Women, Work and Computerization

The new field of computer occupations has acquired a masculine character in a very short time, even in a period in which women's participation in the labour market increased significantly. In this article, I want to show how the computer on symbolic level became inextricably bound up with prevailing masculine values as early as the '50s and '60s. The empirical material is based on an analysis of newspaper articles on computers from this period. I will argue that the brain metaphor played an important role in transferring masculine values to the computer and to the computer worker. At the end, I will discuss other meanings that could have led to a less masculine image, but I suggest these meanings were less powerful than the brain metaphor.