The forgotten queens of the Internet

by time news

Time.news – In the history of the Internet, women hardly appear. They mostly resemble undefined figures in the background. Users, not inventors, who only in some cases become inspiring muses in adventurous stories of men and machines.

This is the theme of ‘Connection. Women’s History of the Internet ‘(Luiss University Press, 2020). the book by Claire Evans, activist, tech journalist, writer, but also a Grammy nominated singer.

The experiment is to subvert the story, giving back to women – who helped found the network as we know it – the place that each of them deserves.

From Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who in the first half of the nineteenth century modulated numbers in the first mechanical computer algorithm, to Grace Hopper, tenacious mathematician and pioneer of computer programming on digital computers, from Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, who developed an early version of the Internet in the 1970s, in Stacy Horn, who founded one of the first social networks from her New York apartment.

Claire Evans talks about this on Sunday 18 April at 6 pm during the extraordinary edition of the International festival in Ferrara in live streaming on the weekly’s facebook page.

“Writing this book, for me, was inevitable – Evans tells Time.news – I grew up in a family with computers; my father worked for INTEL. As an only child, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the computer and thanks to that I became a writer ”.

But how did the idea of ​​Connessioni come about?

“I was fascinated by cyberfeminism, a time that coincided with my early years online, but which I completely missed when I first started hanging out on the Internet. So I thought that if there had been a colorful and glamorous feminist movement online in the 90s and it took me decades to find out, who knows what else was I missing? A lot, it seems. The more I looked at the history of computing, the more I discovered stories of women, spanning centuries. There was so much material that I knew nothing but a book could come out of it. And there are actually more stories in this story than my book can contain. I hope other writers continue my journey ”.

How come these women “who did the business” like men have always been on the margins of history and have been forgotten?

“They weren’t on the sidelines at all. It is important to understand that computing has historically been dominated by women. Before the invention of mechanical computers, networks of women working together in human processing offices performed the brutal mathematical work that made the scientific age possible. In World War II, the women assigned to run the first mechanical computers invented programming out of thin air; after the war they managed the programming teams of the first commercial computer companies and were instrumental in the development of programming languages. In the 1960s, women represented half of the workforce in the computer industry and 40% of computer science degrees at American universities until about 1984 were obtained by women ”.

It seems impossible that their traces have been lost in the shared narrative. How did it happen?

“What pulled women out of the picture was wage disparity, a lack of protections for the first generation of female programmers out of the workplace, a structural reluctance to make room for childcare, and a shift in professional credentials. and in the educational requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. In part this is due to the increased commercial potential of the sector. Several historians of technology have suggested that the professionalization of the field led to its implicit masculinization. If it started out as a female field, it had to be masculinized. This was a fairly recent event; it happened over the course of just one generation. It seems to have set a precedent for male domination in technology that has only strengthened over the years, thanks to marketing, advertising and movies “

In your research you have sometimes had the opportunity to meet women who have made the history of the Internet, what was it important for them to highlight?

Part of my sense of urgency in writing this book is due to the fact that many of the early computer pioneers are still alive. I knew it was essential to get their stories in first person as long as I was still able to interview them. I was very lucky in that respect, and I benefited immensely from their wisdom: the book is alive, with their voices and, on a personal level, there is nothing more precious than spending time with older women. Many of them are part of my life and I am still learning from them.

Speaking with them, did you identify some issues of greatest urgency?

As I have chosen to expand my definition of “tech work” to include things like online community building, multimedia content creation, information science, and political organization, the book’s protagonists represent a wide range of perspectives. . However, they share common themes. Above all, it seems that everyone was interested in users, in those places where technology touches human life in meaningful ways. Perhaps not surprisingly, information technology has always marginalized people interested in users. Whoever deals with it is not seen as a “technician”. And today we are living with the consequences of that thought. There are no technological solutions to social problems; to build a technology that serves humanity, we must consider human beings.

Reading her book, one perceives that her narration does not want to be a denunciation as an end in itself, but an attestation of the presence and claim of the work of these women. Was this the intent?

Yes of course. My book is not a controversy; it is a corrective. I try to give space to the other people in the room. We will never have a complete picture of our history if we focus myopia on just one demographic group. The perspectives and contributions of women can help us understand our world more deeply. I wanted to create something expansive; I wanted women to have a story that wasn’t just about fighting sexism, even though that has always been an underlying motivation. One of my personal mantras is “don’t fight the darkness, bring the light and the darkness will disappear”. I hope the book can make it happen, in a small part.

The marginalization of women’s activity does not happen only in the technological field, unfortunately. Many theories have developed, especially in the business world, from the glass ceiling theory to the labyrinth theory, which try to explain why women see their careers interrupted or left on the sidelines. What do you think?

In my book I document how women often get involved in new technological domains early in their development – long before there is an established order or hierarchy, when there is more freedom – and are gradually expelled by men as they go. their innovations and ideas become economically important. Whenever I give a presentation on this topic, inevitably, someone comes to me afterwards to say something like, “This same thing happened in my industry too!”. The specificity of my technological history is quite universal, it seems; the same patterns have been repeated in many fields, from medicine to video art. I can only hope that if we understand what happened in the past, we can prevent it from happening again in the future.

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment