About the publication
Girls in Tech UK is a publication about women, work and British computing. It has no membership, no chapters, no events and no jobs board, and it is not affiliated with any organisation of a similar name.
Its subject is a filing argument. Into the 1960s, the work of operating Britain’s computers — punching, verifying, operating, and coding from a diagram drawn by somebody senior — sat inside clerical grades, and those grades were staffed with women. As the value attributed to programming rose, the work was reclassified upward: qualifications were attached to it, aptitude instruments were introduced, and the people already doing it were left on the wrong side of the new boundary. The site sets out that record, and then the structural present that followed from it.
Sources and method
The rule that governs every entry is simple, and it is the reason this site exists in the form it does: a figure is published with what it measures before anything is claimed on the strength of it.
- Every figure states its population, its period and its collector. Where a number comes from another country’s workforce, the entry says so rather than quietly reading it as British.
- A distribution measure is never described as a wage comparison. Pay-gap reporting and equal pay are separate duties measuring separate things, and the entries keep them apart.
- Where no British equivalent of a widely quoted figure is published, the entry says that too. It does not substitute one.
- Historical claims are sourced in the entry that makes them. Named individuals appear only where the institutional record is clear.
What this is not
It is not advice on pay, hiring or careers, and it does not campaign. It carries no advertising; the organisations that fund it are listed on the front page and none of them sees an entry before publication.
Corrections are welcome and are made in the open. Send one here.