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In-Depth Information
that fewer than 60 percent of EDP school graduates were able to land
jobs in the EDP fi eld.
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Making Programming Masculine
One unintended consequence of the uncertainty in the labor market
for programming personnel refl ected in—and in part created by—the
widespread use of aptitude tests and personality profi les by corporate
employers and vocational schools was the continued masculinization of
the computing professions. We have already seen how the successful
(re)construction of programming in the 1950s as a black art depended,
in part, on particularly male notions of mastery, creativity, and auton-
omy. The increasingly male subculture of computer hacking (an anach-
ronistic term in this period, but appropriately descriptive nevertheless)
was reinforced and institutionalized by the hiring practices of the
industry.
At fi rst glance, the representation of programming ability as innate,
rather than an acquired skill or the product of a particular form of tech-
nical education, might be seen as gender neutral or even female friendly.
The aptitude tests for programming ability were, after all, widely distrib-
uted among female employees, including clerical workers and secretaries.
And according to one 1968 study, it was found that a successful team
of computer specialists included an “ex-farmer, a former tabulating
machine operator, an ex-key punch operator, a girl who had done sec-
retarial work, a musician and a graduate in mathematics.” The last, the
mathematician, “was considered the least competent.”
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As hiring prac-
tices went, aptitude testing at least had the virtue of being impersonal
and seemingly objective. Being a member of the old boys' club does not
do much for one's scores on a standardized exam (Except to the extent
that fraternities and other male social organizations served as clearing-
houses for stolen copies of popular aptitude tests such as IBM PAT. Such
theft and other forms of cheating were rampant in the industry, and
taking the test more than once was almost certain to lead to a passing
grade.)
Yet aptitude tests and personality profi les did embody and privilege
masculine characteristics. For instance, despite the growing consensus
within the industry (especially in business data processing) that mathe-
matical training was irrelevant to the performance of most commercial
programming tasks, popular aptitude tests such as IBM PAT still empha-
sized mathematical ability.
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Some of the mathematical questions tested
