lengths to which companies often went to shoehorn new computing systems into old and unsuitable buildings via added floor reinforcement and other tactics.²³

A government inquiry from 1946 to 1949—which resulted in the Gowers Committee Report on Health, Welfare, and Safety in Non-Industrial Employment—recognized these problems and extended the health and safety benefits of the Factory Acts to those in white-collar employment. In an increasingly postindustrial setting, labor laws had to struggle to keep up with the changes wrought by modernization.²⁴ Calling for sweeping updates in British office infrastructure, the Gowers Report resulted in the passage of bills throughout the 1950s that created higher standards of health and safety for office workplaces and mandated the creation of modern offices.²⁵ These advances, however, were slow in coming. Throughout the 1960s, a majority of employees and employers contended with far less than ideal building infrastructure. Even the health of office workers was not as robust as their industrial counterparts. Rates of illness and infection—particularly tuberculosis—were much higher in the crowded and often poorly heated and maintained buildings that populated highly polluted city centers.²⁶

During this period, the British computing industry’s public relations machine presented a very different image of the state of computing. Computer companies presented a sleek, automatic vision of the future designed to make labor recede into the background. A widely run advertisement for the Electronic Computer Exhibition and Business Computer Symposium of 1958 proclaimed that “management will be able to see the advanced stage reached in the application of electronic computers as a means of achieving greater productivity in office and factory.”²⁷ Throughout the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, the publicity and the reality of British business computing sharply diverged, but the industry sold machines on their ideal potential rather than their record of use.

Figure 3.1 An ICT 1301 mainframe is delivered to a local government office by means of a crane (left) showing the difficulty of setting up suitable machine rooms in existing offices. *ICT House Magazine*, no. 71, February 1965. By contrast, advertising images of the same machine showed spacious, futuristic settings (right). *ICT Magazine*, no. 9, September–October 1961.

Leading and Stumbling: Computers, Staff, and Government Bureaucracy

As the largest early adopter of computing technology in Britain, the government and nationalized industries played a major part in shaping the role of the administrative computer and its operators. The provisions put in place by the Beveridge Report for the expansion of government health and welfare services, in addition to the continually growing national bureaucracy, created ever more daunting data-processing tasks and a need for faster and more powerful electronic computers. The computers that businesses and government took advantage of fell into two general categories: either smaller or larger multipurpose mainframes. Between the two categories there was a major jump in price, with even “midrange” offerings falling into a much higher price range than small systems. Whereas smaller computers like the English Electric Deuce sold for around £50,000, midrange computer systems installed by the government and larger banks or insurance companies began pricing at triple that amount and could invoice for much more depending on their configuration and peripherals.²⁸ The Air Ministry, for instance, installed a £190,000 computer from EMI Electronics for its eighty thousand–employee payroll in 1959, and Lloyds Bank installed three IBMs in 1960 for around £350,000 to handle hundreds of thousands of customer account entries each week.²⁹

Even well into the 1960s, the government found that its systems often did not live up to the promises of manufacturers. A 1965 memo from the Treasury to the Central Computer Bureau (CCB) noted that “more than a year ago we replaced our troublesome ICT 1201 computer by a well-recommended second-hand 1202 machine but, regrettably, this has also turned out to give us an unacceptable performance.” Even though International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) “threw in clearly uneconomic [for ICT] maintenance resources to keep [the bureau] going,” the Central Computer Bureau, one of the largest government computing installations, could not get its ICT computers to work reliably and consistently. The solution to this problem, Treasury officials felt, was to purchase yet another ICT machine, at a discount—despite the company’s fairly damning “unsolicited admission of inability to satisfy.”³⁰ Even when the machines failed to work as expected, the government continually increased spending on computing, because its data processing was becoming ever more reliant on the speed offered by electronic systems. In addition, many top ministers favored ICT over other companies, hoping that it would grow into a British equivalent of IBM. The government’s purchasing was a way of investing in both the company’s future and the future of British computing while at the same time buying needed equipment.

Buying was not the only option, however. As a result of the high costs of ownership, many businesses and government agencies took advantage of so-called computer center or computer bureau services, like the ones run by LEO and Hollerith in London. These centers processed large datasets to help customers facing higher-than-average workloads that stretched beyond their own systems’ capabilities, and they sold time on computers operated and maintained within the computer manufacturer’s own offices for customers who did not have their own computers.³¹ Using a computer center’s services might allow a smaller business to escape having to purchase a mainframe, but for larger users computer centers served as a place to have overflow work performed and also often as training grounds for their own computer operators.

In 1966, the central government followed the model of these computer centers when setting up the Central Computer Bureau. Based in London’s Bunhill Row, the bureau reflected the computer center ideal of a central computing installation that ran jobs for many different users. The Central Computer Bureau took over from the earlier Combined Tabulating Installation, which had provided similar services using electromechanical machines. Nonetheless, consolidating government computing in one location and thereby lessening the need to rely on outside agencies or individual departmental computers never achieved as much success as the government hoped.³² Complete centralization of government computing, meant to save money and standardize procedures, could not keep up with the diverse needs of many different departments and users—much like computer bureau use could never be as flexible or responsive as having an in-house computing staff.

Prior to going electronic, the central government had employed a variety of electromechanical tabulating, sorting, and printing machines. The speeds attainable by these older systems, however, were expected to be inadequate for the needs of the growing national bureaucracy and its many centrally administered social services. The government now needed to keep track of the many different accounts and systems of payment required by the pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) system of employee taxation and government pension contribution instituted in 1948. In addition, other government-run systems of benefit payments—such as welfare, war injury, and disability payments—all but required the speed of new electronic systems. The modern welfare state was created by policy in an abstract sense and by technology in a literal sense.

The massive record keeping required by the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, the source of the largest computing installation in the country, handled the millions of entries for the recently instituted PAYE contribution system and for old age, welfare, disability, and war injury benefits. The ministry utilized a LEO II system for its own administration, but by 1960 it employed a more specialized Emidec 2400 for pension payment processing. The Emidec was capable of reading more than twenty thousand characters per second from magnetic tape, and it printed out over twenty million annual statements, reportedly working at the rate of nine hundred statements per minute.³³ For its first year of operation alone, it required an estimated 1,200 miles of magnetic tape—more than double the length of England—with two hundred characters recorded on every inch.³⁴

Emphasis on these figures and statistics, however, obscures the fact that for every few thousand characters, or every few feet of tape, there was an entire chain of labor that included programmers, operators, data input workers, and systems analysts. Added to that were the computer manufacturers and their staff, who provided the machines and trained government employees on the use of the new systems. Of these groups, operators and data input staff were the largest. Their numbers represented an overall increase of staff in many cases, rather than a reduction, when compared with the workers they replaced. But because the amount of work had increased, more work was being performed by fewer workers.

The 1960 yearly report from the Ministry of Pensions laid out the staff training underway to bring the Emidec 2400 system online. In its first year of operation, executive and clerical staff underwent close to 43,000 man-days of training (over one hundred man-years). The following year they spent 8,500 man-days more on training (or more than twenty man-years) over the previous year to become technically proficient with the new system. The 16 percent increase in staff training for the first year alone added to the significant outlay for the machine. Close to a thousand new clerical staff were recruited, seven hundred of whom were in the central office performing the start-up work and data input required to prepare the new system for use. These new recruits brought the total number of workers in the ministry to just over thirty-seven thousand people. Data input staff had the daunting inaugural task of preparing a master punched card for every one of the country’s millions of workers, pensioners, and welfare benefit recipients. Within the first year of the undertaking, only 5.5 million cards had been completed. In the pensioners category alone there were more than 5.5 million accounts.³⁵

The original electronic computing system employed to run the twenty-five thousand–member payroll for the Ministry’s own workers, a LEO II, had resulted in a net decrease in staff. It replaced a largely manual system in which about one hundred workers dealt with variations in data by hand before machine operating staff fed the material through conventional punched card machinery.³⁶ The LEO II removed the need for the hundred workers who computed variable factors like overtime, and it required fewer operators because it eliminated the need to pass punched cards through several machines several times during each run in order to arrive at the desired output.

The larger Emidec system, on the other hand, created an increase in staff. Rather than automating an older system already in place, it enabled the construction of a new system of payments and records. The Emidec computer, by virtue of its speed and versatility, helped to create a new set of tasks within the Ministry of Pensions that could not have been completed with older, slower technology. It was purchased with the express intention of defining a new system for doing work that had not previously existed. As a result, it brought new workers into the Ministry, workers whose jobs relied on electronic computing. A similar process was taking place throughout the government as other departments found they needed to turn to computing to redefine, rather than simply speed up, their short- and long-term operations. By the middle of the decade, computer staff in government was growing at a rate of 30 percent each year and this showed no signs of slowing. A significant number of computing projects were delayed or left incomplete due to the government being unable to recruit computing staff in large enough numbers.³⁷

In 1965, six hundred computers operated throughout the country, with four hundred more on order from computer manufacturers. Nearly every British citizen now relied on computers and computer workers to provide some crucial service or state benefit. The national government led the way in computer purchasing, spending £14.1 million just on computing hardware for sixty-two installations from 1958 through early 1965, and more than half a million additional pounds were spent buying time on other computing installations each year.³⁸ In 1965 alone, Western Europe as a whole spent £250 million on computers.³⁹ British government studies projected that the need for over three hundred thousand office jobs, or roughly 9 percent of the clerical workforce, would be obviated by computer installations before 1975.⁴⁰ At the same time, computer labor was in high demand, and computing staff were being hired in ever-greater numbers. That computing would increasingly define the future of labor was becoming clear—but what that labor would look like was obscured by layers of media representation.

Envisioning a Future of Low Labor Costs

A poem reprinted in a 1960 issue of an office machinery and management magazine conveyed the faith most computer purchasers placed in their new mainframes:

In the spring, young men (grown vague and lazy)

And girls (grown starry-eyed and hazy)

Being human

Lack acumen

How undistracted, single-minded,

Never mooning, never blinded,

The computer,

Being neuter.⁴¹

The “neuter computer” contrasted sharply with the gendered bodies of workers—particularly women workers. The clerical workforce of both the public and private sectors was heavily feminized by the 1960s and was becoming more so. Of the almost 7.8 million working women in Britain in 1961, nearly 2.7 million were clerical workers. This number did not even include office machine operators, who were often counted under a separate census designation; adding them in raised the number of clerical workers by close to a million.⁴² For the most part, early computer operators were drawn from this pool of pseudoclerical labor.

However, highlighting workers’ gender could be a potent selling point. Powers-Samas, which combined with British Tabulating Machines in 1959 to create ICT, consolidated the trope of the “Powers Girl” early on, a figure who demonstrated their electromechanical machines in advertisements and brochures. When the machines became electronic, the Powers Girls remained and served much the same function as before. Dressed in ladies’ business attire, the Powers Girls showed how it might look to use a computer, humanizing opaque, intimidating, and potentially confusing machines. They also served a didactic function by showing the kind of worker that should operate Powers machines once a company purchased them. Finally, they showed purchasers that computers would not require a huge outlay for labor in addition to the hardware: “The conventional method is to hire women trained to operate any of the many machines available on the market,” wrote one author when discussing the economics of purchasing a new electronic Powers machine.⁴³

“Most ‘operative’ jobs,” wrote Office Methods and Machines magazine, “are performed by female staff, and this group is absorbing the majority of the present 40 percent of girl school-leavers entering office work.”⁴⁴ In other words, close to half of all young women leaving school went to work in offices by 1967, and of these, most went into computer operation work. This was key to selling machines, because from 1950 to 1966 wages and salaries in the aggregate had nearly tripled, but gross trading profits of companies had little more than doubled.⁴⁵ Women continued to be seen as the best financial bet for much computing work.

In industry, untouched by any equal pay legislation until 1975, the discussion of the benefits that discriminatory wages produced was often quite candid. In 1965, the chief accountant of Bibby and Baron Ltd., the largest paper bag manufacturer in England, wrote a series of articles on how office managers could wring the greatest efficiency from their workers at the lowest cost. He urged employers to hire women, saying: “Equal pay for male and female workers is unlikely to be accepted by industrial concerns ... [and] because female clerks can be obtained at a cheaper price than males, and may be just as good if given the same opportunities and training, it should be your policy to employ them wherever possible.”⁴⁶

Throughout the 1960s, British computing companies’ advertisements were dominated by figures similar to the Powers Girls, who became the object of a specific kind of managerial “male gaze.” Nearly all photographs used to sell and showcase computers in the early 1960s pictured a conservatively dressed, plain-looking female workforce standing or sitting while working at machines.⁴⁷ As most machines became electronic, however, subtle changes in advertising style crept in. In earlier ads, Powers Girls smiled and engaged the viewer. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, often the Powers Girls only presented their backs to the viewer. Workers became increasingly faceless and expressionless as companies marketed more expensive machines. In the advertisement shown in figure 3.2, the woman’s figure does not even have a face drawn on it.

Figure 3.2 The attraction of a computer meant the continued promise of low-cost, interchangeable labor. Powers-Samas advertisement in *Office Magazine*, May 1958.

English Electric–LEO—one of the leading British computing companies of the sixties, created from a merger of LEO Computers and English Electric’s computing division in 1963—ran with this trope in its ads. The cover of its 1963 brochure featured a woman who could easily be mistaken for a Powers Girl, facing away from the camera and not engaging the viewer. The other major British computer company of the era that produced machines geared for business and administrative automation, ICT, produced similar marketing materials.

Figure 3.3 English Electric–LEO advertising brochure, 1963.

Images from a 1963 ICT magazine and 1962 advertising brochure were populated with numerous, anonymous women workers who provided little visual interest and failed to engage the viewer.⁴⁸ Far from being positioned as “cheesecake” to help attract attention to the machines, the women workers were used simply as placeholders for the company’s own staff. ICT’s advertising brochure has page after page of photographs of workers’ backs, taken in the machine rooms of companies that had already “signed on to progress” and installed ICT computers.⁴⁹ As the electronic age wore on, gendered bodies were sometimes used less to humanize computers than to show how people should accommodate themselves to machines.

Figure 3.4 *ICT Magazine* photograph, 1963.

Figure 3.5 ICT advertising brochure photo, 1962.

Despite the orderly machine rooms, the effect of viewing an entire brochure containing page after page of similar photographs of silent, oblivious, women workers did not make computing seem like it would alleviate drudgery, as promised by advertising rhetoric. Through these photographs, drudgery became emphasized, taken for granted as part of a high-performance system engineered to maximize throughput. Human labor was positioned as a temporary inconvenience within systems that anticipated a more fully automated future. If labor could not be made fully invisible, at least it could be made less obtrusive by using temporary, high-turnover women workers with no claim to equal wages, job training, or promotion opportunities. The need for more specialized computer staff required a concomitant increase in training, but “in practice this really means training for male office staff only,” noted Office Methods and Machines. That group would soon comprise a new and growing “administrative” class of computing professionals, requiring “education in complex techniques and business practices as well as a wide knowledge of the overall activities of the employing company.” By contrast, the “operative” group within office staffs generally only received “training mainly in the manual skills needed to work individual office machines” plus whatever on-the-job skills they could pick up.⁵⁰

Powers-Samas, and later ICT, marketed its computing solutions worldwide, focusing especially on Commonwealth and former colonial markets. Just as the machines in the company’s advertisements had impact beyond the British context, so too did the images of workers in these ads. As British companies raced to export computers to compete with IBM, overseas markets for British computers were also targeted with information about who should fill computing jobs. Cultural and economic ideals exported along with machines meant that technological transfer was as much about the transfer of labor patterns as it was about the transfer of specific technologies. As early as 1955, Powers-Samas opened a service bureau in Delhi filled with its machines and staff. Powers trained local workers as part of a plan coordinated with the Indian government and the Indian Statistical Institute to promote “economic uplift and industrialization.”⁵¹ Powers-Samas dispatches back to its headquarters in Britain discussed the “clean symmetry of Western-influenced architecture” replacing older buildings and touted the company canteen with ice water and refrigeration. Pictures showed a building filled with young Indian women in training to become machine operators and punch operators. Efficient, well-trained, and “proud to be associated with a great venture,” the young women mirrored their British counterparts hired to work on Powers-Samas machines at home.⁵²

These labor choices were no accident, nor were they the most likely labor patterns in context. Just as “no effort [had] been spared in the planning of this service bureau to conform to modern trends and to show it off as a model,” neither was any effort spared to engineer the most effective workforce for the bureau in accordance with British standards and experience. From the ice water in the canteen to the special cooling and lighting in the building, everything about the installation was meant to mirror British ideals of “civilization” and technological modernity. Part and parcel of that modernity was the employment of young women as an easily trained, affordably priced, and ideally highly interchangeable technological labor force.

Figure 3.6 *The Powers Magazine*, March 1954.

“The noise of steel against steel in battles fought over this ancient city, gives way to the busy chatter of Power-Samas machines engaged in a combat of a different kind,” boasted an article in the company magazine, without irony. With Powers machines fighting “the battle against hunger, poverty, and underproduction,” their advertising and business practices were also battling for a share of a lucrative new market. Showing Indian users how best to staff their new installations was one part of the marketing strategy—and it was a marketing strategy used wherever British computing companies tried to sell their machines, including Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.⁵³ “Language, dress, customs may differ from country to country, but Powers Samas punched card methods are international,” proclaimed one ad. “Witness this group of operators in Khartoum and this picture of the operator’s training school in Bombay” it continued. Powers conflated technical needs with the effects of the company’s heterogeneous engineering of foreign labor forces.⁵⁴

ICT also became a major player in the global computing market, wooing Indian buyers throughout the 1960s. Prime Minister Nehru viewed ICT equipment at the Indian Industries Fair in 1962, and President Khan of Pakistan was photographed inspecting new ICT equipment at a ceremony at the State Bank of Pakistan in 1961.⁵⁵ British computer companies tried to market British technology as the saving grace of less industrialized nations, despite the fact that their toehold in most of these markets came as a result of colonial influence that had been brutal and debilitating. Spurred on by government support in the form of contracts and loans, British computing companies did not simply act on their own as free agents in a fictional, idealized, global free market. The state’s support of ICT in particular would grow over the course of the 1960s, until the company was essentially tethered to the government’s computing needs. Even in the early sixties, however, most British computer companies took their cues for how to interact with foreign markets from the government’s past and present foreign policy. In turn, successive governments relied on those computer companies to extend the reach of British economic and political hegemony abroad.

Figure 3.7 A young woman demonstrates ICT equipment at the Indian Industries Fair in 1962 as the permanent undersecretary of the Commonwealth Relations Office, Sir Savile Garner, and another man look on. *ICT Magazine*, August 1962.

ICT’s marketing presented computing as a modernizing force to bring former colonial holdings into an ostensibly clean, orderly, productive future. In this vision of the future, modeled on British culture and experience, women held particular roles within the economy relative to men and machines—technical roles that were nonetheless tacitly conveyed as being peripheral to the true work of technological modernization. Photographs of ICT equipment in Indian and Pakistani installations followed the particular gendered contours of the British labor model. Although British companies tried to position these work organization methods as natural outgrowths of the technology, they were in fact didactic. Marketing images showing women exclusively performing data-input and low-level-operation work both reflected the way British companies staffed their overseas installations and how they taught foreign buyers to use the equipment.

Even though imagery produced by British computer companies presented young women in India operating punch machines and computers, and demonstrating equipment at exhibitions and trade shows, India’s punch operator labor force was not as feminized as Britain’s. Sometimes, punching jobs were reserved for men only—as in the case of the Tata Iron and Steel Corporation, whose class of punch trainees, all of whom volunteered for the work, were exclusively male.⁵⁶ Sometimes, men and women worked side by side: The punch room at Air India in 1961 contained both men and women punchers in roughly equal proportions.⁵⁷ When Indian companies set up their own computing installations, the gendered mores of British computing usually did not attach. For this reason, even lower-level jobs in computing were often considered men’s jobs in India. As Ross Bassett and Ramesh Subramanian have shown in their respective studies of technological transfer and Indian computing, Indian users, programmers, and engineers were far from passive recipients of foreign high technology, molding foreign machines to the Indian context and soon developing computer software and hardware solutions specific to their needs via their own national computer industry.⁵⁸ This history has long been overshadowed because of the powerful marketing attempts of Western powers.

Between 1960 and 1967, the percentage of the Indian computing market held by British companies more than doubled. Still, it remained barely more than a tenth of the market overall, with IBM dominating.⁵⁹ British companies reported on each computer sold in their company magazines, and sometimes especially large sales were reported in the national press. Images of foreign machine installations performed a dual function. First, they were meant to show the global advance of British technology. Second, they participated in constructing a type of cultural hegemony through which readers could assess the progress of other nations according to British standards.⁶⁰

In an era when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was shaking the British Conservative establishment by proclaiming that a “wind of change” was sweeping through Africa, arguing that the growing desire for independence there would soon require a loosening of Britain’s imperial grip, British computer companies—with the aid of the press—were repurposing imperial rhetoric to consolidate their own power and importance. Images of British computing abroad presented unsubtle messages of triumph and control that presented women’s bodies as trophies. Pictures of women considered “exotic” by British standards often accompanied articles that tried to show British ingenuity structuring economies, bureaucracies, and women’s and men’s lives abroad. A computer operator in a shiny, form-fitting dress, pictured working on a British computer at Ashanti Goldfields in Ghana, was one of many images that perpetuated a gendered imperial gaze. Linked to a column describing British success selling computers overseas, particularly in former colonial and Dominion countries, the image was captioned “HOT stuff.” Below the image, the front page article on ICL’s successes in overseas markets proclaimed that in 1970 ICL had won 36 percent of the market for computers in India, close to 50 percent in the “Far East,” and more than 80 percent in East Africa.⁶¹These economic victories were presented as symbolic of British cultural power in a broader sense.

Figure 3.8 *ICL Marketing*, February 1970.

At home, computing’s progress was also aligned with a distinctly British style of postindustrial civilization and order. Pictures of the Royal Family inspecting or inaugurating computer installations were perennial press favorites. The Queen Mother, the Queen, and the Duke of Edinburgh could all be found sitting at an operator’s console or inspecting a new machine whenever a major computing installation was inaugurated or when a new plant was built by a British computer manufacturer.⁶² In addition to being publicity events, these photo opportunities not-so-subtly put the mark of the Empire on British computing.

From Low Cost to Best Bet: Women Operators as the Apotheosis of the Machine

As the 1960s wore on, images of women interacting with machines became less literal and, in the process, more freighted with additional meaning. Instead of focusing on a relatively plain-looking feminized workforce, whose presence was simultaneously meant to stand in for low-cost labor and to recede into the background as the viewer considered the computing system, women started to become a subject of the advertising themselves. In earlier advertisements, women were often faceless accessories to the machine, but this trope began to lose favor as the sixties progressed.

In many later images, the formula is reversed: The machines recede or disappear while the woman remains, this time facing the viewer. At a certain point, advertising imagery began to focus more on the fact that managers were buying a system for managing and maximizing labor rather than just a machine. Although this had been implicit in earlier advertisements, in the later sixties it became explicit. Women pictured in the ads retained their importance as a shorthand representation of workers who conveyed all the benefits, and few of the downsides, of modern office labor, but now that message became even more critical to the sales pitch. Women’s labor itself was being marketed explicitly as an essential part of the computing system.

The advertisements in figure 3.9 portray workers as nearly superhuman when combined with their trusty computers, which barely appear in the ads at all. In the case of ICL’s BARIC ad, a “girl operator” interacts with computer bureau services through her office terminal link. “The implications are obvious to every businessman,” says the ad copy. Managers could gain all the benefits of a powerful mainframe with none of the hardware costs and little labor overhead.⁶³ In another advertisement for a different type of technology, from the smaller company Business Mechanisation Limited, the technique is similar. Selling a minicomputer instead, the advertisement again focuses on the operator. With the help of her small office computer named SUSIE—short for Stock Updating and Sales Invoicing Electronically—the lone “girl operator” fulfilled functions like payroll, invoicing, stock control, and accounting which previously would have required a larger staff.⁶⁴ Women’s labor was no longer simply the best fit for the system, it was a necessary element in order to get the benefits of cost and control computers promised.

Figure 3.9 Machines begin to disappear, and computer labor becomes the object of marketing. Advertisement for ICL Baric Remote Computing Service in *ICL News*, 1970 (above). Advertisement in *Office Methods and Machines Magazine*, 1967 (next page).

In addition, young, smartly dressed operators increasingly became objects of a heteronormative male gaze. Although previous advertisements used women to showcase machines, there had been little sexual subtext; women in earlier advertisements were shown less as “pretty faces” than as working hands. In the late sixties, computer marketing added sexuality to the pitch by differentiating one operator from the masses and foregrounding her, even to the exclusion of the machine.⁶⁵ Using sex appeal strengthened the shift already underway in advertising from focusing on machines and workers to focusing primarily on workers. It was also nothing new in the sense that men’s ideas about women’s sexuality had been used to structure jobs in computing for decades. After all, compulsory heterosexuality’s effect on women’s working lives was the main reason women had ended up in low-level machine work in the first place.

The primary purpose of these ads, however, was to assure managers that they could get away with using generic office staff when buying a computer. The ads asserted that operators did not require special training or expertise. The SUSIE computer “is operated by a typist—not highly paid programmers and controllers,” says the ad copy. Even though it states that the computer “is programmed in plain language from tape or by the typist,” the operator remains just a typist, not a “highly paid programmer.” Yet the fact that SUSIE came with a 130-page programming manual gives some indication of how inaccurate it was to refer to the operator as a typist.⁶⁶ Several of the other computers produced by the group of companies known as Business Mechanisation Limited, later Business Computers Limited, had women’s names that alluded to the computer’s functions. In addition to SUSIE, there was BETSIE (a betting and bookmaking computer) and SADIE (which stood for Sterling and Decimal Invoicing Electronically). Women’s labor had become so closely allied with computers that some machines actually took on their identities.

Another selling technique evolved simultaneously over the course of the 1960s. Some companies, including ICT (later International Computers Limited, or ICL), employed all-women computer demonstration teams who worked on-site at the company operating the demonstration machines for potential customers and also went to trade shows. These teams ensured that business consumers saw computers as easy to staff and not overly complex to run. The young women presented a vision of effortless perfection and conveyed none of the gravitas male staff might have. For similar reasons women operators and programmers at IBM’s world headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City were told to work on the computers in the window, in view of the sidewalk, to make the machines look easy to use.⁶⁷

In 1964, the ICT demonstration team traveled to trade shows and customer sites. A photograph shows the team playing with output paper from a machine console at a trade show exhibit.⁶⁸ Attired in matching uniforms consisting of a dark business suit with a knee-length skirt and an ICT pin on the lapel, the women’s clothes did not aim to draw attention to their youth and gender in trade show settings that would be filled mostly with older men. For the photo of the 1964 team, the individual names of all the “girls” were recorded in the caption, a relatively rare sign of respect for workers who were often seen as interchangeable or ancillary.

Figure 3.10 ICT Demonstration Team photo from *ICT Magazine*, September 1964. From left to right: Carole Tucker, Carol Philbrick, Carol Jordan, and Dorine Conway.

By contrast, the 1970 ICL demonstration team aimed to capitalize on the youth and sex appeal of the women operators.⁶⁹ In a trade show setting, the impact of the 1970 demonstration team would have been quite different from that of earlier teams. White linen outfits and contrasting bright orange ICL scarves visually screamed their presence. Although only a minority of the team members were attired in company-issued minidress uniforms in the image shown in figure 3.11, those young women were deliberately placed in the photo’s foreground, whereas the larger number of team members who opted for the pantsuit uniform were placed at the back of the line. As social mores relaxed in the “swinging sixties,” the categories that defined women outside the workplace became increasingly visible within it.

Figure 3.11 ICL Demonstration Team pictured in *ICL News*, 1970.

ICL’s all-male upper management was not solely responsible for injecting sex appeal into the mission of the demonstration team. The head of the department (the older woman pictured on the right in figure 3.11) was credited with choosing the uniforms. Publicity photographs played up the changes. Unlike earlier teams, the women in the 1970 photo were not referred to by name, but only as a group.

Looking at Machines through Workers’ Eyes

Although the identities and stories of the women on ICL’s 1970 demonstration team may be lost, stories of certain operators can be recovered and the realities of operators’ work can be compared with the images used to represent it. In September 1961, four days before his nineteenth birthday, Colin Hobson started work as an operator at the LEO computer company.⁷⁰ Still based out of the J. Lyons & Co. bakery and teashops headquarters in Cadby Hall, and then later in Queensway, London, LEO Computers had gone from handling only the inventory of the Lyons teashops to handling payroll and inventory for a variety of other businesses, providing custom-built computers, and selling time on their own computers.

Hobson became interested in computing precisely because the field was new and enigmatic. When a computer company representative came to his school to speak to the students “about these wondrous science fiction things called computers,” his interest was piqued: “At the time everybody else called them electronic brains!” he recalled. As a young man recruited straight out of school to work on computers, Hobson was slightly unusual. LEO and other computing companies had different standards for hiring operators than government and industry in general. Unlike the lion’s share of operators working at the time, Hobson and his team were all men.

Yet in terms of background, Hobson epitomized the early wave of “computer professionals” who found work in computing installations before the existence of such jobs was widely known and before the field professionalized. Knowing little about computing, other than the fact that he wanted to know more, Hobson trained on the job to become a computer professional long before experience in the field was required or even expected to get such a job. No special educational qualifications as yet served a gatekeeping function. Hobson nixed the idea of going to work for ICT because, he recalled, he “was not impressed by the ICT idea of a computer, which seemed to need a lot of bicycle chains.”⁷¹ Conceptions of the futuristic nature of computers figured heavily into his decision of where to work, showing the powerful effects that popular discourses of technology often had on people. Hobson wanted to work with machines that matched the idealized image of computing presented in the press. He quickly found out, however, that the reality and the ideal were quite far apart.

Early on, the role of a computer operator was far from straightforward. When working on the LEO I, II, and III models between 1961 and 1967, breakdowns were frequent, particularly on the machines that relied on vacuum tubes like the LEO I and II, Hobson remembered.⁷² In this context, operators needed to be able to handle both hardware and software problems to shepherd programs through a successful run. When he started at LEO he was given hands-on training and also sent on several two-week programming courses to learn both machine code and higher-level languages like Intercode.⁷³ Because it was important for operators to know enough code to be able to debug programs during runs, most operators knew how to read code and write simple computer programs. As systems got upgraded, operators were sent on more training courses—but Hobson stressed that the most useful training was the hands-on work.

Both performing operating work and training others to be operators was part of Hobson’s job. As a LEO computer bureau operator, he operated computers for his company’s own use and also ran programs for other companies that bought time on LEO machines. Timesharing was an important part of LEO’s business model during an era when purchasing a mainframe was largely out of reach for all but the biggest companies and government organizations. Hobson and other LEO bureau staff were responsible for ensuring programs ran successfully and for delivering output. Later, he worked as a trainer, going to customer sites to train staff who would operate new computers purchased by businesses and government departments. As a result, Hobson provided labor for a wide variety of consumers in the private and public sector. He also witnessed and helped shape the emerging role of the electronic computer operator in industry and government through his training work.

Simply finding enough computer time was a big part of an early operator’s job. Computing power was still in short enough supply during the early 1960s that the LEO bureau staff often had to “beg, borrow, or steal” time on LEO machines installed at other companies, and in government offices, to be able to complete all of the bureau’s contract work. This borrowed, or more likely bought, computer time filled an important niche in the computing ecosystem, maximizing the use of expensive machines and helping to reduce the cost of owning a machine for some customers. Working overnight on a large government machine in the Post Office, Hobson recalled, “We had very little contact with the staff on these machines because they would hand over and go home. The Post Office machine was particularly impressive because they had a habit of loading it up with four massive programs and then their entire shift (of what seemed like twelve people) would go, leaving one or two LEO operators to finish off the Post Office work and run the bureau work.”⁷⁴ The operators who “handed off” this work, unlike Hobson’s team, were predominantly women. Because operator work was often performed overnight and at other sites, the prevailing view at LEO was that bureau operators needed to be men. Hobson recalled that the company worried that extra supervision, in the form of a women’s officer for female employees, would be needed if even one woman were employed—and so none were. Several LEO employees of this era recall the company as being very paternalistic.

Working closely with LEO’s engineers and designers on cutting-edge computing applications, LEO operators also felt they were a cut above others. Government installations, like the “particularly impressive” one at the Post Office, seemed overstaffed and undermotivated from Hobson’s perspective. From the perspective of the Civil Service computer operators, however, the LEO bureau and other computer companies were no paragons. Ann Sayce, whose career as a computer operator at the Post Office overlapped with Hobson’s time at LEO, remembered that “the worst places [to apply for a job] were the computer firms. They didn’t want women because they thought they couldn’t work at night.”⁷⁵ The stigma against women working at night differed widely by organization however. Civil servants would often work late shifts, regardless of gender, even though at LEO night shifts and offsite work effectively destroyed women’s chances of employment.

LEO’s culture, which explicitly barred women but styled itself as a labor meritocracy, presaged things to come as computing became a more desirable field. Lower-level men employees, like paper fetchers, could be trained for operator positions if they showed interest, underscoring the point that technical experience and aptitude were not the barriers keeping women out.⁷⁶ In contrast to the operators who formed the demonstration teams at ICL, at LEO a culture of masculine bravado meant that the complicated relationship between men and machines was becoming normalized as a natural partnership. One LEO employee recollected that “the operators were always male, and one of the rumored reasons for this was that the spools on the tape decks were so high that if a female operator tried to load tape, her bra straps were likely to snap!”⁷⁷ The iteration of such jokes provided a glimpse into the company’s machine room culture, an environment that, intentionally or not, made it difficult for women to be included as equals—or even to be included at all.

Even though his regular shift was all men, Hobson did train women workers from other companies. Trainees came to LEO’s offices to help run jobs on computers their employers had ordered, but which were still being tested prior to being installed. The women trainees were no different from the men trainees in terms of skill and aptitude, Hobson remembered, remarking that their relative scarcity at some companies probably had to do with the politics of office supervision or shift scheduling rather than an expectation that women would not perform the work as well as men.⁷⁸ Yet while women operators were not welcome, Hobson noted an “odd thing” about the position of other women at LEO: Some of the programmers were women, and “there seemed to be no problems about them hanging around at night in a partially deserted building with a bunch of young men!”⁷⁹ Women programmers, like Mary Coombs, could escape some of the strictures placed on women operators because of their elevated professional identity, which was implicitly linked to class distinctions that implied a different set of social behaviors. Coombs was a management trainee at a time when it was rare for women to be trained for management. But Coombs’s father, a Lyons employee, had gotten her the job. She jumped at the chance to move to LEO when it was a new division still within Lyons because of the dullness of the hand-calculating job she had been given doing ice cream cost analysis at Lyons. Although women operators might do programming, women like Coombs started at a different level: Their higher class status meant their skill level was automatically imagined to be higher, and their job identity was firmly white collar even though they worked with machines.

Class identity could trump gender to a certain extent, but the intersection of class and gender made gender itself a fundamentally classed category. This meant that women would not be treated the same as men of similar social standing. Mary Lee Berners-Lee, the mother of Tim Berners-Lee, worked at Ferranti in the 1950s. She recalled that women programmers performing the same work as men were paid less because “Ferranti was a paternal firm” that believed “men would have to support a wife and children so they needed more money.” Upset by this unfair situation, Ferranti’s women programmers eventually presented a case to management for truly meritocratic ranking and remuneration—and won.⁸⁰

Throughout industry and government, an idealized view of the nuclear family and an expectation of heterosexuality continued to powerfully shape women’s pay and promotion prospects and determine what jobs they could hold. Exceptions to this rule occurred only in times of labor shortage. When computer labor was in highest demand, women’s pay, career prospects, and their ability to get hired at all soared. Although a change was under way in the 1960s to hire “bright young men” for computing jobs instead of continuing to rely on women, as will be discussed in the next chapter, computer labor shortages in the sixties meant that women still got and kept many computing jobs.

Women in the Government Machine: Personal Experiences of Operators

Both Ann Sayce and her friend Cathy Gillespie, who worked at the government’s Post Office computing center, benefited from this sweet spot in the early computing labor market—a period during which the field’s feminization was beginning to be undone with rising wages and status, but before it had fully professionalized and erected barriers to women’s entry. The job advertisement that got Gillespie and Sayce into computing made no secret of the fact that the government was desperate for more computer workers. “Know Nothing about Computers? Then We’ll Teach You (and pay you while doing so),” read the job advertisement, which took up a quarter page in the newspaper and ran several times during the summer of 1965. It was designed with a clean, modern look and decorated with numbers evocative of computerized output. Embodying the spirit of Wilson’s White Heat, it promised that “here at the GPO London Computer Center you can take your first steps into the fascinating world of computers—and into a fascinating future as well!”⁸¹ The ad attempted to sell promising young applicants on a job in the wondrous new world of computers while asking little in return in terms of skills or qualifications.

Hiring managers for these posts, like most managers, felt that operator work, with the meticulous program reading, writing, and debugging skills it required, was a young person’s field. They recruited accordingly, focusing on youth and potential more than qualifications or experience.⁸² Operator jobs, which also required some programming, were seen as suitable for applicants with a solid, though not necessarily stellar, secondary school record, and they were not yet considered jobs for college graduates. Academic accomplishments or work background counted only slightly in determining an applicant’s suitability. Instead, an ability to learn quickly and an enthusiasm for the work, factors often deemed necessary in ill-defined or new fields of endeavor, were key to being hired.

Youth and gender were all the more important to defining this labor force because on-the-job training had little relationship to subjects of study in secondary school and employers lacked any accurate metrics for identifying innately talented candidates. Although he studied for A levels (advanced subjects) at school, Colin Hobson received only several O-level (ordinary-level) qualifications. This in no way hurt his career at LEO, however.⁸³ Cathy Gillespie, who did not have money for A-level study, also received O levels. This likewise did not hurt her career in computing, first in the Civil Service and later in the private sector. Indeed, Gillespie was surprised to have been among the forty people hired to work on the Post Office’s LEO III/26 installation, since she imagined she would need O-level qualifications in math and science but lacked them. Ann Sayce, who worked with her, came from a different background. Sayce had attended an academically oriented grammar school rather than a more general, trade-oriented comprehensive secondary school and had also earned her accountancy qualifications. However, this experience hindered her instead of counting in her favor. Her longer work record meant that, at age twenty-four, she was nearly too old to be considered for the job. Applicants for the job needed to be younger than twenty-five years of age.

Much like Hobson, Gillespie and Sayce were each attracted to the job because computers seemed like a fascinating new field. Both women recalled that this job seemed like it would be a cut above dull office work or the service industry jobs that most young women were hired to do, and the reality of the job did not disappoint. Sayce recalled that “operating a computer at that time was quite interesting and exciting,” a sentiment echoed by Gillespie: “The atmosphere was fantastic and the best bit was that no one knew what I did as it was so new.”⁸⁴ Like Hobson, they reveled in the cachet and prestige associated with working with cutting edge-technology. Even though employers had a difficult time attracting more established workers to computing work (for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter), thousands of younger Britons aspired to make a career out of it, captivated by the futurism and optimism invoked by popular representations of computing.

The job ad that Gillespie and Sayce answered was unusual for its time: It explicitly asked for “male or female” candidates. Job ads for computer workers, and most other workers, broke down along gendered lines. Often, jobs that were presented as career opportunities confined their applications to men, whereas routine office jobs, with potentially high starting pay but little upward mobility, sought only women applicants. Many advertisements that pitched a job to one gender or the other did so explicitly, simply asking for men or for women. Even greater numbers of advertisements, however, employed subtler language or fine print. Some asked applicants to direct inquiries to the company’s “women’s officer” while others warned that night work would be required, intimating that men were preferred. A variety of code words about career opportunity, pension plans, and the possibility for advancement to salaries over £1,500 were used to convey that young men rather than young women were the target demographic for a staff wanted advertisement.⁸⁵ Women were rarely included in job ads when employers were aiming to invest training in entry-level employees for long-term career development. Instead, women were targeted with promises of part-time work, flexible hours, marriage bonuses, sociable outlets at the workplace, and workplaces in districts of London that were described as exciting, fun, and fashionable, such as the shopping area of Kensington or the West End theater district.

The Post Office computer operator advertisement uniquely combined elements that were meant to appeal equally to young men and young women, promising not only careers and good pay, but also marriage bonuses, a stylish location in London, and flexible hours. Equally unusual was the fact that this job ad presented relatively low-level computing jobs as stepping stones to long-term career opportunity. These jobs were not very far removed from punched card machine operation jobs; they were quite similar functionally. Starting at £9 a week and rising as high as £15 by age twenty-one, the already above-average wages were enhanced by a pension that did not require employee contribution, and salaries of £1,000 and above were promised as attainable with time. This sort of salary, in the £1,000 to £2,000 range, was “what all the guys wanted” at the time, noted Sayce.⁸⁶ Further education opportunities were mentioned in the ad, along with three weeks’ paid vacation. The Post Office advertisement asked specifically for young applicants and promised to train them. This, along with the job’s location in the permanent Civil Service, indicated a high-status career opportunity rather than merely a temporary job.

Everything about the ad appealed to Gillespie, who was working in a shoe shop when she applied for the job, after quitting secretarial college because of the dead-end nature of the work. Sayce, who came to the position from within the Civil Service, already had secure job prospects, but was intrigued by computers. Even though she was already employed by the Civil Service, Sayce had to compete against the outside job candidates. She recalled that in addition to passing the required math and writing tests for the Post Office job, she also had to convince the hiring officers that she would not have children in the near future: “You would never get the job until you swore up and down that you wouldn’t have children.”⁸⁷

Only a few years before, a job advertisement like this would have looked quite different. It would have been pitched to women, rather than men and women, and it would have offered different enticements to potential applicants, along with lower salaries. Training and further educational opportunities for career development would not have been part of the equation. A few years later, the job ad would also have looked quite different: No longer would candidates with no experience whatsoever be given such enticement to apply, and no longer would the advertisement explicitly seek out women as well as men for a position intended to be the start of a career in a high-prestige field. The computing positions Sayce and Gillespie had applied for existed at the perfect juncture of labor shortage and computing’s rising prestige. These factors combined to create extremely favorable conditions for those lucky or clear-sighted enough to find work in the field. Computer work was rising in status and offering enhanced opportunities, but its prestige had not yet risen enough to make it attractive to higher-status, career-oriented men.

In the fall of 1965, Gillespie and Sayce started work at the Post Office’s LEO III/26 installation. They were age eighteen and twenty-four, respectively, and joined roughly sixty other operators spread across three shifts. They became part of the “massive” operation that Colin Hobson saw when he came to the Post Office to try to eke out extra computer time overnight for LEO bureau work. Both women received a dedicated two weeks of paid training before they began work and learned the machine code in the thick LEO operator’s manual. While on the job, they learned how to program in binary and to read hexadecimal, parity, nonparity, and mBIC machine codes. The operators, of whom at least half were women, were overseen by primarily male supervisors and initially worked on feeding cards into the reader and loading the appropriate tapes and paper. Gillespie performed some last-minute punching when needed and later specialized in organizing the batches of cards that would be run on the machine to maximize throughput. In many ways, operator work was akin to what systems administrators would do much later. Early operators were responsible for ensuring the systems stayed in good order and ran programs successfully, just as systems administrators would later be responsible for keeping computing environments stable for users. Gillespie also processed the printed paper output, right down to physically chopping it up and bringing it to the relevant departmental destinations.

Gillespie and Sayce’s Post Office jobs were an ideal beginning to a career in computing. Anthony Benn, the minister of technology, had been postmaster general before moving to MinTech, and it was Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers and his team that had created Colossus. For most of the twentieth century, the Post Office controlled and maintained all of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. A center for technological leadership in Britain well into the latter half of the century, the Post Office researched and implemented projects that found new applications for electronics and telecommunications technology throughout the twentieth century. The research arm of the Post Office was akin to the prestigious Bell Laboratories in the United States. Although LEO employees may have considered themselves “a cut above,” the Post Office’s large computing projects were on the leading edge of business and administrative computing. Their programs ranged from standard applications like payroll and telephone billing (the Post Office was also in charge of telephone service) to much more complex software that interpreted diverse datasets and dealt with numerous intertwined variables. Sayce recalled running civil engineering programs, for instance, that coordinated all of London’s road work with maintenance on underground utility lines so that the same busy streets would not have to be closed and dug up multiple times. Even with standard applications, the scale at which the Post Office computer center worked—for example, managing the billing for every telephone customer in the nation—meant that it pushed the boundaries of administrative computing at the time.

The atmosphere in the computing installations, quite different from the run-of-the-mill Civil Service office spaces, was youthful and gregarious. Gillespie recalled the young, mixed-gender environment of the job fondly, noting that “it was fun to work there and the atmosphere was great. The majority of us were about the same age so it felt like going to a party every day, not work.” She worked the early shift from seven-thirty in the morning to roughly two-thirty in the afternoon, and she remembered fondly how someone had programmed the noisy machine to play an approximation of Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” at the start of the day by orchestrating the machine’s various whirrs and clatters. “It was like one big party,” Gillespie emphasized.⁸⁸ In contrast to prevailing norms in computer companies like LEO, the gender of the operator labor force skewed more toward women in the public sector. Gillespie and Sayce worked in an environment in which women operators made up half or more of the operating shifts at the Post Office and, later, at the Central Electricity Board. Overall, “it was a great first job, you were not trapped in an office, you were working fantastic hours, which gave you a lot of freedom, and no one had any idea what you did,” recalled Gillespie.⁸⁹

Although there was no overnight shift, there was a shift that worked into the night. Gillespie and Sayce recalled that the married, male engineers who were on site to fix the computers thought women operators were “a bit dodgy” and shied away from them, viewing them as “man eaters.” Working with men at night was looked upon in a suspicious light, Gillespie remembered: “‘What sort of a woman would want to do that?’ was the idea.” Simply working at night could put the stain of sexual promiscuity on women, and the effect was intensified if men worked alongside the women. Gillespie added that “there was also this idea that you didn’t indulge in sexual things before marriage.” But Sayce disagreed, asking incredulously: “What sixties were you in?” The swinging sixties in London were a bundle of contradictions for women. Hemlines were rising, and women were wearing more and more revealing fashions to work. At the same time, trousers were still not allowed for women machine operators despite the physicality of the job, even though protective attire, like a long “overall” coat, was sometimes supplied to operators.

Both Gillespie and Sayce walked a fine line to maintain a respectable image in the midst of this, remembering—only half in jest—that the all-female punching and verifying pool was regarded as “a sexual wolf pack.” Described as loud and aggressive as a group, individual punchers were known to stake claims to male coworkers they liked and then sexually harass them as they walked through the punch room. This trope of a predatory, single, working woman was exactly the image Gillespie and Sayce did not want; the engineers’ and operators’ impressions of the largely working-class young women in the punching pool underscored the fact that performing sexuality in a particular way was an important component of the kind of middle-class respectability that attached to, and was required of, more prestigious jobs in computing.⁹⁰

In addition to being exciting, computer jobs also often came with above-average salaries. Sayce, who supplemented her hours as an operator with a part-time job doing accounting and another job dealing antiques in her spare time, described herself as very “cash rich” at the time. However, even with her high wages she could not buy a home. Sayce attempted to get a mortgage but was turned away despite meeting the financial qualifications, because she did not have a male relative to cosign. “Men earning eight to twelve pounds a week could get a 90 percent mortgage at the time,” she recalled ruefully, yet her request for a modest loan prompted “a spotty eighteen-year-old” bank employee to “laugh in [her] face.” With money to spare but unable to finance a home, one lunch hour she instead decided to splurge on a car: “I told the salesman that I wanted a car with a radio, and he sold me the longest car that they had at the time!”⁹¹

Despite the many advantages Gillespie and Sayce enjoyed, the diffuse effects of discrimination shaped their lives and careers in ways that are difficult to quantify. The range of opportunities foreclosed to them simply because they were women, even in a period of better-than-average prospects, can be discerned by comparing their experiences with those of Colin Hobson at LEO. Even though Hobson left school at the earliest allowed age, whereas Gillespie and Sayce stayed in school past the required age of sixteen, Hobson had stepped into one of the most elite positions in the field of computer operation at the time—that of a LEO bureau operator. Gillespie and Sayce, as women, could not even compete for that job, because LEO hired only men. Instead, they entered an open competition for a good government computing job and were extremely fortunate to be hired from a very large applicant pool. In addition, they were particularly lucky to be competing for computing jobs at a time when computer labor shortages worked to their advantage, with the government struggling to fill the ranks of its growing computer installations.

Those conditions would not last. As women coworkers left to have children, the gender balance of operators shifted, and new women hires did not replace the old. Both Gillespie and Sayce saw married colleagues come back to work after having children, only to fill different, less desirable jobs at lower pay. During the 1960s, and well beyond, popular opinion dictated that white-collar women were only supposed to seriously pursue either a career or marriage. Indeed, after taking another computing job a few years later, Sayce left to have children and was never able to return to computing work, despite maintaining her interest in the field. As late as 1975, a survey of school-age girls’ career aspirations noted that “the simple and obvious escape route to marriage and motherhood was not merely socially acceptable for girls, but almost obligatory.”⁹² Even though Sayce was divorced at the time she was employed by the Post Office, she was disqualified from getting a Civil Service pension because she had been married at one time. Marriage, either the future inclination toward, or the remnants thereof, enormously complicated women’s career aspirations, even as it offered the most socially acceptable and economically viable way for most British women to live.

Moving Up, Moving On

In 1967, only two years after arriving at the Post Office, both Gillespie and Sayce left the security of their positions for the large, new IBM installation at the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). In addition to leaving behind guaranteed jobs for life in the Civil Service, Gillespie and Sayce also relinquished their excellent working hours. Their new jobs required work on both day and overnight shifts, but leaving the Civil Service was a necessity in order to have opportunities to advance to higher computer operation jobs. The organization of the Civil Service meant there was no guarantee one could gain promotion if one wished to continue to work in computing. Civil servants could be required to work in a totally different office doing completely different work after each promotion, and the limited number of vacancies in the Senior Machine Operator grade in the Post Office meant that, if individuals wished to continue working with computers, they might wait many years until even one senior machine operator post became vacant. Yet leaving the Post Office had downsides as well: In contrast to the relaxed atmosphere there, “at the CEGB things were slightly more serious,” said Gillespie.⁹³

Representing the early curve of a shift already underway in favor of IBM at the expense of British computers, the CEGB ran IBM 360s. Gillespie’s rationale for applying for the job was due as much to her desire for promotion as to her recognition that she would need experience on IBMs in order to advance further. The computer operation staff at CEGB consisted of only about twenty-four operators for three machines, in contrast to the more than sixty at the Post Office’s installation, reflecting how systems were maturing to require fewer operators. An IBM 360/30, a 360/50, and a 360/75 occupied two different London offices of the CEGB, the first used mainly for administrative tasks, with the latter two forming part of a new system called Attached Support Processor (ASP). While the 360/50 handled input and output, the 360/75 ran the programs. In order to wring maximum efficiency from the machines, they were used in tandem and their interaction was automated to perform different tasks in the processing chain for the purpose of speeding up programming runs beyond what a human controlling the input, processing, and output functions nonprogrammatically could achieve.⁹⁴ Sayce proudly recalled that she once held a speed record for processing data on these IBMs.

In the machine room at the CEGB, Gillespie’s job again included organizing input, this time received from a remote location where the cards had been copied to magnetic tape. The tapes were sent to her with a job sheet indicating their contents, along with any paper tapes needed to input the program. In addition to feeding in these programs, scheduling the work, and processing and debugging the jobs, she performed the initial program load (IPL) to bring the system up after crashes and logged hardware faults and other problems to pass along to the engineers who performed overnight maintenance. Engineers were on staff during the day as well to correct insurmountable operating problems and machinery breakdowns. Even into the early 1970s, Gillespie recalled, these problems tended to occur regularly—two or three times each day.

In addition to machine faults, operator faults could wreak havoc. Opening a door to one of the magnetic tape reels too early one day earned Gillespie a broken foot when the still-spinning reel shot out of the case. The scratch tapes, forming the short-term writes that would not comprise the final output, could cause chaos when they were occasionally confused with an output tape. “Imagine how popular you were if you picked the wrong one,” Gillespie said with chagrin. In fact, management greatly feared the ease with which scratch tapes could be switched with other tapes, because of how this could be used by disgruntled workers in the context of a labor dispute. Even a small number of tape swaps could throw important work in the government—or industry—into disarray.⁹⁵

While Gillespie was at work one day in 1970, a publicity photograph was taken of her and her machine (figure 3.12). She and her IBM 360 were to be the public face of the CEGB’s new IBM 360/85 installation. In the photo, Gillespie sits at the console, typing and answering commands.⁹⁶ The machine’s dials are set to the initial program load from the card reader on address 00C, which read the initiation deck containing the information needed to boot up—to bring the computer to the point at which it would be ready to run a program loaded via the read-only input tapes on the units in the background. Acting in place of the modern equivalent of a screen, the paper from the console comprised a hard copy of the daily log, which Gillespie could refer back to in the event of an error. System tapes, to bring the machine up at the beginning of the day and after crashes, are visible in the glass cases behind the console. The scratch tapes, used to record incremental output throughout the day, are shown stored on the rack in front of the tape unit in the photo’s background. Dedicated magnetic tapes—or sometimes paper tapes or cards, depending on the application—collected the final output.

Figure 3.12 Cathy Gillespie performs the initial program load on the CEGB’s new IBM 360.

Because of the way the publicity photo is staged, Gillespie sits in a seemingly passive role, rather than being shown in a way that telegraphs action. Photographs of men from this era often showed them confidently striding around the machine room, or inspecting output with a sense of gravitas that seemed to heighten their importance. By positioning Gillespie in a way similar to a secretary at a keyboard, a position that she would not have occupied for much of her workday, the publicity photo subtly—and perhaps subconsciously—packaged her role in a way that the public would understand. Viewers might be forgiven for assuming that women in these images were not doing the real, important work of computing, given how they were posed in ways that triggered associations with secretarial work or typing. The image comported with stereotypical expectations of women’s work even while showing off a “revolutionary” technology.

At the console, Gillespie performs her duties, but the way the image is arranged freezes her in time, obfuscating the actions and skills required for her job. If looking at the photo without knowing her background, it might be difficult to discern whether Gillespie was a worker or a model brought in specifically for the photograph. Although some advertising used models, many computing company advertisements and most publicity photos from this era did not. Yet, as many of these photos have filtered into the popular imagination, and been stripped of context on the Internet, a widespread contemporary assumption has taken hold that these images portray either low-level workers or not-real workers—simply women brought in for aesthetic value. Small hints in the photo imply that Gillespie is really on the job: On close inspection, the image’s sleek veneer is slightly eroded by the clenched look on her face. A tooth extraction the previous day had left her face swollen and numb, and its effects disrupted the utopian image of effortless automation the photo sought to portray. Gillespie’s very embodiment as a worker, reporting for duty despite a physical setback, undermined the presentation of a stylized, hyperreal image of computing’s future.

In the imaginary void surrounding the field at this time, images like these possessed the ability to become powerful ambassadors for the current state of affairs in computing. They repeated similar tropes—not simply reflecting reality, but reflecting a particular version of reality and shaping the public’s image of what computing was and what it should be. Computing imagery participated in defining, rather than just reflecting, what computing was. The positioning of women operators as passive or the confusion of workers with models made—and continues to make—a material difference in how we understand computing’s past and write computer history.

The Cooling of White Heat

Thinking of her work in computing in the 1960s, Cathy Gillespie recalled that it was “great to be young in a new industry, earning good money and being on a par with the men regarding wages and opportunities.” Gillespie entered the field at an ideal time. Throughout the mid-1960s, the shortage of computer labor—or at least the perception thereof—meant the practice of hiring women continued even as the status of computing work began to rise. By later in the decade this perception of labor crisis had diminished somewhat, and as a result many employers—especially the largest employer of computer labor, the Civil Service—began to change whom they hired.

A 1967 Air Force report discussed how the Air Force’s mostly female workforce had served it well during periods when careers for computer operators and programmers were not easily found in the Civil Service. At this point in time, however, the Air Force felt that a change was necessary to bring it into line with new ideas about computing within the Civil Service: “The majority of other organizations considered during this investigation recruit young men as machine operators,” its report noted, and in order to groom computing professionals, “they offer a complete career to such people.” The report states that this trend is due to a widespread presumption that “the computer field generally is a young man’s domain” and concludes that “the young man seems to represent the ‘best bet’ if career opportunities and financial rewards are satisfactory.” However, it then points out that “if, on the other hand ... machine operators are required who have no career ambitions and simply want to earn a bit of money, then the best bet is the middle-aged married woman.”¹⁰¹

In any case, the Air Force report summed up, it had “become quite clear during the course of this investigation that unless some considerable improvements are made to both career prospects and salary levels of the machine operator ... then the recruiting and retention situations which exist at the centre at the present time are unlikely to improve.”¹⁰² The situation in the Air Force computing section showed why women continued to be the best bet for much computing labor throughout the public and private sectors in the 1960s. Women were favored precisely because computer work lacked a career ladder. Several women civil servants complained that workers were not allowed to accrue seniority in the same fashion when they were in the excluded grades, as there were two different seniority scales kept for the excluded grades and the clerical grades, and most of the promotional outlets were available in the latter category. They wished to integrate the two job categories, have a common seniority list, and, critically, allow men to take up excluded grade posts and promotions as well as women. Although women had attained equal pay in the clerical grades of the Civil Service by the late 1950s, the persistent division of “machine” and “clerical” work perpetuated unequal pay and opportunities, and industry was untouched by sex discrimination legislation until the 1970s.¹⁰³

During the 1960s, however, computer jobs began to undergo a metamorphosis. Early on, computers only promised enhanced efficiency, but by this point they were becoming important symbols of industrial and social modernity. As the vanguard technology in Britain’s white hot technological revolution in the sixties, meant to lead Britain back to the heights of power on the world stage, computers enjoyed a high public profile and rising status. No longer could they simply be staffed by the lowest workers in the labor pyramid since this would not square with their seeming importance. As a result, Wilson’s call for technological meritocracy backfired: By emphasizing the critically important role that technology workers would play in the coming decades, his rhetoric sowed the seeds of technocratic hierarchy. As much as Labour sought a new style of meritocracy to define modern Britain, accidents of birth, in the form of age, class, race, and gender, weighed heavily on who would become part of the technological elite. The supposedly revolutionary technological vision of white heat could not undo—or even see—how gendered hierarchies constructed computer-age Britain.

The rising numbers of punch operators in government and industry were perhaps the best indication that society did not emerge from White Heat on the path to a technological future in which the need for drudgery would disappear. By 1971, punchers and “support staff” formed by far the largest category of computer labor in government.¹⁰⁴ The equalizing effects of technological progress were largely lost on the lowest echelons of workers that should have been helped by them, like those engaged in high-stress, boring, repetitive work. The rapidly modernizing society that Labour envisioned reforming all work along egalitarian lines never materialized, because it implicitly required the continuation of ingrained, antimeritocratic hierarchies to function. Because of this, computer operator labor became increasingly restive beginning in the mid-1960s. An agglomeration of computer operator strikes, union renegotiations, and labor meetings tasked specifically with solving the problem of growing inequality in the technology workforce muddied the image of a technological revolution that had promised meritocracy and egalitarianism.

The effects that computer publicity had in helping to create this context cannot be underestimated. In order for the technological future to materialize, people first needed to be able to envision it. The pictures presented to the public, to hiring managers, and to potential job seekers helped the nation make sense of a new field and powerfully defined what that field looked like in both image and reality. An important element of this visual project was to represent electronic computing as within the reach of any business. That resulted in advertisements portraying the computer workforce as relatively inexpensive, low skill, and feminized. So symbolically and economically potent was the young, female operator that computer companies deployed her outside Britain’s borders, exporting British labor patterns to postcolonial and former Dominion markets even though those countries often earmarked such jobs as suitable for men. Advertising created a division between the actual work and how the work was viewed by hiring managers because it made computer work seem low skill and low status when women performed it.

Meanwhile, computing’s rising status began to pull more women and men into jobs that had previously been considered suitable only for women. In this context of labor shortage, coming hard on the heels of the field’s prior feminization, many women succeeded, but the gains made by women operators as a class would begin to disappear in the late 1960s as employers and policymakers placed more hope in the young men who were expected to become experts in the application of computer technology in order to save the British economy. A potent new role for computer workers—that of the technocratic expert—was emerging in society and government, and structural changes made in the public sector would begin to solidify this new identity. This role was not for women, however, and only women who had entered the field before this point in time and remained in it without interruption, like Cathy Gillespie, had a leg up. When high-tech labor crises eased, women were no longer seen as ideal candidates.

On the ground, White Heat left untouched many inequalities, functioning less as a sociotechnical revolution and more as a force that consolidated older forms of hierarchy. The educational and employment practices that made it difficult for men of lower classes and income levels to become highly paid, high-skill technologists, like programmers and systems analysts, doubly affected women of the same class and generation. The computer labor shortages of the mid-1960s slightly delayed the coming of this new technocratic order, but soon management potential, rather than computing experience, would become key to computer workers’ success. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this was not a natural evolution but a highly structured process—one that paradoxically unmoored computer work from technical skill.

Notes

17. Times (London), “Electronic Computer Demonstrated Drum Capable of Storing 250,000 Digits,” February 18, 1955; Times (London), “Computer Process for Insurance Work (Business and Finance),” March 2, 1959; Times (London), “EMIDEC Computer for Sainsburys,” May 12, 1959; Times (London), “190,000 Computer for Air Ministry Pay,” August 6, 1959; Times (London), “It’s Quicker By Computer: ‘Leo’ Works Out Rail Distances,” June 24, 1957; Times (London), “Assurance Companies Share Computer,” April 18, 1960; Times (London), “‘Eric’ Joins L.C.C. Computer Will Cost £30,000 to Install,” April 13, 1960 (the organization rented the computer for £60,000 per year, but claimed it only cost £30,000 per year because of the money it would save); Times (London), “Computer Production and Installation in U.K.,” October 4, 1960.

3 Luck and Labor Shortage: Gender Flux, Professionalization, and Growing Opportunities for Computer Workers, 1955–1967