Sexual Harassment in Tech is as Old as the Computer Age

Tekla Perry writes: Historian Marie Hicks, speaking at the Computer History Museum talks about how women computer operators and programmers were driven out of the industry, gives examples of sexual harassment dating back to the days of the Colossus era, and previews her next research.

Hicks has started looking at the bias baked into algorithms--when did it first cross from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government’s main pension computer. She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was “specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a ‘known transsexual.’”