Ray Ann Bucu
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UN § 08 · THE UNCOUNTED
The Computers
For a century, computer was a job title held mostly by women, and the transition to machines took the credit with it.
Before it named a machine, computer named a person who computed. From the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth, large calculations in astronomy, ballistics, navigation and physics were performed by teams of human computers working from prepared instructions, and those teams were predominantly women.
The Harvard Observatory employed a group from the 1880s to classify stellar spectra from photographic plates. Their output was the Henry Draper Catalogue. Annie Jump Cannon devised the classification scheme still in use, with spectral classes ordered by temperature. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, working on variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, established the relationship between the period and the luminosity of Cepheid variables.
That relationship is the reason anyone can measure intergalactic distance. Hubble used it. The expansion of the universe was established on it. It is difficult to name a more consequential single result in twentieth-century astronomy, and Leavitt was employed at thirty cents an hour to measure the brightness of dots on glass plates.
The pattern repeats through the century. The ENIAC programmers, six women who worked out how to program the machine from wiring diagrams because no programming existed yet, were largely absent from the accounts for decades and were not invited to the celebration dinner. The computing groups at NASA's Langley centre, whose work was documented much later. Grace Hopper's work on compilers, which is the argument that a machine could translate human-readable instruction into machine code.
The structural explanation is more useful than an account of individual slights. Computation was classified as clerical work: repetitive, rule-following, requiring accuracy rather than insight. Clerical work was low-paid and available to women. The people who defined the problems and published the results were classified as the scientists.
Then the classification stopped matching the work. Programming a machine turned out to require exactly the insight the clerical designation denied, and by the time this was generally understood, the field had been reclassified upward, and the reclassification was accompanied by an influx of men and a change in who was hired.
That sequence is documented in the employment statistics. The proportion of computer science degrees in the United States awarded to women rose through the 1970s, peaked in the mid-1980s at around thirty-seven percent, and then fell for two decades. The decline coincides with the arrival of the home computer, marketed overwhelmingly to boys, and with the emergence of a culture that assumed prior experience.
That is a suppression mechanism with no exclusion rule at all. Nothing was closed. An expectation of prior familiarity was established, the prior familiarity was distributed unevenly by marketing, and the intake changed.
It is the ranking mechanism, arriving in a job market. No decision, no list, no author, and a measurable distributional result.
The word computer changed what it referred to, and the people it used to refer to did not come with it.