Interview with Dr Juliet Webster

Dr Juliet Webster describes her childhood as one that involved much relocating around the country. She says: “I moved around the country a fair bit as a kid so my schooling was very fractured. However, that’s meant that I’ve lived all over the place and have continued to live all over the place as an adult. I suppose I’ve got used to travelling, so I’ve never been fully settled.”

Juliet’s father was the child of a sub-postmaster. He educated himself after the Second World War, gaining his PhD through part-time study in the evenings. Juliet’s mother came to the UK in the 1930s as a refugee with her family from Germany, she worked as a secretary all her life.  Apart from her parents and her grandfather, Juliet had no extended family in the UK.

Juliet attended several different state primary schools as the family moved around the country, before settling to allow her to attend just one secondary school, of which Juliet says: “I have to say that my secondary school was not greatly inspiring and I didn’t perform very well at school at all.  … It was a school that was very intent on getting people into university, preferably Oxbridge, and if you didn’t particularly show an inclination to study a fairly mainstream set of subjects or go to university, they weren’t particularly interested in you.”

At that time, Juliet’s interest was in drama, as she explains: “I didn’t excel at it, but I loved doing it. My school didn’t offer anything along those lines; no drama at all.  I started a drama club myself at school. I did Saturday classes as a teenager in one of the drama schools in London. I loved all that and had it in mind to pursue a career in drama if I could, but I don’t think I was that good and I think you have to be good and lucky.”

At school, Juliet was advised by the careers adviser, who was also the history teacher, to be a secretary. After completing her A levels, she took the advice and started a secretarial course, she adds: “I couldn’t see any other avenue open to me. My parents quite rightly said to me, at least then you’ve got a way of earning a living if you decide to pursue drama and it doesn’t work out.”

 Juliet had no experience of computers at school or on her secretarial course where she learned to use an electric typewriter.

At the same time as studying her secretarial course, Juliet chose to study A level sociology in the evenings. She says: “I thought it would be nice to take an A level in something that wasn’t available to me at school. From comments that my mum made and her perceptions I had the feeling that this was a really potentially interesting subject of study.  I was very drawn to it, I don’t really know why.”

The course was a turning point for Juliet and on the advice of a friend, she decided to apply to university to study sociology. She says: “I didn’t think they would have me because my school had drummed into me the notion that I would never get into university.” Having made the decision, Juliet had just two days to submit her UCCA forms for a place to study. She was accepted at Bradford University to study social sciences. She adds: “I chose Bradford partly because I really liked the content of the course on offer and partly because I wanted to live in the north of England.  I’d seen the north of England in kitchen sink dramas, and I was quite intrigued by how different it was from what I knew. I suppose it was the sociological interest again, I wanted to live somewhere that was completely different from what I’d grown up in.”

Juliet enjoyed her course, in part because of the content and in part because the other students on the course were mostly mature students. She adds: “The students I was studying with, who were my peers on my course, were very serious indeed about what they were doing and it made me very serious too.  I found it so stimulating being around people who’d experienced the world of work properly and made an active decision to come back into education.  I had some really wonderful tutors and the course focused on the world of work and industry and it just gelled with me.  I loved learning about work, industry, industrial relations, industrial technology, industrial change.”

Having gained her degree, Juliet decided to study for her doctorate for which she moved into an engineering department having won a grant from the Science and Engineering Research Council. She says: “When I say it was an engineering department it was actually an interdisciplinary department that at undergraduate level taught students a mixture of various engineering disciplines, technical stuff, and social sciences in relation to industry.  So the students would be learning how to become engineers, but they’d also be learning about the social context of production and work and they’d be learning industrial relations, how workers experience the world of work. They got a grounding in industrial sociology as part of the undergraduate programme, and that same interdisciplinarity was reflected at postgrad level as well. There were a lot of engineering postgrads in that department and I was one of the few social scientists, but there was this active effort to bring more social scientists in and to try and create a department that had a real vibrant dialogue between the different disciplines. It was a really path-breaking department and degree programme that I was quite proud to be attached to.”

Through her studies and love of research, Juliet realised that the academic life was one she wanted to remain in. She says: “I got the appetite for research doing my first degree, and I just really wanted to dig inside the question of what was happening in the world of work.” At the same time, Juliet began to get interested in technology as she saw the first computers introduced into the workplace in the early 1980s. Speaking about how she settled on the subject for her PhD which was entitled ‘The Impact of Word Processing on Secretarial and Office Work in the UK’, Juliet adds: “What drew me in was studying the sociology of industry and industrial relations. As part of that I had to go back into literature like Marx’s Capital, and look at how he was writing about the labour process and the introduction of machinery into the workplace in the 19^th century.  I was really interested in what kind of resonances that work had for the automation of the workplace in the 20^th century and the lessons to be drawn from the mechanisation of the workplace to the automation of the workplace. By the time I got to do my PhD I was in a department where technology was very much central to what was being both taught and researched.”

 Her decision about her research focus on was also influenced by her involvement with an activist group in West Yorkshire that was assessing the introduction of computers in workplaces in the area and their implications for women.

Juliet adds: “It was a feminist group that was examining and publicising the impact of new technologies on women’s work. Our activities included teaching WEA classes – Workers’ Educational Association classes – to women and trade unionists about the spread of computers in workplaces and their implications for women workers. That helped me narrow down and focus my own research.”

She adds that her own personal experience of working as a secretary also influenced her subject matter.

Speaking about her research, what she saw and what has happened since, Juliet says: “I don’t think I did anticipate what has happened in the last few years, I certainly didn’t anticipate things like the internet, and I don’t think I anticipated the kind of growth of, consumption labour that has displaced so many service jobs done by womenin the last century.

“I concluded that the impact of computerisation on women’s work was shaped by the way in which the workplace was organised initially when the computers or word processors were introduced.  In other words, a lot depended on the nature of the job in question.  There was a huge, huge difference between different categories of women’s office work. Secretarial work, on the one hand, involved a whole number of other functions that were not technical, that were service work.  Much of secretarial work  involved activities that were not really at all related to the requirements of the organisation, but served to create and sustain the gendered power relations of the workplace, for example, taking the boss’s shirts to the cleaners and buying Christmas cards and presents for the family, that kind of thing.  Domestic labour, basically.

“Secretarial work also involved what we would now recognise as managerial tasks.  Secretaries invariably carried out tasks that were responsible but undervalued, so they were rarely paid or valued for the skills and especially knowledge that they exercised.

At the other end of the office hierarchy was the typing pool. “The introduction of word processing in those two areas was hugely different because typing pool work was already much more routine, much more repetitive, less varied. Word processing augmented that routinisation, accentuated it, reinforced it.

“What I didn’t anticipate, and what’s happened since, is that the whole secretarial function has largely been eliminated, and the tasks displaced upwards.  The economics of that are intriguing, and perhaps accounts for the so-called ‘productivity paradox’. Typing as a dedicated job has also largely disappeared.”

Following the completion of her PhD, Juliet began an academic career working at various universities, including Edinburgh University, the University of East London, and at the European Commission in Brussels. Asked what her career milestones are, Juliet says: “The position at Edinburgh was a huge milestone because I was working with a superb team of researchers in a national research programme called the Programme on Information and Communication Technologies, in which there were six universities; Edinburgh was one of those.

“Each of the universities had a different focus on information and communication technologies, as they were then known. Edinburgh’s focus was on what was called ‘the social shaping of technologies’.  We were taking issue with the notion of technological determinism – the idea that technologies develop independently of their social settings, that they have natural paths of development according to the most technically efficient solutions, and that they then have independent impacts.  That was the prevailing wisdom and is still widely believed.

“What we did was to show that technologies developed precisely because of the social relations within which they are situated: political agendas, economic programmes, social relations of one kind or another.  So technologies don’t simply have impacts on societies, but rather arise from the social relations implicated in their development. Technologies and social relations are then in a mutually-shaping dynamic all the time.  They’re much more interrelated than technological determinism would suggest

Juliet was invited to work in Brussels at the European Commission to advise a High Level Expert Group on the gender dimensions of the ‘information society’ and to guide their policy recommendations on gender issues.  The Group produced a report called Building the European Information Society for Us All.  She adds: “The remit of the group was to cover the application of information technologies across a whole number of social policy areas, including employment, work and work organisation, training, education, the labour market, social cohesion, health, culture, media, democracies; a very wide social area. For me, that was really decisive because it not only showed me how information technologies are relevant to almost all social policy areas, but it also gave me a very useful insight into European-level policymakers’ concerns emerging policy priorities at the time, and particularly with regard to gender.”

Following her time in Brussels, Juliet led a cross-national research project, examining the use of information technologies by women working in very low-paid service jobs.  Juliet adds: “The issue that we were intrigued with, and that the European Commission was particularly interested in, was whether women in grade jobs in service work which were being computerised (for example, the more repetitive jobs in banking and financial services, and in retailing), were getting opportunities to upskill and progress to better jobs. Or were they simply being displaced? We did detailed panel studies with women in eight countries in Europe, to examine how women’s technological work was evolving and varied from north to south and east to west.”

Of the outcome, Juliet says: “That is difficult to put simply because, not surprisingly, different European countries are vastly different from one another. The picture, on the whole, has not been terribly positive. We didn’t see too much evidence of women progressing as a result of the introduction of these systems, even in some of the more gender-equal countries like the Nordic countries.

“Some countries, like Britain and to a lesser extent the Republic of Ireland, were rapidly adopting forms of work organisation typical of US-style shareholder capitalism (a process that has certainly been continued and extended since we did the research).  The women in these countries were only provided with the training that they needed to do a fairly restricted set of job-specific operations, that is, training that was very limited indeed. It was the barest minimum necessary to do a job, and certainly didn’t foster ‘knowledge work’, as the rhetoric had it.

“We also saw the application of what we might call a ‘smiley culture’, where service workers are trained to ‘say hello, offer help, say goodbye’, ‘greet and smile’, or ‘show empathy’ to the customer.  Call centres were just opening up at the time and they were a huge, huge area of academic interest. A lot of call centre work in the early days was dominated by women, and their work was highly procedural and highly scripted. The training that they received was in areas like showing empathy, holding open and closed conversations, and knowing when to close down a conversation. Each interaction with each customer was very tightly timed.  So, we were seeing the growth of the white collar factory.

“Services-based technological change has speeded up since that research was done. We now see the almost total demise of skilled work in retail services, which did exist in certain countries. For instance, in Germany if you worked in retailing you did a three-year apprenticeship, which included skills like merchandising and artistic elements like learning to display goods, none of which you would receive in British retailing.”

Following on from this project, Juliet’s research examined equal pay and job evaluation schemes, and also took her into the field of women’s representation in computer science. She adds: “I was doing consultancy for the European Parliament, but I was gradually transitioning into looking at the under-representation of women in computer science professions. I did a large project with another European research group, again, comparing different countries and trying to understand how women who did have careers in computer science experienced those careers.

“We were very interested in the culture of the sector and the culture of the computing workplace.  So we examined women’s work in software development, in sectors where computing skills were paramount and women were under-represented.”

Juliet runs through the history of women in computing from its heyday to today and some of the reasons for the decline. She explains: “In the early days of computing, computers were women; the word computer referred to the women.

“There are so many very well-known examples of key women software developers, from Ada Lovelace onwards, who are very well-known to women computer scientists and feminists working in the field, but they’re not very well known generally.

“In the Second World War and immediately after, women were computer scientists and worked in places like Bletchley Park as codebreakers, and as programmers of the ENIAC computer in the United States.

“However, something happened that conferred an anorak culture on the world of computing. Partly because of that, many women left, but as my subsequent research has tried to show, women also disappeared out of the field because the working conditions in computer science became hostile to women’s participation.

“It became a field in which you needed to be prepared to work very long hours, which made family life and domestic labour very difficult to reconcile.  You needed to be able to work off-site sometimes, and work at a client’s premises for prolonged periods of time – if you were going to install software systems, or troubleshoot problems, for example. There was a real ‘long hours culture’ in computing in the 1990s, 2000s and onwards, that was very discouraging to many women.

“I did some subsequent research with my colleagues in the Open University of Catalonia, in which we looked at the lifecourses of women working in computer science jobs. We tried to identify the reasons why the minority of women who entered the field subsequently dropped out, and at what points in the life course they dropped out.

“We found that they dropped at two key points in their working lives.  One was at maternity; the first stage at which women left computer science in their droves. The second point was in mid to late career, round about the time when they were seeking to consolidate their careers.  It’s never been entirely clear to me quite why women drop out in number at that second point.  It’s quite easy to see why they drop out at the first point; a computer science job is incompatible with having primary caring responsibility for children.

“What happens in mid to late career is that women then join the ‘sandwich generation’: they start assuming responsibility for the care of both elderly family members and the next generation, their teenage children.  That’s almost a more difficult point in these women’s lives, because their teenage children can require just as much care as smaller children.  We know only too well that the care sector is threadbare in very many countries, and particularly so in Britain, and that means that a lot of care work falls on the shoulders of principally women family members who do it as an invisible labour.

“That just makes a demanding job – one that requires a great deal of personal time and out-of-hours working – very difficult to sustain.  I think the development of the internet has exacerbated that whole process, because it requires  professionals to be on call, on duty and online twenty-four hours a day. It just makes the demands upon workers in general almost relentless.”

In 2009, Juliet was invited to work with the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at the Open University of Catalonia.  “I was invited in the first instance to go and work in the Gender and ICT group as a visiting professor, to bring in some research and do it there. That was a standard arrangement that they had with a number of international researchers, of whom I was one.”

 After the first year, Juliet was invited back annually and finally invited to take over running the group. She adds: “I was delighted to do so. The group’s attention at that point was shifting into women in science and we successfully secured a substantial European contract to build an online portal for resources on gender, science, technology, engineering and maths.  We were aiming to build a repository for all the written and other material that existed in this field, so that activists and others only needed to go to one place.”

Juliet says of the institution: “It was trailblazing.  It was set up by a sociologist called Manuel Castells who was originally invited by the Catalan government survey the spread of the internet in Catalonia in the mid-2000s.  Having done that work he was then invited to set up a research institute, which was the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). He created a number of research groups within the institute, of which the Gender and ICT group was one.

“Gender is not something that every male academic pays any attention to, so Castells deserves a lot of credit for making that mainstream within the institute and giving us resources to do our work.

“As we did our work and hold public events with external invitees, it became clear to me that there were indeed some very senior Spanish women in IT, principally working in American multinationals, as executives. I found it very refreshing because I hadn’t met so many senior women in IT in Britain as I did in Spain.” This underlined the conclusion that women have very varying IT career trajectories in different European countries, and globally.

In 2012, Juliet joined a European Union COST (Committee on Science and Technology) Action, chaired by Professor Ursula Huws. The Action, a network of researchers across and beyond the EU, was established to chart the dynamics of ‘virtual work’.  Juliet explains: “Virtual work in this context referred to any work that was mediated through the internet or that involved working on the internet or on communications technologies.”

 The research network involved representatives from thirty countries focusing on different aspects of virtual work via working groups. Juliet led the group examining newly-emerging virtual occupations (for example, influencers, content farm workers, ‘micro workers’, and gig economy workers). She says: “I was particularly interested in the conditions of work for micro workers and the gender dimensions of that work. Microworkers are people who bid for their work online through a platform, carry out the tasks they are contracted to perform, and then deliver the results online. The work ranges from very minute or repetitive tasks, for example, tagging photos for websites,  organising people’s filing system, to professional work, like accounting and editing.

“The point about it is that it’s highly precarious, it’s unprotected, it relies upon the worker negotiating a fee as an individual. The people who do that kind of work are very vulnerable to exploitation, and of course they don’t know what the competition is when they tender for a job or a piece of work – it can be anywhere in the world. So suddenly people are pitched into a global labour market without realising it.

“That introduces a whole new area of what we call ‘precarity’ at work, but for a lot of women, precarious work has been the stuff of their working life for many decades. For example, women who have worked in any kind of freelancing job or any kind of insecure work (which might in the past have been manual work), that’s now being replicated online.  So, I think virtual work exhibits some of the gendered features of work in general.”

 In 2016, Juliet became a full-time carer for a family member, so experiencing at first hand the tension between doing paid work and unpaid care labour  – an issue she had long been writing about.

Asked about the impact of her research, Juliet says: “My impact has probably been principally in shaping people’s thinking about how gender and technologies work together and how technology has embedded particular social and gender relations; I don’t think it has advanced gender equality.”

Asked about her view that technology has not advanced gender equality, Juliet says: “It seems to me that the world of computer science and computing technologies is extremely double-edged.  On the one hand I see fantastic stories of women path-breakers, entrepreneurs, etc and that’s really encouraging.  On the other hand, the world of computer science is still very anoraky, it’s riddled with sexual harassment.  …  So, it’s not yet a good place for women to work in some respects.

“In this country, I think there’s a noticeable policy silence on the question of women and computer science, and encouraging women into computer science and encouraging the sector to adopt working practices that are more amenable to the lives of women and men.

“Paradoxically, Covid may have done more to facilitate the entry of women than anything, simply because it’s created an environment in which flexible working is much more routine than it ever used to be.  For me there is a question about whether a career in computer science as it’s currently constituted is desirable, and if it’s not desirable, what is to be done to make it so? That responsibility, as things currently stand, largely lies with the employers.”

“The participation of women in formal computing education still needs to be boosted, women are still a tiny minority of computer science and engineering students, so interventions have to happen through multiple agencies.  Currently it’s employers who are largely making the changes, women entrepreneurs and big organisations, those are the ones that are doing whatever good practice is being done.  Little or nothing is going on at the public policy level as far as I can see, currently.  That’s quite dispiriting.

“I think careers advice has improved vastly in the last few years.  That’s one cause for celebration.  In this country, it was really poor and much of it fell to untrained teachers to do. There was very little understanding of the kind of new jobs that are emerging in the information society, or in virtual work or the internet economy. There are very new emerging occupations, and it’s difficult for careers advisers to be across these developments and adequately advise school students about what they might do next. People are learning as they go along.”

Asked if IT is the route to riches for women, Juliet replies: “For some women it is,  there are clearly examples of women entrepreneurs who do make it big.  I don’t think it’s a route to riches for all women by any means, or even most women, and there is, a whole area of work with IT and telecommunications technologies that’s really very low paid.

“What concerns me as much as anything, it is the way in which the spread of the internet, freely available Wi-Fi, mobile telephony and digital devices means that people can be ‘always on’.  Even if you’re working in a professional area which is reasonably privileged in terms of working conditions, the likelihood is that you are feeling the pressure to be always on, to be clearing your email inbox the whole time, to be responding to multiple demands through different media or social media.  All the various routes into your inbox put an enormous strain on women and men to be available and online.

“The ramifications for women are particularly serious precisely because this sort of ‘always on’ culture means that work is bleeding into the domestic sphere.  I mean physically bleeding into the domestic sphere in the sense that we’re all working from home more, so the physical boundary between home and work is becoming dissolved.  But it’s also a temporal boundary that’s dissolving, you can be looking at your mobile phone and doing a bit of online shopping one minute and dealing with a work email the next.  The boundaries, which used to be very firm, between paid work and unpaid work have completely dissolved in my view and what I see is a huge amount of stress.

“In the case of women, because the home has never really been the site of leisure, it’s always been a site where they’re doing multiple forms of labour – unpaid, caring, emotional. The kind of bleeding of paid labour into the home just augments and exacerbates the demands on them.”

Juliet says she is “hugely pessimistic about what might be coming next in terms of working conditions.” She continues: “More and more labour markets are becoming globalised and therefore more and more of us are being drawn into competition with workers in other parts of the globe and into undercutting ourselves in order to get work.

“It seems to me that there’s a rise in freelancing insecure work, self-employment, short-term, very short-term contracts, and those kinds of working arrangements bring with them enormous numbers of freedoms> But they also throw the individual back onto herself.  The collective nature of work has largely been eroded and when that happens people take individual responsibility for all aspects of work.  If you have a problem you have to find an individualised solution. There’s no longer ready access to work colleagues, trade unions or other sources of support that are collective.”

Of the achievements she is most proud of, Juliet points to working with the Gender and ICT group in Catalonia, adding: “We were able to build up the group and make it self-sustaining financially, which was one of the things we aimed to do, and get it on to the map internationally. It’s now got an excellent reputation because it has superb researchers almost all of whom were hired by my predecessor, Cecilia Castaño, who was brilliant at bringing in good people and keeping good people. She created a group that functioned excellently and stayed together and stays together to this day.

“I’m also proud to have been part an adviser to the European Expert Group, which was so interesting, and to have been part of generating a little bit of European policy around the information society back in the nineties.

“Proud too of having published a couple of books, one called Shaping Women’s Work  which I know has had a very good reception and been very influential on the thinking of researchers across the world about gender and technology. I think it’s probably my best contribution.”

Juliet is also an active member of a community support group for the resettlement of a Syrian refugee family. She says: “In the past, I’ve been on a management committee of a centre that looked after the welfare of refugees so I’ve got a long-standing interest in refugees and refugee welfare.  I was approached to be part of a community sponsorship group and it spoke to my condition because of my own mother’s refugee background. I’m happy to say that my community has sponsored a Syrian family to come and live amongst us. They arrived some years ago and are now very happily settled here, something which I regard as a huge achievement by them, and by us.”

Juliet’s advice to young people entering technology today is to “go in with your eyes open.  It can be hugely rewarding.  I know so many cases of women who had very, very rewarding careers in this field, but there are huge numbers of downsides as well.  You’re in a labour market that is working in your favour at the moment in the sense that there’s a labour shortage. Take advantage of it, make sure you get the kind of working conditions and the working arrangements that suit the other areas of your life that you want to live and then go for a career in computer science. But if you have any control over the matter, don’t let it be one in which you are constantly on call, because we’ve seen that that leads to burnout.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley