Ces femmes qui déchiffraient les codes pendant la Deuxième Guerre

On en parle relativement peu habituellement, mais les services de décryptage furent particulièrement importants pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale. On a ramené cette question sur le tapis en 2014 lors de la sortie du film "Le jeu de l'imitation", film qui présentait la contribution d'Alan Turing. Cette fois c'est l'auteure Liza Mundy qui raconte la contribution secrète de ces femmes à qui on a précisé dès le départ que jusque là ce travail était effectué par des hommes. Une percée pour les femmes serait-on tenter de conclure... Pas nécessairement puisqu'en faisant appel à ces femmes on croyait libérer des hommes pour des tâches plus importantes.

 "Women were considered better suited for code-breaking work by many people—but alas, this wasn’t a compliment. What this meant was that women were considered better equipped for boring work that required close attention to detail rather than leaps of genius. In the field of astronomy, women long had been employed as “computers,” assigned to do lower-level calculations. This was seen as women’s rightful domain: The careful repetitive work that got things started, so that the men could take over when things got interesting and hard. Men were seen as more brilliant than women, but more impatient and erratic. “It was generally believed that women were good at doing tedious work—and as I had discovered early on, the initial stages of cryptanalysis were very tedious, indeed,” recalled Ann Caracristi, whose first job as a code breaker was sorting reams of intercepted traffic. But all along there have been female geniuses whose contributions are as important as those of men. It’s just that far less attention has been paid to them, and often these women were denied the top spots that would have brought them more recognition."

  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/10/the-secret-history-of-the-women-code-breakers-who-helped-defeat-the-nazis-215694