Automation, Skill, and Gender in the German Financial Industry: A Historical Case

• In Event: Automation, Skill and Identity in an Age of AI - II

Abstract

Automation proponents like John Diebold promised in the 1950s that computers would process any information at lightning speed, freeing employees from tedious routine tasks for more intellectually engaging work (Diebold 1952). Interrogating this narrative of technological progress, this paper shows that rather than liberating human labor, office automation created and required more instead of less routine work.
Data occurred in corporate offices in various forms such as stamps on time cards or names and numbers on checks. Before a computer could process a payroll or check, this data first needed to be transferred into computer-legible form. Mostly women performed this essential data entry work which carried the typical characteristics of unskilled clerical labor: Easily supervised for speed and accuracy, it was often paid poorly. In addition, noisy machinery created unpleasant working conditions for the operators. For companies, data entry proved time-consuming and unexpectedly costly, requiring pay for large numbers of operators and machines as well as provision of often scarce office space.
This paper examines computerization in West German savings banks. The banks relied on a newly emerging workforce of part-time women to meet their immediate data entry needs while seeking to ultimately reduce if not eliminate their need for data entry. Based on archival research and semi-structured interviews with former data entry clerks, the paper reveals historical roots to the complex negotiations of organization, skill, and gender in today’s global information economies (Freeman 2000, Poster 2016), and casts a critical light on claims of AI-based automation.

Author

• Corinna Schlombs, Rochester Institute of Technology