In the UK, Walter Lang's Desk Set (1957) was released as "His Other Woman," an arch reference to the EMERAC (known throughout the film as "Emmy" or "Miss Em"), a mainframe computer that serves as both a central narrative catalyst and part of a love triangle with research librarian Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn) and computer expert Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy). At the conclusion of this one-note romantic comedy, the love triangle is resolved with a marriage proposal delivered via the computer keyboard, a cinematic first. The film, which was sponsored by IBM, coyly acknowledges and then disarms cultural anxieties around computerization and social disruption, spinning a potentially disruptive narrative scenario into a politically retrograde reassertion of the status quo with regard to women and computing.

A perverse Hollywood interpretation of the gender dynamics of first generation of corporate computing is in evidence throughout the film. Hepburn's Bunny Watson (transparently named after IBM founder and CEO Thomas J. Watson) plays the head of the research department in a large corporation where two computer systems are being installed to manage the accounting and research efforts of the company. Desk Set reflects the anxieties of workers who feared being "replaced" by machines–exacerbated when the computer installed in the accounting office "mistakenly" sends pink slips terminating all employees.

Hepburn's Watson is coded as the wittiest and most erudite of the all female research staff, in addition to being the film's romantic lead, partially by virtue of her well-known off-screen romance with Tracy. Hepburn's mastery of arcane trivia and mnemonics is impressively displayed at numerous points throughout the film, a fact she repeatedly uses to demonstrate the superiority of human sense making and context awareness over the rote data processing of the computer. When Watson is quizzed by Sumner–both as a professional evaluation and increasingly as part of a repressed courtship–her responses to a series of questions betrays a computational logic at the heart of her own prodigious memory. Even her response to his first question is a binary: "Q: What is the first thing you notice in a person? A: Whether the person is male or female." As the quiz continues, Sumner reveals himself to be machinelike in his own ways, impervious to cold and seemingly immune to social cues. Apart from the extradiegetic necessity of their eventual union, their shared resemblance to the computer appears to be the only thing the two have in common.

The most reprehensible and socially normative critique embedded in the film relates to EMERAC's uptight operator, who contributes to the alienation of the research staff when EMERAC is installed. Miss Warriner (Neva Patterson) displays an attitude of imperious condescension toward the other women in the office, chiding them for improper behavior in the presence of the computer (e.g., smoking, leaving the door open). After being repeatedly humiliated for having–not unlike the computer itself–limited contextual awareness, Miss Warriner is reduced to hysterics and verbally berated by Sumner after she accidentally flips a large red switch that brings about a total system failure signified by alarms, flashing lights, showers of sparks, a smoking console, and punch cards that erupt out of the machine. It is ironic–and perhaps indicative of the industry's ambivalence about the importance of its female workers–that this film's release should coincide with the year that IBM launched its "My Fair Ladies" recruitment campaign while offering such a brutal critique of a computer manufacturer's sole female employee. The narrative resolution of Desk Set likewise presents the ultimate in socially normative critique, with the presence of a supercomputer serving to catalyze a quintessentially Hollywood ending. The threats to the existing social order once posed by EMERAC, including threatened unemployment and epistemological crisis, are decisively neutralized by human heterosexual coupling.

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