Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534536/recoding-gender/ ↗
Abbate investigates a historical inversion that most people in technology take for granted without examining: how programming went from being classified as clerical "women's work" in the 1950s and 1960s to being culturally coded as masculine by the 1980s.
Drawing on oral histories and institutional records, she traces the mechanisms — hiring tests biased toward certain personality profiles, university pipeline changes, professional identity construction — that gradually redefined who belonged in computing.
The book avoids simple narratives of exclusion and instead shows how gender was actively recoded through organizational decisions, aptitude testing regimes, and the professionalization strategies of an industry seeking higher status.
Abbate's earlier work on the internet's history gives her an unusually grounded understanding of the technical context, which prevents the analysis from floating free of the actual work being done.
Central argument
Abbate argues that women's declining representation in computing was not a passive drift but the result of specific, traceable institutional decisions: aptitude tests calibrated to favor particular personality profiles, shifts in how university programs recruited and credentialed practitioners, and a deliberate professionalization strategy that repositioned programming as high-status technical work — and, in doing so, as masculine. The core finding is that gender coding in computing is a constructed artifact of organizational choices, not a reflection of innate aptitude or natural market sorting. What makes the argument sharp is that she shows the same work — writing code — was classified as clerical when done primarily by women and redefined as engineering once men dominated it.
Critique
Because Abbate builds substantially on oral histories and institutional records from the U.S. context, the analysis risks overgeneralizing from a specific national and corporate ecosystem — the mechanisms she identifies (Bell Labs hiring practices, U.S. university pipelines) may not transfer cleanly to explain parallel or divergent patterns in the UK, Eastern Europe, or India, where women's participation in computing followed different trajectories. A sharper account would need to grapple with why some institutional environments resisted the masculinization dynamic, which would either strengthen or complicate her causal claims about what specifically drove the shift.
Why it matters for product
CPOs routinely make decisions about team composition, role definition, and hiring criteria that feel neutral — calibrated to 'craft' or 'product sense' — but Abbate's analysis should prompt scrutiny of whether those criteria were themselves constructed around a particular practitioner profile that got retroactively treated as the standard. More concretely, when organizations define what a 'good' product manager or engineer looks like through structured interviews, take-home tests, or seniority ladders, they are running exactly the kind of aptitude-filtering regime Abbate dissects, with compounding effects on who builds the product and therefore what the product assumes about its users.