User:Alice/More words

Comparative Essay

Question - is there a deeper, natural connection between women and technology, particularly between women and software? Does software have a gender?

Selected texts:

   The Future Looms - Sadie Plant
   When Computers Were Women - Jennifer Light

This essay is meant to compare and discuss two different texts relating to women in computing. Both essays were written by women, and both were published in 1999. The first text considered here is 'When Computers Were Women', by Jennifer Light, an essay discussing women's contribution into the technology world during and after the second World War. The second essay is 'The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics', by Sadie Plant. In this case, the author looks back at the computational icon of the 19th century, Ada Lovelace, and draws the relationship between women and computers through the practice of weaving.

The main theses of this essay relates to the idea that women and software are somehow interconnected. The two texts take two different approaches to the 'feminine' aspect of software development. One deems it inherent to the female spirit, while the other looks at gendering an occupation, a process that diminished its importance in the eyes of the general public and the media. It is important to note that, even though both texts were written by women, they often present the points of views of the men that were also present in the same context.

Both essays make reference to two real-life examples of women working in technology. Plant focuses her essay on the well-known Ada Lovelace, today an icon of women in computing, who worked with Charles Babbage in the 1800s on his Analytical Engine, a computer that could perform simple calculations. Respectively, the second essay presents the work of women in technology during and after the second World War, particularly on the ENIAC computer, which calculated ballistics trajectories. In both cases, women with great mathematical skills were assigned the software side of the project, while the men were in change with designing and building the hardware. In the case of the ENIAC, a large number of recent female graduates were hired due to the shortages in male workforce. This was a consequence of men being sent to war, a purely practical economical reason for women to replace men in their previous positions. Ada Lovelace, on the other hand, was a highly privileged woman with a natural affinity to mathematics and computing, which led to her involvement with the Analytical Engine. Therefore, we are looking at women from different time periods and contexts, who got involved in technology for very different reasons. Here, we can also highlight an important distinction between the viewpoints of the two essays—the first one looks at the relationship between women and software from a philosophical perspective, the second one focusing on a more material viewpoint.

The idea that software and women are interlaced is developed in both texts, although from very different perspectives. Sadie Plant dives deep into history, looking at how weaving, a very sophisticated and programmatic practice of arranging threads into a particular patters, has always been associated with women. Rather than being dismissed as "women's work", as it is in the case of ENIAC, the importance and complexity of weaving is clearly recognized. Moreover, the design of Babbage's Analytical Engine is based on the design of the first automated loom, which used punch cards to record patterns of weaving, much like the algorithms used in programming. Plant states that, since weaving came so naturally to women throughout history, programming should have the same kind of connection.

In contrast, the programming work women were doing during World War Two, even though just as intricate, was seen as less important than whatever men were working on. The assumption that software simply reproduces the same notions and computations over and over again is clearly meant to suggest that the work that is put into programming is menial and of less importance than that of building hardware. The male engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics considered that doing computational work was a waste of their skills and time, and that these tasks should be assigned to women instead. Thus, women and software both were considered to be working in the service of men, the software being a subordinate of the hardware.

Both weaving and computational work required, then more than now, working in a particular rhythm. Mechanization has generally transformed the natural rhythms in which women were weaving and making calculations by hand, and machines have taken over production in many areas where women used to work manually. When such developments occur, the manual work that came before, and ultimately helped this development take place, is often overlooked. This was the case of ENIAC, whose software was based on, and built through the manual work of women. The machine's achievements were ultimately praised completely independently of all the labour behind it. The software was seen as an invisible layer, hidden inside the physical machine build by the men, working in the interest of the man and his machine. Surprisingly, in the case of Ada, her legacy lived on way further than that of Babbage, through the ADA programming language used by the US Defence Department.

The two perspectives of the relationship between women and software are extremely different. On one hand, the complexity of software development is inherent to the way in which women have always worked. This viewpoint recognizes the work of women at the level of excellence at which they were performing, as well as the abstract aspect of their work which made it less approachable for men. On the other hand, the repetitive aspect of programming is seen as a form of clerical work with less value than engineering in Light's essay. In this case, "women's work" is no longer considered complex and abstract, but rather menial and unimportant, compared to the work that men were performing, and therefore pushed into anonymity. In both perspectives which look at women's work in software, the work is given a gender, female. I believe the conceptualization of software as weaving is more than a metaphor, but a view based in reality. An example here would be the women working on the Apollo software which was hand-woven to contain all the 0s and 1s necessary for takeoff into space. Dismissing the work of women as simple and repetitive is a gross underestimation of the complexity of the patterns they create. To conclude, by comparing the two selected essays, the answers remain unclear.

Bibliography:

Light, Jennifer S.(1999). When Computers Were Women. Technology and Culture 40(3), pp. 455-483.

Plant, Sadie(1999). The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics. Body and Society 1(3-4), pp. 45-64.

The Future Looms

The future looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics - Sadie Plant

Sadie Plant begins her paper with the beginnings of women in technology, personified through Ada Lovelace. Plant puts Lovelace at the center of her work, with which 'the histories of computing and women's liberation are first directly woven together'. In fact, only a century after Ada's death did women first make their way into the software scene. As the author beautifully puts it, after the 1940s 'both women and computers begin to escape the isolation they share in the home and office with the establishment of their own networks'. Moreover, these networks of women in computing only began to come together in the 90s, bringing the beginnings of cybernetic feminism. The symbolic thread that bounds together women and computers brings forward the idea that the history of the computer comes from the history of the loom, of weaving. Stories and texts and code and networks are woven just as threads and fabrics, and the future of women and computers 'looms over the patriarchal present'.

Ada's brilliance and commitment to her work shine through in a number of letters and notes written by and about her. She came to know and began to collaborate with Charles Babbage after going to see his Difference Engine in 1833. She often contributed to his work, her work ethic and perseverance far surpassing his. She found her role as wife and mother to be reductive, and would sometimes mention her disinterest in that part of her life. Even though her health was often frail, leading her to be considered, among other things, hysterical (she had cancer), she looked at the inability of her body to be healthy from a philosophical perspective, considering it a peculiar addition to her being, rather than a defect.

The computer as loom

The complex interlacing of threads in a loom relates to the complexity of data that needs to be fed into a computer in order to perform even the simplest of operations. The first automated loom, build by Jacquard in the 19th century, used a system of punch cards that worked as a software which stored the information and allowed only one human to work on the loom. Babbage's Analytical Engine was also inspired by the punch card system, in which the machine would select the cards it needs to perform a certain operation: the first simulation of memory. The first programmable computer to reach the attention of the military was based on Babbage's designs, and programmed by Grace Hopper, the women who wrote the first high-level language compiler.

The connection between women and weaving can be traced back as far as Greek Mythology. As Margaret Meade describes in her study of Tiv women, Weaving was part of the identity of being a woman, as imposed by patriarchal societies. The bodies of women and were deeply connected with the movements of the loom, where the rhythm of a woman's hand dictated the weaving. So, when a woman cannot, or does not have to weave anymore, what does she become? Perhaps, a computer programmer, a weaver of data.

The woman as software

Despite their undisputed importance in the development of humankind, the role of women in history has been largely overlooked. The woman was always the provider for the man, his mirror, his medium, his servant. Ada Lovelace's work started as annotations, translations and elaborations on the work of men, 'Weaving her influence between the lines'. In this sense, the software is also a tool used by the man in his interests. And perhaps there is no wonder that the women's liberation movement has developed interconnected with the growth of software technologies, the latter giving the former a platform to branch out on and create a global network.

Looking at the works of Freud on femininity, of women as merely imitators, and the feminist work of Luce Irigaray, Plant draws a connection to the symbol of the man who denies the materiality of cyberspace, the world behind the veil of pixels, the womb behind the machine, the woman behind the man. The material conceals the immaterial because it is flawed and complicated. Behind the veil, the immaterial continues to evolve and multiply, going further away from man's control, becoming a dangerous woman. She goes further by saying that 'Misogyny and technophobia are equally displays of man's fear of the matrix.' The women, as the immateriality of cybernetics, can no longer be contained. Ada Lovelace's legacy lived on further than the men's she worked with, in the immaterial shape of a software, ADA, hidden deep inside of a military machine.

Conclusion: The connections made by the author between the woman behind the veil and the software behind the computer are fascinating and deeply relevant. They talk about the way history is more than often presented through the eyes of the man, with many less obvious details being concealed or simply forgotten.

Other work