Min Gao (LSE) - 2024-25 Students
mgao19@lse.ac.uk

Telephone Girls Moving Towards Innovation: Revisiting the Socialist Gendered Technoculture in Maoist China (1949-1960)

In 1952, Guo Xiuyun, a young telephone girl at the Long-distance Call Station of China’s Tianjin Telecommunications Bureau, demonstrated near-impossible wiring speed and low error rates, setting the highest record in China. If she operated four lines at the same time, she could increase circuit utilization by 22.62%; if she operated three lines at the same time, she could increase circuit utilization by 23.86%. Her amazing technique2 immediately gained the attention of the newly built state. In July of 1952, a research group consisting of cadres from party branches and labor unions, as well as technicians was set up. After two months of repeatedly observing, measuring, and recording Guo’s operations, the group summarized “Guo Xiuyun’s Operating Methods of Long-distance Telephone Operators.” As a result, Guo’s operating technique was disseminated to more than twenty cities in China and improved the efficiency of long-distance telephones by more than 100%.

This unique story belongs not only to the history of information technology (IT) in China but also to the broader feminist studies on gender and technology. Is technology the maker of occupational segregation by sex, or the generator of gender equality? This question, due to the instability of the gender-technology relationship, has never had a standard answer. After a long period of vacillating between technophobia4 and technomania5, recent studies have begun to recognize a mutual shaping relationship between gender and technology . This new steam, named techno feminism, fuses the insights of gender theory with the studies of science, technology, and society (STS), which severely criticizes technological determinism and focuses on how a particular “technological object” is produced, promoted, and used in a specific social context. It has been proved that gender, as s set of beliefs, roles, and practices, is itself inherent within the social construction of technical skills and expertise, and can affect, but also be reshaped by, women’s technical engagement.

These intellectual advancements draw our attention from technology itself to the gendered cultures, ideologies, and assumptions in it. Literature on the history of information labour has shown the occupational segregation based on sex and women’s marginalized position in IT industry. In telecommunications, telephone operators were often seen as emotional laborers that used women’s gentleness, patience, obedience, and beautiful voices to provide a “labor of love” and please customers, which made telephone operator a position natural for women and hindered female participation in technical fields. These studies reveal the gendered cultural molds of the Anglo-American IT industry—— Regardless of an individual’s skills and abilities, gender defines what kind of work he/she is good at: “femininity”=emotional, clerical, and service work, while “masculinity” =technical, technology-intensive, and creative work.

In this way, this research provides an alternative history (rather than a positive counterexample) to the story of “invisible women” in Anglo-American technology progress. Guo’s story, which represents both the ideology and practice of socialist gendered technoculture, serves as a parable of how the socialist gendered culture powerfully reshapes the operating techniques of the telecom industry and plays a crucial role in managing the scarcity of telecom resources; and how a developing country modernizes in an even way and actively reconstitutes categories of gender equality. Also, it forces a rethinking of the role that socialist gendered culture played in shaping the IT industry and defining socialist modernity, and a reappraisal of the new opportunities, as well as old gender boundaries it presented Chinese women with.

Primary supervisor: Professor Bingchun Meng