Today, when we look at current recording technologies such as CD burners or MP3 files, it is difficult to see how gender could have played any role in their history. Most assuredly, gender roles shaped the history of all sorts of sound recording technologies, but the process is most obvious in the history of office dictation machines.

The technical and economic histories of office dictation equipment are told elsewhere one this site. One very important aspect of the history of office dictation equipment has to do with the way it was split into a men’s technology and a separate women’s technology. Like the bicycle (which comes in men’s or women’s models) the differences in the designs of the two versions of dictating machines are based on assumptions about how men worked versus women, and also reflected the fact that most high level jobs were held by men, but most clerical jobs were held by women.

 

Elsewhere on this site is the early history of the phonograph and its competitor invented a few years later, the graphophone. The designers of the graphophone were the first to bring to market a sound recorder intended specifically to replace human stenographers (employees, often young men or women, who “took dictation,” this is, they wrote down the words of other employees who spoke aloud the content of a letter or memorandum).