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The Women Who Count: Gendering Calculations in the Soviet Atomic Project
Accumulating institutional histories, nuclear memoirs, declassified files, and transcripts of interviews with nuclear veterans, this chapter discusses feminization of the human calculations as a gender bias in governing the Soviet Atomic Project in the 1940s and 1950s. The authors focus on both huge participation of young women in the performing of voluminous calculations for the first nuclear objects and their sexist positioning within the masculine nuclear discourse. The reduction of joint women labor to living computers is treated here as a technocratic form of gender-marked objectification. Gendering and sexual devaluation of calculations, as this chapter reveals, equated applied math to service work in the eyes of the Soviet physicists regardless of the actual status and sex of those who counted. The authors conclude that the gender bias in the Soviet nuclear calculations requires revision in terms of joint work and collaboration.