Built on the Hands of Women: Data, Automation, and Gender in West Germany's Financial Industry (2023)
This article examines the history of data entry from the 1950s to the 1970s, when office automation required transforming information into computer-legible data. Often women's work, data entry was an essential step in electronic computing—one that automation proponents did not anticipate and historians have largely overlooked. Two West German cases, Allianz insurance company and Sparkassen savings banks, encountered issues when they computerized their offices. Allianz, pioneers of computerization in West Germany, unsuccessfully sought a technological solution for the data entry problem. In contrast, Sparkassen pursued a sociotechnical solution, delaying the introduction of computers until they developed technologies that circumvented the need for data entry in the long run. Before that, they employed women for data entry on a part-time basis. These cases show that routine manual data entry was—and continues to be—a crucial part of computerizing business operations.
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