If you’re looking for women in the history of technology, look first where it makes life better, easier, and more connected. Look for the places where form gives way to function. A computer is a machine that condenses the world into numbers to be processed and manipulated. Making this comprehensible to as many people as possible, regardless of technical skill, is not an essentially feminine pursuit. Nothing is. That being said, the women I talked to all seemed to understand it implicitly and to value it as fundamental, inalienable, and right.
Il y a quelques années, j’avais déposé le nom de domaine <informaticienn.es> pour publier une poignée de portraits des pionnières de l’informatique, en me disant que ce serait l’affaire d’un weekend de quatre jours. Quatre jours plus tard, je n’avais pas écrit la moindre ligne, mais décuplé la liste des développeuses, conceptrices et chercheuses ayant joué un rôle dans l’émergence du secteur. C’est un bel échec, parce qu’il prouve que j’avais tort (les informaticiennes ne sont pas rares) en ayant raison (mais elles sont fort méconnues).
Claire L. Evans le montre fort bien, quoiqu’elle enjambe rapidement la période séparant Grace Hopper et Jean E. Sammet, celle des premiers calculateurs numériques, de Stacy Horn et Marisa Bowe, celle des premiers sites web. L’histoire des informaticiennes des années 1970 et 1980 reste à écrire, je suis persuadé que nos interfaces graphiques seraient encore plus hostiles qu’elles ne le sont déjà si elles avaient entièrement été conçues par des mecs. Il faudrait même que ce soit une histoire collaborative, parce que mon projet et son livre ne font entendre qu’une seule voix, or c’est la diversité des profils féminins qui enrichit l’informatique, bien plus que la figure stéréotypique du geek barbu.
Cela n’enlève rien au plaisir que j’ai pris en lisant Broad Band. C’est un livre utile : on ne répètera jamais assez que les premiers informaticiens étaient des informaticiennes et même que les premiers ordinateurs étaient des ordinatrices1. C’est aussi un livre rassérénant : la bienveillance qui se dégage de la réunion des fondatrices du Project One me fait dire que les incels qui passent leur journée à nier les symptômes de leur dépression sur les réseaux sociaux ratent tout de même quelque chose.
Je ne veux pas dire que l’informatique devrait être plus féminine, pour ne pas dire plus maternelle, parce qu’elle ne devrait pas simplement être binaire, vaste programme dans un domaine qui ne connait rien d’autre que les bits2. Mais je suis certain que l’informatique devrait être moins masculine, pour ne pas dire masculiniste, parce qu’elle ne doit plus être unaire. Tout est informatique : si nous voulons que le monde nous ressemble, alors l’informatique doit nous ressembler.
Notes
Et Jacques Perret avait proposé de traduire computer par « ordinatrice » :
Human computing thrived as a stopgap between the emergence of large-scale scientific research and the capacity of hardware to carry out its calculations; eventually, the tireless machines that emerged from the spike in computer science research during the Second World War wore down their competition. After that war, the machines took over, decisively and permanently, shifting the definition of the word “computer” for the first and last time. The job description, which once required a unique cohesion of human effort, changed too: onetime human computers went from rivals to keepers, no longer executing the functions of the machine but rather programming those functions to be executed.
Betty beige :
Beyond the C-10 code, Betty made two more significant contributions to computing while she was working at EMCC. The first was cosmetic: she persuaded the engineers to change the UNIVAC’s exterior color from black to the oatmeal beige that would become the universal color of desktop computers (yes, I have Betty to thank for my dun-colored Dell).
Quand l’informatique est devenue une affaire d’ingénieurs, au masculin, bien sûr :
The most significant change they made, arguably, was semantic: programming, they decided, would heretofore be known as software engineering. As such, it would be treated like a branch of engineering rather than a rogue, wild-blooming field roamed by fiercely independent, self-directed misfits and women. Engineering is a job with clear credentials, not a shadowy priesthood. This change signaled a larger renegotiation of computing’s professional status that would unfold through professional journals and societies, hiring practices, and certification programs throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The more the discipline professionalized, the more it grew implicitly masculine. The introduction of formal educational prerequisites for programming jobs, for example, made it harder for self-taught programmers to find employment—a change that penalized female candidates, particularly those who might have taken time off from school to raise children, above all.
Un rappel utile à l’heure du machine learning qui apprend de plus en plus des contenus créés par les machines :
There’s an expression in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. Fill a machine with nonsense, and it will cook it up for you without judgment, executing commands precisely as dictated. Feed it truth, and it’ll do the same. It doesn’t care about the signal’s nature. Meaning is our business; the computer is a mirror that reflects us back to ourselves, and whoever controls it molds the world in their image.
Un autre web était possible :
Perhaps if the foundational myths of the city’s technology culture, which so influences the rest of the world, included things like the Social Services Referral Directory, that revolution might have had a different flavor.
La technologie fait le monde :
When we create technologies, we don’t just mirror the world. We actually make it. And we can remake it, so long as we understand the awesome nature of the responsibility. The more diversity there is at the table, the more interesting the result onscreen, the more human, as Stacy Horn would say, bite me, the better. There’s no right kind of engineer, no special plane of thought that must be reached to make a worthwhile contribution. There’s no right education, no right career path. Sometimes there isn’t even a plan. The Internet is made of people, as it was made for people, and it does what we tell it to do. We can remake the world.