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Britain’s sexist campaign to sell computers

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By exploiting women, British companies gained all the benefits of powerful mainframes with little labor overhead — and no long-term commitment to their computing workforce.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/brita...computers/

EXCERPTS: In 1959, a computer operator embarked on an extremely hectic year, tasked with programming and testing several of the new electronic computers on which the British government was becoming increasingly reliant. In addition, this operator had to train two new hires with no computing experience for a critical long-term project in the government’s central computing installation. After being trained, the new hires quickly stepped into management roles, while their trainer, who was described as having “a good brain and a special flair” for computer work, was demoted to an assistantship below them.

This situation seems to make little sense until you learn that the trainer was a woman and the newly hired trainees were men. Yet this is not simply an example of unfair labor practices. It is part of a larger story about attempts to shape the newly developing digital economy.

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. “Equal pay for male and female workers is unlikely to be accepted by industrial concerns,” he wrote in one, urging employers to hire women, 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.”

This was at a moment when the clerical workforce of both the public and private sectors in Britain was heavily feminized and becoming even more so; because of this, most early computer operators were drawn from this pool of pseudoclerical labor. Nearly half of all young women leaving school went to work in offices by 1967, and of these, many went into computer operation and programming work. This was key to selling machines, because while wages and salaries in the aggregate had nearly tripled over the past 15 years, gross profits of companies had little more than doubled. Women continued to be seen as the best financial bet for all office work, including much computing work. But the catch was this devalued both computer work and the women doing it — eventually leading to industry-wide problems.

Computer companies quickly realized that highlighting workers’ gender could be a potent selling point. [...] Dressed in ladies’ business attire, they 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...

[...] Throughout this period ... 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. As more machines became electronic, however, subtle changes in advertising style crept in. ... 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 60s progressed.

In many later images, the formula is reversed: The machines 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 60s 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 — by nature low-paid and temporary — was itself was being marketed as a key part of computerization.

[...] In addition, 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 60s, computer marketing added sexuality to the pitch by differentiating one operator from the masses and foregrounding her, even to the exclusion of the machine. Using sex appeal strengthened the shift already underway in advertising from focusing on machines and workers to focusing primarily on workers...

[...] 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 the SUSIE computer came with a 130-page programming manual gives some indication of how inaccurate it was to refer to the operator as a typist... (MORE - details)
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