Marie Hicks

Marie Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and modern Europe, specializing in the history of computing. Her book, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017) investigates how Britain lost its early lead in computing by discarding the majority of their computer workers and experts--simply because they were women. Her current project looks at transgender Britons' interactions with the computerized systems of the British welfare state in the 20th century, and how these computerized systems determined whose bodies and identities were allowed to exist. Hicks's work studies how collective understandings of social progress are defined by competing discourses of national prestige, labor, and productivity, and how technologies often hide regressive values while espousing "revolutionary" or "disruptive" goals.