From women operators to technical assistants: women in the BBC's wartime engineering division.
Men have long dominated the engineering professions, with women's lower participation rates often explained as a disinclination—downplaying how organisational structures actively exclude women. The Second World War provides ample opportunity to explore women's large-scale entry into engineering fiel...
| Publicado en: | Women's History Review Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 580 - 603 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jul2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=157683469&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 157683469 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 09612025 GP6 jtl: Women's History Review issn: 09612025 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jul2022 vid: 31 iid: 4 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 157683469 10.1080/09612025.2021.1944347 ppf: 580 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 2MB tig: atl: From women operators to technical assistants: women in the BBC's wartime engineering division. aug: au: Terkanian, Kate affil: Department of Humanities & Law, Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK su: Women in engineering British Broadcasting Corp. Transmitters (Communication) Control rooms Oral history sug: subj: Women in engineering British Broadcasting Corp. Transmitters (Communication) Control rooms Oral history keyword: Broadcasting engineering gendered labour Second World War ab: Men have long dominated the engineering professions, with women's lower participation rates often explained as a disinclination—downplaying 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Women's History Review is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Women's History Review holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2022 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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