Where Did all the Women in Tech Go? | BBC Ideas

0:03 There used to be more women in computing than men.

0:06 Where did they all go?

0:13 In the 1950s and the 1960s,

0:15 computer programming was decidedly women's work

0:19 but as the 1960s stretched on, women started to be replaced by men,

0:24 and not just by men, but management-level technocrats.

0:29 The gender of the field flipped because women were pushed out,

0:33 not because they didn’t have the tech skills.

0:35 And many women found themselves in the position,

0:37 of training their male replacements.

0:40 Not all of the women who were pushed out of the workforce

0:43 stopped working in computing however.

0:46 Dame Stephanie Shirley who back then went by the moniker 'Steve'

0:50 actually started her own freelance software company

0:54 and Shirley had an explicitly feminist business model.

0:59 At this point in time, most programming was done

1:01 with pencil and paper before being run through a machine

1:05 so Stephanie Shirley's workers could work from home

1:08 and they could have flexible hours

1:09 that allowed them to take care of children and families.

1:13 One of these workers, Ann Moffatt,

1:15 programmed the black box flight recorder for the Concorde.

1:20 And you can see her programming at her kitchen table

1:23 while her young daughter looks on.

1:26 But many other women just left the field entirely.

1:30 This produced an enormous skills shortage and a huge labour shortage.

1:34 Meaning that the people available to do the important work

1:37 of computerisation were suddenly too few in number.

1:42 As a result of this, the British government decided that they needed

1:46 to change the design of the computers that they were using.

1:50 Since there weren’t enough people to run them,

1:52 they would concentrate and centralise computers.

1:56 In conjunction with the Ministry of Technology,

1:59 the British government forced a merger of all of the remaining

2:03 successful computing companies

2:05 and this created one big company that was supposed to provide

2:09 the government and the entire nation

2:11 with the kind of huge centralised mainframes

2:14 that could be run by the small number of technocrats

2:18 who were now remaining.

2:20 The problem with this however

2:22 is that by the time the machine was delivered

2:24 the mainframe was on the way out,

2:27 and even though ICL's line of computers

2:29 was highly technically advanced,

2:32 it wasn't something anyone wanted to buy anymore.

2:35 This effectively destroyed the British computing industry

2:39 and today we see similar things going on.

2:42 Discrimination continues to wreck high-tech economies

2:45 and high-tech labour markets

2:47 and the results reverberate out into the rest of society.

2:51 Right now we see in the United States

2:53 Silicon Valley having a day of reckoning in terms of how they hire,

2:57 promote and decide to design their technologies.

3:01 All of the talent that is lost hurts the industry and hurts the economy

3:06 but what's more important is that

3:08 these people lack a voice in designing critical infrastructure

3:13 that we're all going to have to live with.

3:15 It can undermine the principles of democracy.

3:18 By looking at examples from the past,

3:21 we can find out not just how to build better technologies

3:24 but how to construct fairer societies.