Prestige-Driven Regendering

Definition

When an occupation is seen as menial, it can be staffed by a marginalized group without resistance; once the occupation is recognized as intellectually prestigious or economically powerful, the group that already does the work skillfully can be pushed out and replaced by a dominant group that redefines the job's core identity to exclude them. The exclusion is not driven by declining performance from the incumbents — the book's cases show the opposite — but by a shift in who gets to claim the role's status.

In the Book

Chapter 7 opens with the all-female "ENIAC Girls" — Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman — hired as the first programmers of the 30-ton ENIAC because programming was seen as clerical "scut work" akin to punch-card operation, while building the hardware was considered the prestigious "manly engineering task." The women invented core practices still used today (Betty Snyder proposed the "break point" for debugging) and, per Jennings, could "diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than, the engineer."

Thompson then tracks the reversal: women were 27 percent of computing/mathematical professions in 1960, rose to 35 percent by 1990 — then fell back to 26 percent by 2013, even as every comparable technical field (law, medicine, biology, chemistry) saw women's share rise for decades straight. As programming's cultural status climbed (Chapter 6's "rock star" and "10X" mythology), the field's self-image shifted toward the solitary, logic-obsessed male archetype, and gatekeeping — hostile code reviews, personality-based hiring filters, harassment — followed, driving women out of a field they had helped found.

Why It Matters

This gives a historical, falsifiable mechanism for occupational sex-typing that doesn't rely on essentialist claims about aptitude: status change, not skill change, predicts who gets pushed out of or into a field. It is exportable to any profession undergoing a prestige or pay shift (nursing versus medicine, teaching versus school administration, early radio versus broadcast television) as a lens for predicting where gatekeeping will intensify next.