Women’s work: how Britain discarded its female computer programmers

an article by Marie Hicks for the New Statesman

Britain once led the world in electronic computing. But when the industry squeezed out female employees, it wrote its own epitaph.



If the rise of computing is one of the biggest stories of the twentieth century, then the failure of the nation that invented the electronic computer to capitalise on it is undoubtedly one of history's most important cautionary tales.

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers deployed by the British at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day and the Allies’ win in Europe. At a time when the best electronic computing technology in the United States was still only in its testing phase, British computers literally changed the world.

After the war, British computing breakthroughs continued, and British computers seemed poised to succeed across the board, competing with US technology on a global scale. But by the 1970s, a mere 30 years later, the country’s computing industry was all but dead.

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