March is the month of Dora’s birth, International Women’s Day and Women’s History month. The UN theme for IWD 2023 is “DigitALL – innovation and technology for gender equality.”
It seems appropriate to celebrate Dora, a tech pioneer who employed an almost exclusively female staff in her information services business, CASS. From the start of the 20th century, it was women who used the new technology – typewriters, telephones and calculating machines. In 1916, Dora’s Comptometer operators were all women. In the 1920s, when Dora added electro-mechanical tabulators to her business, the operators were all women. She brought in female statisticians, mathematicians and eventually programmers. Men were happy to be engineers, but their focus was on developing hardware and servicing the machines. Women used the machines and analysed the data, and it was Dora, a trained mathematician, who was the innovator, finding new applications for how the machines could be used in businesses and government departments.
In was only at the very end of her career, in the 1960s, that men started to encroach into the field of computing. The machines were no longer clerk substitutes with their operators suffering low status, low pay and no career progression. The electronic era and the introduction of programming gradually transformed computing into a career of importance. Apparently too skilled for the women who had been working in the field for years, a shift that follows the ‘boys and their (mechanical) toys’ trope. Sadly, the shift has never reversed, with men still dominating the computing industry. According to the UN, “women’s exclusion from the digital world has shaved $1 trillion from the gross domestic product of low- and middle-income countries in the last decade—a loss that will grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025 without action.”
I was fortunate to be awarded a place at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. It’s an artists’ retreat, with studios for artists, printmakers, photographers, dancers, composers and songwriters, and lovely rooms for writers. It is a big old country house, surrounded by woodland and with a lake at the foot of the lawn.
It was heaven to have a whole week to write, uninterrupted by the necessities of daily life. Perfect timing too, as a publisher to whom I had submitted my manuscript asked me to tweak the story, saying they liked it and would look at it again if I redrafted it. So I delved deep into Dora’s life and worked hard to make her story more immediate, rich in texture and immersive.
I especially enjoyed being in Ireland to do this work. Dora spent her life between Belfast and Dublin and TGC is close to the border, in County Monaghan. I was in the excellent company of some fun and creative Irish people, being treated to generous Irish hospitality. There is an augmentation effect when a group of people are all engaged in similar work, a sort of entrainment of the energies. It made it a very productive time.
A Bitter Equation 