Men have long dominated the engineering professions, with women's lower participation rates often explained as a disinclinationdownplaying how organisational structures actively exclude women. The Second World War provides ample opportunity to explore women's large-scale entry into engineering fields, as wartime labour shortages expanded women's opportunities in technical fields. Like many wartime organisations, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recruited women to fill technical roles previously barred to women. From 1941, women were trained and deployed to control rooms, studios and transmitters, and were paid and promoted on equal terms as with men-dismantling, at least temporarily, the division's gendered structure. Ultimately, over 900 women trained as technical assistants during the war, but just seventeen remained in the Engineering Division into the 1970s. Using BBC archival documents and oral history interviews, this article investigates how the BBC integrated women into technical roles, the challenges that their introduction posed to ingrained gendered structures and hierarchies, and why the numbers of 'survivors' was so low. In doing so, it argues that women's eventual exclusion from BBC Engineering in the post-war era was not a wholesale reversion to pre-war norms, but a choice grounded in BBC engineering's management structure and sense of prestige.
This special issue considers how the gendered dimensions of technology intersect with labour and media, in both historical and contemporary settings. The junctures where women have gained more access to technology,such as during the Second World War, show that a crisis that disrupts gendered labour patterns can create spaces of possibility. Yet women must still contend with deeply held notions about the relationship between technological proficiency and masculinity that cross space and time. The persistent under-representation of women in technical occupations in the media suggests that the association between masculine labour and technology remains strong. Contributors consider unpaid labour in feminist activism, women's technical work in male-dominated areas of broadcasting and photography, and the impact of technological change on women's careers in the media. New feminist methodological tools for analysing and amplifying hidden layers of media and communication work are also proposed.
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