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2015 | Book

Connecting Gender, Women and ICT in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective Read chapter Read first chapter

Connecting Women

Women, Gender and ICT in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Editors: Valérie Schafer, Benjamin G. Thierry

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : History of Computing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This important volume examines European perspectives on the historical relations that women have maintained with information and communication technologies (ICTs), since the telegraph. Features: describes how gendered networks have formed around ICT since the late 19th Century; reviews the gendered issues revealed by the conflict between the actress Ms Sylviac and the French telephone administration in 1904, or by ‘feminine’ blogs; examines how gender representations, age categories, and uses of ICT interact and are mutually formed in children’s magazines; illuminates the participation of women in the early days of computing, through a case study on the Rothamsted Statistics Department; presents a comparative study of women in computing in France, Finland and the UK, revealing similar gender divisions within the ICT professions of these countries; discusses diversity interventions and the part that history could (and should) play to ensure women do not take second place in specific occupational sectors.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Connecting Gender, Women and ICT in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective
Abstract
Cross-analysing the problem of ICT with women and gender’s roles on a long-term perspective, as this collective book aspires to do, may seem challenging. As described in some pioneering historical works, the very notion of computing as a construct calls for a nuanced understanding. Great care is required to avoid amalgams that could introduce an artificial continuity that has no evidentiary basis between human computers, keypunch operators or today’s women labourers in computing (with all the diversity within the milieus of industry, public and private research, education, etc.). Therefore, creating a dialogue that includes diverse ICTs, diverse contexts and various European countries may make this all the more difficult. But the choice to embrace multiplicity seemed relevant from several angles that are discussed in this introductory chapter.
Valérie Schafer, Benjamin G. Thierry

Networks and Empowerment. Introductory Remarks

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Telegraphy and the “New Woman” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe
Abstract
This article explores the history of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of class and gender. It brings together approaches from social history and the history of finance with communication studies. The article demonstrates that our understanding of telegraphy as a masculine undertaking in terms of science, technology, and technology-in-use needs to be expanded. Contemporary discourses of telegraphy included practices of exclusion for the woman engineer and the female telegraph user based on constructions of femininity as “the other.” Yet, telegraphy also afforded women new avenues of independence, which resulted in an expansion of the domestic sphere. Middle-class women in particular used the opportunities telegraphy offered as a means for employment as a female telegraph clerk or investment in telegraph shares. At the end of the nineteenth century, telegraphy thus helped the “new woman” carve out a new social geography for herself.
Simone M. Müller
Chapter 3. Airing the Differences: An Approach to the Role of Women in the Spanish Free Radio Movement (1976–2014)
Abstract
The free radio movement appeared in Spain in the late 1970s, right after Franco’s death, claiming for a new model of doing and understanding communication. Taking advantage of the new sociopolitical situation and with clear references in both French and Italian movements, hundreds of small, alternative, free radio stations appeared all over the country, making the 1980s their golden decade. This article explores the ways this movement established a series of relationships with feminism and women attending to its two main representations: women-related programmes and women’s groups. The article deploys, mainly, a diachronic perspective, analyzing the development of this relationship from the late 1970s until today (as the movement is still alive and struggling), although it also attends to address its transnational features, as free radios have been an international phenomenon since their inception and these women’s groups have very often established international networks.
José Emilio Pérez Martínez
Chapter 4. From Marie-Claire Magazine’s Authoritative Pedagogy to the Hellocoton Blog Platform’s Knowledge Sharing: Between Gender Construction and Gender Appropriation
Abstract
When Marie-Claire magazine was first published in 1937 in France, it broke new journalistic ground as the first written format directed at women. Despite its favourable reception, this type of publication, now commonly referred to as a women’s magazine, is regularly decried as a vehicle for transmitting stereotyped models of a femininity that is confined to domestic life and superficial appearances. From a diachronic perspective, the participative web – ‘women’s’ blogs in particular – offers key areas of observation of what women do when they self-express directly to other women. Do they fall along the continuum of women’s magazines’ editorial style, or rather, do they break with those magazines’ gender codes and conceptions?
Alexie Geers

Gendered Representations. Introductory Remarks

Frontmatter
Chapter 5. The Sylviac Affair (1904–1910) or Joan of Arc Versus the Demoiselles du Téléphone
Abstract
In April 1904, the well-known French actress Ms. Sylviac had her phone service suspended by the telephone administration after being accused of insulting the demoiselles du telephone – France’s then exclusively female staff of phone operators, who failed to connect her to the number she requested. The major newspapers (Le Matin, Le Temps, etc.) quickly transformed Ms. Sylviac into a symbol of helpless subscribers forced to turn the other cheek before an all-powerful, monopoly-abusing administration. The real question became whether telephone operators should be considered officials receiving special protections in cases of job-related insults. Beyond the actress’s personal situation, the case highlighted the new balance of power being established between subscribers, the telephone administration and its employees.
Dominique Pinsolle
Chapter 6. The Representational Intertwinement of Gender, Age and Uses of Information and Communication Technology: A Comparison Between German and French Preteen Magazines
Abstract
Gender, preadolescence and the use of information and communication technology are not stable and static entities in the field of media. Rather, they are constantly shaped by images and texts. This chapter aims to examine their representational intertwinement and to cross-analyse gender and age imaging with ICT use. The primary issue treated in this paper concerns the way preteen magazine imagery ‘marks’ ICT use according to gender and age (and vice versa). Are certain technologies and their usage patterns associated with a particular gender? How does media imagery participate in the mutual shaping of gender, technology and age group? In different national contexts, to what extent does imagery of computers and video game use contribute to modelling preadolescence, an age category that did not exist even a few decades ago? This text seeks to respond to these questions by drawing on the results of an exploratory research on ICT imagery found in German and French preteen magazines over the last 30 years.
Marion Dalibert, Simona De Iulio

ICT and Professionalization. Introductory Remarks

Frontmatter
Chapter 7. From Computing Girls to Data Processors: Women Assistants in the Rothamsted Statistics Department
Abstract
Over 200 women worked as computing assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department during the twentieth century. They were employed in the analysis of field and laboratory experiments and in the examination of the returns of agricultural surveys. Before World War II they did calculations with pen, paper, slide rules and electromechanical calculating machines, but during the 1950s, when the department underwent an early process of computerisation, their tasks shifted to data processing. Only sparse records exist on the work of these women, and their contribution to the activity of the Rothamsted statistics department has never been assessed, consigning them to invisibility. Combining the literature currently available on laboratory technicians with the one on human computers and data processors, the paper will provide a longue durée perspective (1920s–1990) on the work of the female assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department, addressing two distinct aspects. On the one hand it will examine how the tasks of these women evolved with the computing technologies available in the department. On the other hand the paper will reflect on the invisibility of these assistants, who are never explicitly accounted as contributors to the scientific activity of the Rothamsted statistics department, despite being a conspicuous component of its staff.
Giuditta Parolini
Chapter 8. The Gendering of the Computing Field in Finland, France and the United Kingdom Between 1960 and 1990
Abstract
This chapter documents the role that women played in the computing field in three different European countries from the late 1960s into the early 1990s: Finland, a latecomer to the computer industry which was then deemed of national importance, France which boasted several computer manufacturing companies and where IT service companies played an important role in the early history of computing, and the United Kingdom, also involved in computer manufacturing, but where the public sector played a major role. We will see that despite national differences, similarities exist concerning the role women played in the computer industry and that the masculinisation of the profession can be attributed to similar causes. Initially, jobs were considered unskilled and marked out as women’s work. When women acquired the necessary skills to play a more important role, various forms of discrimination slowly discouraged them from staying in computer science. The study of these three countries at the moment when computing was introduced into the public and private sectors and became a major tool for management and strategic decisions shows how software activities were socially constructed as masculine.
Chantal Morley, Martina McDonnell
Chapter 9. Breaking the “Glass Slipper”: What Diversity Interventions Can Learn from the Historical Evolution of Occupational Identity in ICT and Commercial Aviation
Abstract
This chapter examines parallels in the evolution of two occupational identities – commercial airline flying and ICT work – and the implications for current diversification interventions. We begin by conceptualizing occupational identity and diversification through the “glass slipper” metaphor. We then demonstrate the empirical potential of this framework with a cross-case analysis of how these dynamics are at play in the historical evolution of the aforementioned professions. Finally, we consider how these cases, weighed together, implicate scholars and practitioners, especially research on technical-scientific work and so-called diversity interventions in ICT occupations.
Karen Lee Ashcraft, Catherine Ashcraft
Chapter 10. Gender-Technology Relations in the Various Ages of Information Societies
Abstract
From “domination” to empowerment, gendered uses of information technologies appear in a variety of situations and interpretations. What is added to the history of technology by their social studies, and what is offered otherwise by the critical input of feminism on this field, is the idea that relations between humans and technologies (gender relations among them) are never set in advance but instead the object, as much as the end game of the analysis, as shown by Judy Wajcman. Yet the “seamless fabric” (with reference to Hughes’ work) interweaving the social and the technological and tying together gender and power relations is enduring; the role of historians is to acknowledge its lasting existence.
Delphine Gardey
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Connecting Women
Editors
Valérie Schafer
Benjamin G. Thierry
Copyright Year
2015
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-20837-4
Print ISBN
978-3-319-20836-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20837-4

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