Discrimination in IT

An American academic contributed to the Google misogyny debate on The World This Weekend last Sunday. She blamed the decline in the UK IT industry on our failing to recognise that women could program.

I feel that was too simplistic. As I wrote in a comment on Peter Black's blog in response to another suggestion for our loss of a lead in various aspects of computing:

We were still pioneering computer developments into the mid-1960s - and US was never far behind anyway. After the war, Turing had continued to work on computing at NPL and others from Bletchley Park took their expertise into industry and academia. So while they may not have been able to publish, nothing was lost - apart from the electronic valves from Colossus!

Three things did for us in my opinion: a) the Americans were better at marketing their machinery (sales to the big retail banks were key); b) they used the embargo on sales to iron curtain countries to their advantage; c) they maintained indirect government support for their industry while Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine abandoned ours.

I am glad that she placed on the broadcast record that the civil service agreed on equal pay for general service grades in the 1950s (though she did not realise that it would take about five years to achieve!) well ahead of other institutions*. However, she seemed to believe that machine grades, which were excluded from the 1954 equal pay agreement, incorporated computer programmers. In fact, the definition covered typists and, later, the people who pushed buttons and loaded paper tape and punched cards into computers. Programmers were drawn from executive grades, where equal pay certainly did apply. Now, here, I believe, is the insidious sexual discrimination which the American advocate missed. In order to be considered for direct entry as an executive officer, at least two GCE 'A' levels were necessary. It is now public knowledge that examination boards applied a fudge factor to girls' GCE results to pull them down to the same level or below those of the boys. In turn, this would have reduced the field for recruitment into data processing, where there was already a bias towards men. This was a shame, because I can vouch from personal experience that the women could at least hold their own with the men in civil service IT. One imagines the situation was similar in commercial computing.

On the subject of discrimination, Britain's ICT had a policy of excluding Jews from visible positions, because they had some lucrative contacts with Middle Eastern nations most of which had even stricter anti-Jewish policies than obtain now. I recall that it was a sore point with the IBM people we met in the 1960s.

*According to research by an academic Liberal Democrat, this advantage has been lost after the Thatcher/Heseltine reforms, which outsourced most traditional functions as well as allowing individual departments more freedom in setting pay rates.