{"id":6027,"date":"2016-02-15T11:18:30","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T11:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=6027"},"modified":"2016-02-15T11:18:30","modified_gmt":"2016-02-15T11:18:30","slug":"big-computers-big-hair-the-women-of-bell-labs-in-the-1960s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=6027","title":{"rendered":"Big computers, big hair: the women of Bell Labs in the 1960s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/gallery\/2016\/feb\/13\/future-women-the-bell-lab-computer-operators-of-the-1960s-in-pictures-women-in-computing\"><img src='https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/4464.jpg' alt='Picture of Bea' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Guardian has posted a set of pictures by Larry Luckham who took a camera into work in 1967 to take pictures of life at Bell Labs, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/gallery\/2016\/feb\/13\/future-women-the-bell-lab-computer-operators-of-the-1960s-in-pictures-women-in-computing\">Big computers, big hair: the women of Bell Labs in the 1960s<\/a>. That the collection is entirely of women raises some questions. As the <a href=\"http:\/\/tech.slashdot.org\/story\/16\/02\/14\/1947250\/what-bell-labs-was-like-c1967\">Slashdot article post<\/a> that pointed me to this collection puts it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What&#8217;s noticeable about the pictures, is that they are of woman. I don&#8217;t think this is a result of the photographer just photographing &#8220;eye candy&#8221;. I think it&#8217;s because he was surrounded by women, whom from his comments he very much respected and hence photographed.<\/p>\n<p>In those times, wrangling with a computer was very much seen as &#8220;clerical work&#8221; and therefore the domain of woman. This can be seen as far back as Bletchley Park and before that Ada Lovelace.<\/p>\n<p>Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Guardian has posted a set of pictures by Larry Luckham who took a camera into work in 1967 to take pictures of life at Bell Labs, see Big computers, big hair: the women of Bell Labs in the 1960s. That the collection is entirely of women raises some questions. As the Slashdot article post &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=6027\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Big computers, big hair: the women of Bell Labs in the 1960s<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,5,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics-of-data-science","category-history-of-computing-and-multimedia","category-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6033,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027\/revisions\/6033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}