Journalist and Author Claire L. Evans uncovers the real story about how the internet was made
For Women’s History Month, we interviewed longtime journalist and author Claire L. Evans about one of our favorite books, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. There’s so much history in this book about how women have been at the forefront, building and creating the underpinnings of the internet at every major technology milestone in the last 200 years. Yet, those stories often go untold. Claire tells us why and gives us an inside look at some of the other things she learned as she researched for this book. You can follow Claire and her work by subscribing to her newsletter.
Jennifer: Claire, we are so happy to be able to interview you for Women’s History Month. Your book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, is an engaging and sometimes surprising account of the role women have played in shaping the Internet and the tech industry that we know today. What made you want to write this book?
Claire: Thank you! The simple answer is that it needed to exist. I was a technology journalist, and over the years I’d read all the “important” books about the history of the Internet—books that, if you took them at their word, seemed to exist in a world without women. I had a hunch that something key was missing, and I was right. As I started digging, I found that not only were there plenty of women in tech history, but their stories provided a vital counterpoint to Silicon Valley mythology, and the women themselves were bursting to tell them. Part of my sense of urgency about writing Broad Band was the fact that many of the early female computing pioneers are still with us. I knew it was essential to get their stories firsthand while I was still able. I’m very fortunate in that regard, and I benefited immensely from their wisdom. The book is alive with their voices, and on a personal level, there is nothing more grounding than spending time with older women. Many of them remain in my life, and I’m still learning from them.
Claire L. Evans
Jennifer: You cover so much ground in the book, nearly 200 years of history, so much of it unknown or overlooked. What were you most surprised by when you were doing the research to write the book?
Claire: In my book I document how women often get involved in new technological domains early in their development—long before there is an established order or hierarchy, when there is more freedom—and are gradually pushed out as their innovations and ideas become economically important. From the invention of programming to the dawn of the Web, it really has happened over and over again. I was struck, in my research, by that clockwork-like regularity. But I don’t find it surprising anymore, because every time I give a talk, someone inevitably comes up to me afterward to say something like, “This same thing happened in my industry!” That pattern of pioneering and exclusion is quite universal; it’s happened in many fields, from medicine to film editing. I can only hope that if we can learn to see it clearly, we can prevent it from happening again in the future.
Jennifer: Can you tell us why, in the mid-twentieth century, computing was considered a woman’s job and how terms like kilogirls emerged?
Claire: Before computing machines were invented, someone had to do the math! To solve problems related to maritime navigation, astronomy, and ballistics, among other things, groups of people had to work together to perform the underlying calculations by hand. These human “computers” didn’t have the prestige of mathematicians or scientists—they were workers in the math factory, brute-forcing complex problems with tedious calculations on pencil and paper. The more people worked on a problem, the faster it could be solved, and since women were paid half what male workers were paid, most computing laboratories hired women to get more bang for their buck. For close to 200 years, a computer wasn’t a thing—it was a woman. So it was only natural that by the time computing machines came along, engineers would guesstimate their horsepower or talk about how much time they took to solve problems by using terms like “girl-years” and “kilogirls.”
Jennifer: What do you think is the most important thing people get wrong about women’s roles in the history of the Internet and tech industry?
Claire: One thing I see a lot is well-meaning people suggesting that women are natural to computing because women inherently make connections and build networks. It’s especially tempting to make these kinds of claims in light of the historical evidence. Before computers, after all, women were the software, and in the early days of programming, they were the ones who figured out how to put hardware to use to actually solve useful problems. In the years since, many women have carved out roles in tech by pioneering in people-oriented spaces like online community building, hypertext design, content moderation, or user experience design. But this isn’t because of some natural affinity women have with “connection.” It’s because in computer science, people who are interested in users are marginalized! And so those places in tech have been more open to women, professionally. They’re where women have made their mark. Needless to say I think we’d all benefit from a comprehensive reconsideration of what it means to be “technical,” because ultimately software is a mechanism by which human beings facilitate tasks for other human beings, and when we lose sight of that, things go south quickly.
“Before computers, after all, women were the software, and in the early days of programming, they were the ones who figured out how to put hardware to use to actually solve useful problems. ”
Jennifer: I found the stories about women in the 1990s incredibly interesting, because while I know about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, for example, I knew very little about women from that decade and the communities they were starting and building. What struck you about this time period?
Claire: That section of the book is my favorite, too! I’m a child of the 90s, and there’s a freewheeling, punk spirit to early Web culture that’s a lot of fun to write about. But the dot-com bubble era is such an interesting analog for the moment we’re in right now, too—if you look at the enormous financial speculation, the way people were wrestling with how to build sustainable online communities without becoming commodified themselves, and the land rush for virtual space, among other timely anxieties. This was the era in which a network originally designed for academics and scientists became a public commons, and then, after a brief efflorescence of extraordinary creativity and utopian thinking, began its inexorable decline towards privatization and corporate consolidation. We’re still living in the echo of the boom, as I say in the book.
Jennifer: I wonder if you can tell us about one of the lesser known women you cover in the book and who inspired you as you did your research.
Claire: I’m an enormous fan of Stacy Horn, who was the founder of an early online community in New York called ECHO—the East Coast Hang Out. Stacy was a real pioneer, working out how to do online community on the fly. She had key insights about what it takes to create a space that is safe, interesting, and sustainable, things we’re only catching up to now. One of those insights was making sure to create private as well as public spaces online so that people could express themselves in different contexts and to different audiences. We speak differently when we speak to a potential audience in the billions than when we do to our close friends. The other great insight was to make sure moderators came from within the community, and that every conversation had two moderators: a man and a woman. That way women saw themselves represented in both the culture and the power structures of the Internet as soon as they logged on. This made ECHO one of the first places online to be hospitable to women, although Stacy would say she didn’t mean to create a safe space for women. She just wanted to build a great service for everyone. Turns out that’s the same thing.
Jennifer: How can we make sure we learn from history, that we use the past to inform the future and make sure that advancements like Artificial Intelligence are built and influenced by all genders?
Claire: The most important lesson I’ve learned from writing this book is that nothing happens in a vacuum. New technologies don’t fall from the sky. They emerge along a continuum of ideas. The Web could not have existed without decades of research into hypertext ideas conducted largely by women. Social media as we experience it today could not exist without decades of experimentation with online community-building on the early Internet, on platforms long gone. And so on. Tech history is usually told to us as a story of solitary genius and lightning moments of inspiration. But even the geniuses are surrounded by other people and their ideas. Making big things requires big communities, and that’s what’s amazing about technology, but it’s also what makes it hard to see where things come from, and more importantly to imagine where they might have gone, and could still lead. I think debunking the “Great Man” idea of history is essential, but the antidote is not necessarily a “Great Woman” history, either. It’s something more expansive, that acknowledges we are all in this together.
Jennifer: What have you learned about women in tech since writing the book?
Claire: I’ve been really lucky to share this book with audiences around the world over the last few years. I’ve learned from them that some of those same patterns of exclusion and displacement are still at play in tech workplaces, but I’m grateful to have seen positive forces for change, too, and to have met wonderful people of all genders who are committed to equity. I’ve also learned that for every story I was able to include in Broad Band, there must be a thousand more. I hope that deep history can be a strong foundation for the next generation to take on technology’s biggest problems.