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March 20, 2019 • 38 mins
In celebration of women's history month and the 30th anniversary of the world wide web, we are kicking of our third season with a two part interview with historian Mar Hicks (@histoftech). Mar's research explores the intersection of computing, gender, and labor and this first part of our interview looks at how important it is to include gender in our explorations of the past.

For more information on their research check out mariehicks.net
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Episode Transcript

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(00:00):
Hello Nasty's and welcome to she whopersisted the Nasty Podcast. I'm Elizabeth with
my co host. Well, thisseason, I don't have a co host,
and actually you'll notice a couple ofchanges this season. The first,
and let's just address it right offthe bat. Beatrice is busy. She
has another podcast in German called Grutathat looks at feminist issues in Austria,

(00:26):
and she's very busy with that.In addition, she also needs to finish
her dissertation, so she'll be focusingon her job, her other podcasts,
and her dissertation for this season.She'll be coming to visit as a guest
host here and there in the courseof the season, but we'll have other
guest hosts as well, and we'llhave interviews with people who are doing some

(00:49):
amazing work, amazing feminist work,amazing intersectional feminist work, and who are
just all around amazing people. Onething you might also notice this season is
the episodes are a bit shorter.We got some feedback from listeners that the
episodes just were too hard to digestall in an hour, an hour and
a half, two hours, Soinstead we're going to split our longer conversations

(01:14):
into shorter episodes. One other thingyou might notice this season is that there
might be a few more ads.We're trying to strike a good balance.
If any of the ads ever seemto be in conflict with what we're trying
to do as feminists and what we'retrying to do with our podcast, let
us know and we'll remove the adsimmediately. It's always most important for us

(01:38):
that we remain true to our interestsas feminists and supporting feminist causes. I
think that's all the housekeeping we have, so let's get started with the episode.
Today we begin a two part interviewwith historian Mar Hicks. In honor

(01:59):
of Women's History Month and the thirtiethanniversary of the Internet, we thought it
would be great to bring on ahistorian of gender and computing. Mar's first
book, programmed Inequality, investigated whythe proportion of women declined as electronic computing
matured and the effect that this hadon technology in Britain. Their new research

(02:24):
project investigates the exclusion of trans individualsin algorithms and is really interesting. Mar
has some really great recommendations for booksand articles to look at if you're interested
in the intersection of gender and technology. So stick around toward the end of

(02:45):
the episode for recommendations on books.Like I said, this is part of
a two part interview. So inthis episode we're looking primarily at their research,
which is super interesting, and inthe next episode we look at the
contemporary situation with gender and computing,what we can do, how we can
persist and it's not all bleak.There are people doing some really great work

(03:08):
to help raise awareness and fight thepatriarchy. Thank you for joining us for
this our inaugural episode of this seasonof She who persisted she was warm,

(03:35):
she was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted, thank you for joining
us. So do you want togo buy Marie or mar And can I
ask you your preferred pronouns? Sure? Well, I use they them pronouns,
and we can use mar for ourpurposes here. That's generally what I

(04:00):
go by. If people are lookingfor me online, you know, my
professional scholarship and stuff like that,they'd have to google Marie Hicks perhaps,
Okay, And so first I'm goingto ask you a really broad question.
Can you introduce yourself and your research? So give me basically your thirty second
elevator speech about your research. Sofirst, thanks for having me, and

(04:21):
I'm mar Hicks. I'm an associateprofessor of history at the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago, Illinois, andI do the history of computing primarily,
and what I'm really interested in isgender and labor and trying to figure out
how, for instance, like computinggoing from being feminized to masculinized really changed

(04:45):
things in the field other than justfor women. And right now I'm working
on a book about the deep prehistoryof transphobic algorithmic bias that is super interesting.
What is that entail? I mean, I know that there's a lot
there and you're just getting maybe justgetting started on the research for it.
Yeah. Yeah, it's still inthe early stages. But what it entails

(05:06):
basically is going back and you know, algorithmic biases in the news so much
today, and so it's a verypressing and current problem. And there's been
a ton of great sociological and informationstudies research and research coming out of a
lot of fields. However, Ifeel like history hasn't done the greatest job

(05:27):
of showing how this is not acurrent problem. This is something that has
existed for decades. It's something thathas existed as long as computers have existed,
and I think that once we canshow people that, then we can
show how this problem has snowballed andwe can also kind of, I don't
know, get people to the pointof realizing this didn't happen by accident.

(05:49):
These were intentional choices made over longperiods of time for specific reasons by people
in power, and that's why wehave these systems that we have today.
So it's not about like asking MarkSuck or Gerberg to please make things better
or something. You know, thisis a huge systemic historical problem and we
have to address that. And sothat's kind of my goal in writing this.

(06:14):
And so it address does it addresshow computing and algorithms can be transphobic
even like because they're not really valueneutral, right, these algorithms. Yeah,
you're totally right. They're not valueneutral at all. And the thing
is, folks always want to giveI guess, the benefit of the doubt
to the machines that pervade their lives, right because if we don't, it's
terrifying. But in fact, youknow, we have to look at how

(06:40):
we look to machines, and welook different depending on what race we are,
what class we are, what genderwe are, whether we are trans
or not, whether we are disabledor not, all of these different categories,
and so like, the part ofthe book that I'm working on right
now has to do with one particularexample of how the British government tried to

(07:05):
apportion kind of like what we wouldconsider social security benefits to trans people in
the nineteen fifties through nineteen seventies,and it kind of hinges on this one
thing that I found in the archivesthat shows that prior to the British computerizing

(07:27):
their big social welfare system, therewas actually more accommodation of trans people who
were writing to the government telling themthat they needed their records corrected essentially,
and after computerization the government actually usedthat as an excuse to say, the
computer doesn't see gender only numbers,so we're not going to accommodate trans people

(07:53):
anymore, all the while continuing totrack them through the system, saying internally
that the reason they wouldn't accommodate transpeople was actually because they consider them perverts
and they didn't want to give themsort of a tacit approval, and then
most tellingly, programming the mainframe computerthat apportioned these benefits to actually kick known

(08:16):
trans people's accounts out of the processingchain, so actually cause a programming fault,
you know, a processing error whenone of these accounts came up kick
it out, so it had tobe dealt with manually, which caused it
to be subject to greater scrutiny,greater oversight. Each of these moments was
a moment for that person's worthiness toget benefits to be reevaluated. They were

(08:41):
not allowed to just go through themachine as a man or as a woman.
They were always marked as different.Like it was basically computer othering of
individuals. I love the way youput that. That's exactly it. That's
precisely what it was. Wow,that's like a really really interesting project thanks

(09:03):
to your previous research project and yourmonograph that came out was called programmed Inequality,
and it kind of investigated why theproportion of women in computing declined as
computing matured and the effects that thishad on the technology sector in Britain.
Do you see this erasure of womenfrom histories of science and technology or do

(09:24):
you see an erasure of women fromhistories of science and technology and labor?
I mean We're We're. Our podcastis all about persisting and resisting patriarchy.
What do you see as the bestways as a historian to counter this.
I think you're one hundred percent rightthat the history of women in computing and
many other fields of work in particular, but in lots of different areas,

(09:48):
it's one of erasure, and it'sone where in fact, even the records
that have been kept off the skate, how many women wore there they were
actually doing, what the relative importanceof that was. And you see this
in a lot of different contexts.But the thing that's really interesting to me

(10:09):
about computing is that it starts outfeminized, and as it automates, it
becomes more male identified. And that'sunusual. That's the reverse of what normally
happens. Usually, as a fieldautomates, it gets seen as d skilled
and it starts to feminize. Socomputing is a little weird in that way.

(10:33):
And then, of course, becauseI worked in computing for a while
and my mother was a computer programmer, and obviously computing is really really important
today and really high status today,I started out wanting to learn more about
the fields feminized, de skilled,or I'll put d skilled in air quotes

(10:54):
origins, and at the time thiswas back in the early two thousands,
there really wasn't very much written onit, and so I decided, you
know what, I'll write about it, and then you know, the rest
is literally history, because now,of course everybody actually cares about this and
there's been an explosion of books onthe topic. Well, sure, I

(11:15):
mean your book came out at areally important moment. I feel like,
in our discussion about women in technology, the film Hidden Figures had just come
out and we really started acknowledging kindof the unsung shiros I would say,
of the early tech technological innovation.And you know, you were specifically looking
at Britain. Hidden Figures looked atAfrican American women in the US context.

(11:39):
What lessons can we draw from thecase of what happened with women in Britain
and maybe the American case as well. Sure, yeah, I really lucked
out because, as you point out, my book came out the same year
that Hidden Figures exploded onto the scene, and Margaret Lee Shtterly even was kind
enough to blurb my book book whichwas like, that's like my brush with

(12:03):
celebrity, and she's so nice.I met her at a conference once,
and her work is so important.You know. I always say to people
like, if you've seen the movieand you haven't read the book, definitely
read the book because the book,you know, don't don't judge a book
by its movie. The book doesthings that the movie just can't. It

(12:24):
doesn't have room for, it isn'tinterested in doing. And I mean,
the movie's fine, it's entertaining,but the book is really a great institutional
history of NASA and of this particularclass of workers within NASA. And the
really fascinating thing and sad thing,and this goes back to your question about
a rature, is that even thoughthere were hundreds of these women, they

(12:50):
were not really known to exist.And Margot Lee Shutterley, you know,
she knew they existed because she grewup in their community. And when she
started working on the project and lookingfor funding so she could do this research,
people disbelieved her. I've got toimagine they were they were white people.
But she's talked about how people andfunders actually disbelieved that these women even

(13:16):
existed, or at least existed inany large numbers enough to be the subject
of historical research, and I've raninto a little bit of a similar thing
with my own project. But oneof the reasons I actually work on the
UK is in part because of theavailability of records, because all of the

(13:41):
UK companies that I was looking atare now defunct pretty much, and so
I could get at their records.The US companies from that period, like
IBM, for instance, they're stillgoing strong and they don't want anybody looking
too closely at their purses. Sothere's there's there's a definite issue there.

(14:03):
And then I have to say,like, now there's a lot of tech
critique about Silicon Valley. We're undergoingyou know what people call the tech lash,
right, and it's like, now, okay to critique Silicon Valley.
But I started this project right afterthe first Internet bubble, when people had
they've been given a little bit ofa you know, a push to look

(14:26):
at Silicon Valley as maybe not asgreat as they assumed, but they still
thought this is going to be thenext great thing, and direct criticism of
Silicon Valley was not really an option, especially since after the first tech bubble,
there is this idea that oh,well, we've learned our lesson we
won't. We won't do that again, right, um and um. And

(14:48):
so I thought that, you knowwhat, let's look at a very similar
you know, historical cousin of ours, which was a fading empire sort of
in a simil position to where wenow are. They were going through that
in the late twentieth century in theUK. And I will make it implicitly
comparative, so that an unformed readeranywhere, but especially an unformed American reader,

(15:15):
can see very clearly all of theparallels and can see how this gendered
labor change, this discarding of women'stechnical talent led to terrible things in the
British context. And also we cantalk about this more how it led to
very similar things in the US context, only it was a little bit less

(15:37):
obvious because we were sort of theyou know, last man standing after World
War Two in terms of Western powers. Yeah, that's that's interesting. You
know, I used to work intechnology to information technology as well, and
you know a lot of the peoplethat I work with, even people who
had been working in the field fortwenty years, were women who were you

(16:00):
know, mainframe programmers who were nowhaving to learn how to do you know,
web developing and how to turn thosemainframe programs into web programs and like
learning all of those new skills.But they had the original technical skills.
It was just learning something completely new. I wonder to what, to what
extent, you know, we werewomen in the United States or people in

(16:25):
the United States were able to kindof run with this tech bubble thing because
a lot of people just didn't understandwhat the heck was going on. And
I think that, you know,you look at the government in the United
States and you look at the hearingsthat Mark Zuckerberg has with congressmen and senators
these days, and it's just veryclear that the most senators and congress people

(16:48):
have no idea what Facebook does,what information technology is, and how it
works. Yeah. Yeah, it'ssort of like getting a baby who's never
on outside to like understand a freighttrains. It's horrifying. And that's not
to say that, you know,I'm not claiming, oh I'm some expert,

(17:10):
but yeah, there's there's a Ithink a willful disregard and failure to
even try to understand a lot ofthese systems on the part of UM some
of our more entrenched leadership. AndI had the same experience as you.
When I was assistedman, my umcontemporaries or my colleagues who are like my

(17:33):
same age were mostly young men,and then our big bosses, who are
of a different generation, they werewomen. And that was actually, yeah,
working in that job, that wasthe germ of like, huh,
why is this And our bosses wouldsay, you know, you don't understand.
There used to be a lot morewomen around, And that was actually
like the germ of this project andwhy I started even looking into this question.

(18:02):
Yeah, so I think you wereasking about like just kind of how
do we deal with like what's goingon right now with people not seemingly understanding
what's going on with technologies? Isthat sort of what you wanted to get
into. That's part of it.I mean, what I think is interesting
about the British case is that,you know, the shift in demographics of

(18:25):
the people who were working in technologyactually led this really robust computing field and
really robust computing companies to you know, fail and no longer exist. I
mean the fact that you could getaccess to those those records because those companies
no longer existed, and you wereable to draw a line or at least

(18:48):
draw correlation between the shift in demographicsof the computing population and the decline of
these companies. Yeah. Yeah,So the British case is like this wonder
full little like Petri Dish example,and not wonderfulness sense of positive. It's
just wonderful in the sense that youcan see historical cause and effect in action.
And what happens is, you know, like they have the first digital

(19:11):
programmable electronic computers and it's a reallyfucking big I'm sorry, can I swear?
Yeah? Oh yeah, you canswear. Okay, it's a really
fucking big deal because they create themduring World War Two, specifically for the
purpose of code breaking, specifically forthe purpose of what we would now call

(19:32):
cyber warfare, to wield these computersas weapons so that they don't get invaded
and completely destroyed. You know,during the worst parts of the Blitz,
there were more people dying on thequote unquote home Front in the UK than
we're dying at the actual front.So that gives you some sense of the

(19:52):
pressure they were under. And sothis historical first is really important because it
ends up actually changing the course ofthe war. They know where and when
the Allies know where and when toland on D Day because of the intelligence
provided by these computers, which werecreated primarily by an engineer at the Post

(20:17):
Office Research station. His name wasTommy Flowers, not Alan Turing. Alan
Turing had really nothing to do withthese computers. Tommy Flowers creates these electronic
computers in the face of a lotof disbelief that they will work because people
think having thousands and thousands of vacuumtubes that's how they did the electronics at

(20:40):
the time. They think that havingso many of these fragile tubes working all
at once is going to mean thatone is breaking like every five minutes and
the machine will have no uptime.And Flowers says, if we run a
lower current through them, if webasically kind of run them at half power,
you know, we just have todo you know, kind of switch
on switch off to use these asswitches, we can make sure that they

(21:07):
won't break. And also we'll neverturn them off so they never go through
that heat cool cycle. We'll justkeep them on constantly and it works.
And the people running these machines,so programming as we would call it today
and operating and even putting them togetherwhen they arrived at Bletchley Park. These
are all women because, of coursethe majority of workers on the home front

(21:30):
during World War Two in Britain theywere all women. But the women were
doing this work not just because theywere the ones sort of left behind.
They were doing this work because thiswork was seen as okay, this is
work appropriate to women, because womenwere the original human computers. They were

(21:51):
doing human computing well before the war, where they would just you know,
they were the machine. It wasmore like a job instead of you,
instead of the name for a machine. And so then as you point out,
fast forward through the years and theBritish computing industry it's all but defunct.
It's basically imploded. And a lotof people had come forward with explanations

(22:15):
for that that had to do withBritain's broader decline and with business history.
And I'm not saying that the thingsthey said are wrong, but they were
not the whole picture at all.Because what I uncovered, and this was
actually a surprise to me. Ithought I'd go into the archives and I'd
tell a story about you know,ra Ra, there were women in early
computing, right, But what happenedwas after I saw okay, here's how

(22:40):
women get pushed out of the field. Here's why and when, and here's
how it actually starves the field oflabor causes disastrous decisions on the part of
the government and the computing industry whichthe government is trying to control and actually
lead. These decisions actually lead tothe main computer company not creating the products

(23:06):
that are needed at the time becausethey don't have enough people to run them.
So they create ever larger and largermainframes that can be run by fewer
and fewer people because they don't haveenough technical people. And they do that
at a point in time when themain frame is on the way out,
and it basically everything just collapses inon itself. So it's not like IBM

(23:29):
came in and beat them. Theywere already pretty much they had beaten themselves,
and IBM just kind of picked upthe pieces well. And this is
just such an interesting kind of intersectionof computing history, labor and gender and
how all of these all of thesefields really intersect with one another. And

(23:52):
it's important, I think, tolook at history through the lens of gender
and to look at labor history throughthe lens of gender. I mean,
where we're you know, we're celebratingInternational Women's Day tomorrow. We're recording this
on the seventh International Women's Days.The eighth and International Women's Day was all
about labor, was all about,you know, understanding women's impact on the

(24:15):
labor force. And as as agender and computing and labor historian, what
do you think the most important thingthat you are contributing to the you know,
to the history, to history generally, is by looking at things kind
of in this intersection of these fields. I mean, that's a big question,

(24:37):
but that's such a powerful question becauseyou know, like as you're as
you're saying that, and as you'retalking about International Women's Day, you know,
the image that I have in mymind is of all those charred bodies
lying on the sidewalk, the womenin the Triangle shirtwaist factory who are locked
in burned to death and try tojump out the windows to save their lives.

(25:00):
And as you point out, thatwas the basis for what became International
Women's Day. The fact that womenworkers who were not just women, but
they were working class, they weremostly immigrants, they had all these sorts
of different categories, you know,that created their their status in society and

(25:22):
made it, you know, verydangerously, dangerously low right, and they
had to fight for their rights toget to the point where, you know,
now we enjoy things like workplace protectionsand you know, a week that
has livable hours and not being lockedinto our workplaces. And I think that

(25:45):
your question is like, it reallymakes me glad that you you asked me
that and asked me in that way, because I feel like a lot of
times people don't believe that women areactually workers, that oh, maybe they
work, but they work in thehome, or maybe they work for pay,
but the work they do there issort of incidental. It's just adding

(26:10):
to you know, the families takehome pay. It's not like they're supporting
a family, or that what theydo in the workforce isn't as important as
their male peers. And that iswell, it's offensive. Of course,
it makes me so angry, itmakes it makes me very mad, and
it also is just wrong. It'sjust not true. It's not true now

(26:37):
and it's never been true historically.You know, this idea that oh,
women used to like just be theangel in the home. No, that's
not something that was true for mostwomen, not at all. This was
all sort of an idolized view ofmaybe what you know, middle classmen in
Britain in the nineteenth century, forinstance, wanted women to be and do

(26:59):
in society. But that's not thecase. And so women are workers,
and so many of the rights thatwe get in society, whether where men
or women or no matter what ourgender is, we get those rights,
sadly enough, through our participation inthe labor force and through our being sort

(27:19):
of productive economic citizens. And sowomen's history is labor history, and both
of those things are really important.So if you know, if I was
going to try to talk myself upand say, okay, what's the most
important thing I'm doing, I've heardactually from a lot of women who are

(27:41):
computer programmers today, who work inthe field right now in twenty nineteen,
and they are interested in my book, and they read my book and they
say thank you for writing that.It feels really validating. That's exactly how
it is today. It's sad.It's sad that we have not come that

(28:03):
much further than we were at,you know, fifty sixty years ago.
Yes, it is so so sad, And I'm going to bring I'm gonna
bring things up in a moment,I promise, But yes, it's so
sad because these women are saying,I look at women being pushed out of
the field in the fifties and sixtiesand the glass ceiling and the way that
their technical skills were devalued and theywere paid less and they were told this

(28:29):
isn't really a good place for youto work, and they were just pushed
out in all sorts of ways.And they say, that's how I feel
now. But here's the good part. Then they say they also got mad,
right, and they take this bookbecause books have weight and authority,
right, and supposedly, you know, the people who write them are super
smart, we hope. And theytake this book and they show it to

(28:52):
their boss, or they show itto a bunch of people in their workplace,
and they say, we got tohave a talk, okay, because
this shit has been going on toolong. And so I spoke to for
instance, like a book club atIBM where they read, you know,
they read my book, and thenI came in and I talked to them,
and um, it was very Holdon a Second's got a book club?

(29:17):
IBM Chicago has a book club,And you know what I think,
IBM actually has a company wide bookclub. So yeah, I mean the
workers who work there, like,they're not management for the most part,
you know, they're just like youand me, and they're they're trying to
they're trying to make sense of what'sgoing on and how they can, um,
you know, how they can liveand succeed as workers. So like

(29:40):
there's a lot of I think we'rerealizing there's a lot of class solidarity and
sort of um, cross industry solidaritywith tech workers once they actually start seeing
themselves as workers instead of as oh, we're sort of more management aligned.
Okay, that's that's that's really interesting, and I think it's great that you

(30:00):
know, they're reading the book,they're identifying with it, and they're using
it to make change. Yeah.Yeah, I mean I really like did
not see that coming, honestly,because if you look at this book,
it's you know, I try tomake it readable, of course, but
like it's an academic history book,but people are just so hungry for these

(30:23):
stories and it speaks so much totheir experience and their interests. Now that
you know, they swoop it up, they grab it up, and yeah,
a lot of people are actually reading, not just reading popular history,
but they're reading tough academic histories andit's making I think in some cases it's

(30:44):
making them feel bad, in somecases it's making them feel energized to fight,
and I think in all cases it'smaking them feel like, oh,
okay, I understand a little betterwhat's going on in the present, and
yeah, let's do something about that. So, speaking of books, what
are some of the most important worksto read when it comes to gender history
and what books are you kind ofalways turning to and you constantly recommend to

(31:07):
your students as kind of foundational worksof gender history. Yes, yes,
okay, so there's like that's kindof like huge. So I'm going to
actually, like I'm going to weaselit down to like gender and technology and
gender in the history of science.So one that I would recommend that we've
already talked about is Margot Shutterley's HiddenFigures. It is a lovely book and

(31:33):
it's an important book, and theerasure of black women in tech continues,
and I think we should all readabout that and know a lot more about
that. Relatedly, a couple ofthese books I'm going to tell you about
are not actually history books. They'redefinitely historically informed, but they're more what

(31:55):
we might call science and technology studiesor media studies. But it would be
really nice to pair hidden Figures,for instance, with a book like Sophia
Nobles Algorithms of Oppression, which isall about how Google, which is not
a search engine, it is anadvertising company. That's how they make their

(32:15):
money, and that's how they maketheir decisions about what information quote unquote to
give us, how that has beenreally devastatingly problematic in a lot of ways,
and in particular, how it's beenracist, how it's been misogynist and
what you would call misogynoor so likemore problematic for black women and girls.

(32:40):
And she just has a really reallyclear and compelling argument with tons of examples
about how important this issue is andit's going to be going forward. And
then there's other folks doing work alongthose lines, like Meredith Broussard wrote a
book called Artificial unintel Religence, andVirginia you Banks wrote a book called Automating

(33:02):
Inequality, and they're all about likethis current context of algorithmic inequality and algorithmic
injustice that we find ourselves in.And then going back and talking a little
bit more about history books if youare you know, if you read my
book. Of course, hey,read my book. Read my book first,
right, just kidding, But ifyou read my book, or if

(33:25):
you're interested in that sort of thingand you want to learn more about let's
say the US context, definitely goto Janet Abati's book, which is called
Recoding Gender. One of the reasonsI like that book so much is because
it's very you know, it doesn'tpull its punches, but it's also not

(33:46):
necessarily as depressing to read as alot of histories of gender discrimination. So
that's one that I always give myundergrads because I feel like it's not fair
to depress them too much. Andthen also, like you can get this
article online. I know people havelike kind of ganked it and posted free

(34:09):
online. But read Jen Light's articleWhen Computers Were Women, which is all
about the Eniac women, and thenmaybe read like the autobiography of one of
these Eniac women, Gene Bardick.She wrote her autobiography and it was published
posthumously just a few years ago,and that's a really great personal insight into

(34:32):
Okay, look at all the importantwork she was doing and her compatriots were
doing. And then look at howthey were explicitly cut out of the limelight.
Like there's this one story in thereabout how after they work for like
twenty four hours straight to make surethe eniac is ready for this big demonstration

(34:52):
where they're going to show it offand show off how it works to these
important visitors. It goes off withouta because of the work that she and
the other women have done, andnot only are they not given credit,
but as the rest of the people, the men go out to have a
big celebratory dinner, they aren't eveninvited, and they just kind of they

(35:13):
just take the train home in therain, and it's just like wow,
So these personal stories are there.Yeah, they'll they'll definitely, they'll definitely
grip you and keep you reading alongthose lines. I would also recommend Steve
Shirley or Stephanie Shirley's autobiography or memoirrather called Let It Go. And Shirley

(35:38):
is somebody that I talk about inmy book, and she actually she got
pushed out of the workforce like alot of other women when she married and
had a kid. But she startedher own software company at a time when
people didn't think of software or somethingthat you actually sold separately for machines.
She started a freelance program company,and she did it with an explicitly feminist

(36:02):
business model. So what she didwas she hired all the other women she
could find who were getting pushed out, who had these technical skills, and
she let them work from home.They had flexible, family friendly working hours,
and as long as they had atelephone and a pad of paper in
front of them, they could program. Because at this point in time,
people didn't program on computers. Youknow, computer time was so expensive that

(36:27):
you did all your programming on paper. Then it was punched onto cards or
tape and then run through the machine. So her autobiography, Let It Go,
is really it's really just an amazingstory. I think they're going to
be making it into a movie soon. She was a child refugee from the
Holocaust. She came over to theUK on one of the Kinder transport trains
as a little kid, you know, to escape being killed by Hitler.

(36:53):
And then from there, you know, she has an amazing life with highs,
like tremendous highs and tremendous lows,and it's just a very human story
that sounds awesome. Those are excellentbook recommendations. We hope you enjoyed our
interview with mar Hicks. Remember thisis just the first half of the interview.
The next episode will be the secondhalf of our interview, where we

(37:15):
talk about contemporary issues of women andtechnology. If you want to find out
more about mar Hicks, you cancheck her out on Twitter at hist of
Tech. If you want to findout more about us and our podcast,
you can reach out to us onsocial media, either through our Facebook page,
She Who Persisted the Nasty Podcast,the Facebook discussion group per Sisters,

(37:39):
the She Who Persisted group on Instagramat She Who Persisted, Twitter, She
Persisted Pod, or via email SheWho Persisted Podcast at gmail dot com.
You can also find us online,including show notes at our website She Who
Persisted dot com. If you wantto support feminist podcasting, we are on

(38:01):
Patreon and you can find that onour website. Keep Persisting and stay nasty. Bye.
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