Prior to earning a Ph.D., Hicks worked at
Harvard University as a
UNIX system administrator. Hicks has said the position informed their later work on history of technology. Hicks is currently an associate professor with tenure at the
University of Virginia, in the School of Data Science. Hicks was previously a visiting assistant professor at
North Carolina State University in
Raleigh,
North Carolina, a visiting assistant professor at
Duke University, in
Durham, North Carolina, an associate professor at the
Illinois Institute of Technology in
Chicago, and an assistant professor of history of technology at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison until the closure of that university’s history of science department. Hicks's work focuses on issues of inequality in high tech, particularly gender discrimination in the computing industry. Their book "
Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge In Computing" reveals a switch in the 1960s and 1970s, where as computing roles became more powerful, women who dominated computer programming roles were systematically replaced with men. Hicks is known for drawing from this history when writing about contemporary gender issues in the computing industry. Hicks has also written about the early history of computer dating in the mainframe era, showing that women were at the forefront of creating computer dating businesses, contrary to what was previously thought. Hicks is an Associate Editor of the
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Hicks is
non-binary and uses
they/them pronouns. ==Selected membership==