Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
indeed, those who did pursue professional careers in computing often
became programmers and thrived at it. A few women, Grace Hopper
and Betty Holberton of UNIVAC as well as Ida Rhodes and Gertrude
Blanche of the National Bureau of Standards in particular, continued to
serve as leaders in the programming profession. But despite the success
of the ENIAC women in establishing a unique occupational niche for
the programmer within the ENIAC community, programming continued
to be perceived as marginal to the central business of computer develop-
ment. By nature of their gender (female) and education (nonscientifi c and
nonengineering), the early programmers remained isolated from their
engineering and scientifi c managers. If software was admitted to be
important, hardware was considered to be essential.
The confl ation of programming and coding, and the association of
both with low-status clerical labor, indicated the ways in which early
software workers were gendered female. In the ENIAC project, of course,
the programmers actually were women. In this respect programming
inherited the gender identity of the human computing projects in which
it originated. But the suggestion that coding was low-status clerical work
also implied an additional association with female labor. As Margery
Davies, Sharon Strom, and Elyce Rotella have described, clerical work
had, by the second decade of the twentieth century, become largely
feminized.
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This was particularly true of clerical occupations that were
characterized by the rigid division of labor and the introduction of new
technologies. Some of these occupations carried over directly into the
computer era: the job of keypunch operator, for example, had been
thoroughly feminized long before it became associated with electronic
data processing.
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And although today we do not associate the work
of keypunchers with the work of the computer programmer, in the
1950s and 1960s the differentiation between keypunch operators and
other forms of computer work was not always clear. In any case, the
historical pattern of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been that
low-status occupations, with the exception of those requiring certain
forms of physical strength, have often become feminized. In terms of the
ENIAC, for example, the telephone switchboardlike appearance of the
ENIAC programming cable-and-plug panels reinforced the notion that
programmers were mere machine operators, that programming was
more handicraft than science, more feminine than masculine, more
mechanical than intellectual. The programmer/coder continued to
occupy an uncertain position within the nascent association of computer
professionals.
