Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

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.