From women operators to technical assistants: women in the BBC’s wartime engineering division

Abstract

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.