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Claire L. Evans knew something was missing.
As the child of an Intel employee, the tech writer and musician—who some might know better as a member of formerly Portland-based electro-pop outfit YACHT—had early access to all sorts of gizmos, including the internet. But while nerding out over tech history books, she noticed a distinct lack of women's voices and stories.
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"There's this thing that happens when you read books that do not include women enough times—you begin to believe they weren't there," she says. "I had a feeling they might have been there."
Beginning with a series for the news site Motherboard, she began telling stories of women in tech. That research gradually morphed into Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio/Penguin, 288 pages, $27). It offers a history of computing with those missing pieces in place. From Ada Lovelace's early computations to all-women programming teams in the midcentury to today, women have been at the forefront of technological innovation.
WW spoke with Evans about hypertext, the gendering of labor, and the ways the internet could've been a vastly difference place.
WW: Early in your book, you write that the word "computer" initially referred to a person, not an object. When did that switch happen?
Claire Evans: The emergence of the Scientific Age, if you will, required a lot of mathematical labor, which we did not have machines to do for us. So early astronomy, ballistics, maritime navigation—all these calculation-intensive pseudo-technological areas—they all required math that was too substantial for a single individual to do. And so large-scale mathematical calculations had to be done by networks of people working together in this kind of factorylike way. Women were predominantly doing that because they were cheaper than men to hire. It was seen as menial mental labor. And it went away essentially parallel to the invention of the mechanical computer, which happened independently.
Women were the first programmers, but now it seems to be a field dominated by men. Why did the gendering of the work change?
It's really important for women in tech and women who use tech to understand this core fact— that computing is absolutely and originally our domain. In the '60s, women were half of the workforce in the computing industry. Women earned 40 percent of the computer science degrees at American universities until 1984. And that's kind of when that number started to dive and kept diving.
There's a lot of the usual stuff: wage disparity, lack of mentorship, a structural unwillingness to make a space for child care. But largely it came as a shift in the professionalization of programming as an industry. When it was very young as a field, there was no educational background you had to have. People got jobs as programmers because they were clever with puzzles, they were good at math. It was really a field that was kind of populated by misfits. But in the '70s, they started talking about "software engineering," which is a phrase that has a lot more professional gravitas and, implicitly, was biased toward people who were coming from engineering backgrounds, which was predominantly men at the time.
Women created some fascinating precursors to the World Wide Web. What might the digital realm look like had one of these caught on?
I can't predict the parallel future that might have happened had different things taken place. But one of the things that really knocked me out doing the research for this book was just the way that it rewrote my conception of how the internet could be. One of the women that I profiled, hypertext researcher Wendy Hall, talks about the web as being this massive laboratory experiment, and we're the mice running around in this maze. The internet, the web are the way they are because of countless small decisions made in the moment by people, and driven by very human needs and desires, and informed only by the context and the circumstance of their moment. When you talk to the early internet people, on both the technical and cultural side, they're just as stymied and weirded out as us about what's going on with the internet today. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a way to judge the relative hotness of incoming Harvard freshmen, and now he's the most powerful man in the world. Nobody meant for that to happen.
Hypertext is a really explicit example of that. It presents this structural difference in the way our primary platforms in the 21st century might have worked. But there's no way of knowing if it would have exploded at the same level as the web did. The web became the biggest thing in the world because of its relative user-friendliness and its simplicity, and the fact that it was free. The hypertext programs that preceded it, which were designed predominantly by women, were more complex, more sophisticated, more nuanced—more human, perhaps—but maybe they would not have been as commercially successful as the web was. There's no way of knowing. But I think the more I investigate the past, the more I think anything is still possible.
SEE IT: Claire Evans appears at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., powells.com, on Wednesday, July 25. 7:30 pm.