Very eager to get my hands on this after reading the following paragraphs: Programming was not always such a manly field, by the way. It was originally a field for women, and not just because it was invented by one, Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s. The human “computers” on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos were women; so were the “Eniac girls” coding for John von Neumann in the 1940s. Chandra recounts the “masculinization” of the industry through male-oriented aptitude tests that led to an influx of what one analyst called “often egocentric, slightly neurotic” programmers disproportionately equipped with beards and sandals. It reminds him of something quite different at first blush: the gender politics of the British Raj. The colonizers deployed a rhetoric of effeminacy against the colonized. “The British ‘cult of manliness’ had been an essential component of the creed of Empire,” Chandra writes. “Intelligence and intellectual capability were inextricably intertwined with masculinity; women and all others who exhibited symptoms of femininity were fuzzy-headed, illogical and easily overcome by emotion; they were incapable especially of scientific reasoning and therefore self-knowledge and progress. The state of the world — women without power, Englishmen ruling Indians — bore out the truth of these propositions.” Two cultures, indeed.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:41:15 +0000
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