“Understanding this as a labor class, rather than through the lens of a few remarkable individuals, sheds light on the importance of gender as a formative category in technological organization and design. It forces us to rethink many of the assumptions of computer history narratives that hold up individuality and innovation as key explanatory elements. It also provokes a reconsideration of how histories of computing sometimes reflexively and unconsciously privilege those with the most power and implicitly endorse an ahistorical fiction of technological meritocracy. That the workers in this field were disproportionately white is no more a coincidence than the fact that they were overwhelmingly women. Throughout history, it has often not been the content of work but the identity of the worker performing it that determined its status, and these workers, while below their male peers, still occupied a position of privilege compared to other women….

… Histories like this offer examples that help us think about where increased dependence on computerization and digital labor forces may lead in the future. The construction of classes of ostensibly deskilled high-tech workers continues to enable the boom-and-bust cycle of technical advance and shape the social patterns that cohere around these systems” (16-17).