Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements.
Since the 18th century, women have developed scientific computations, including
Nicole-Reine Lepaute
Nicole-Reine Lepaute () née Étable de la Brière, also erroneously known as Hortense Lepaute, (5 January 1723 – 6 December 1788) was a French astronomer and human computer. Lepaute along with Alexis Clairaut and Jérôme Lalande calculated t ...
's prediction of
Halley's Comet
Halley's Comet or Comet Halley, officially designated 1P/Halley, is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 75–79 years. Halley is the only known short-period comet that is regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and thus the o ...
, and
Maria Mitchell
Maria Mitchell ( /məˈraɪə/; August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI (modern designation C/1847 T1) that was later known as " Miss Mi ...
's computation of the motion of
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never fa ...
. The first
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
intended to be executed by a computer was designed by
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...
who was a pioneer in the field.
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy Rear admiral (United States), rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, Harvard Mar ...
was the first person to design a
compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...
for a
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the
Harvard Computers
The Harvard Computers was a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering (1877 to 1919) and, followi ...
, codebreaking at
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...
and engineering at
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
.
After the 1960s, the "soft work" that had been dominated by women evolved into modern
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
, and the importance of women decreased. The gender disparity and the lack of women in computing from the late 20th century onward has been examined, but no firm explanations have been established. Nevertheless, many women continued to make significant and important contributions to the IT industry, and attempts were made to readdress the gender disparity in the industry. In the 21st century, women held leadership roles in multiple tech companies, such as
Meg Whitman
Margaret Cushing Whitman (born August 4, 1956) is the US ambassador to Kenya, an American business executive and former gubernatorial candidate for California. She is a board member of Procter & Gamble and General Motors. Whitman was previously ...
, president and chief executive officer of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States.
HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...
, and
Marissa Mayer
Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contacts. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a p ...
, president and CEO of
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
and key spokesperson at
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
.
History
1700s
Nicole-Reine Etable de la Brière Lepaute was one of a team of
human computer
The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613), meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available. Ala ...
s who worked with
Alexis-Claude Clairaut
Alexis Claude Clairaut (; 13 May 1713 – 17 May 1765) was a French mathematician, astronomer, and geophysicist. He was a prominent Newtonian whose work helped to establish the validity of the principles and results that Sir Isaac Newton had out ...
and
Joseph-Jérôme Le Français de Lalande to predict the date of the return of
Halley's Comet
Halley's Comet or Comet Halley, officially designated 1P/Halley, is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 75–79 years. Halley is the only known short-period comet that is regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and thus the o ...
. They began work on the calculations in 1757, working throughout the day and sometimes during mealtimes. Their methods were followed by successive human computers. They divided large calculations into "independent pieces, assembled the results from each piece into a final product" and then checked for errors. Lepaute continued to work on computing for the rest of her life, working for the
Connaissance des Temps
The ''Connaissance des temps'' (English: Knowledge of the Times) is an official yearly publication of astronomical ephemerides in France. Until just after the French Revolution, the title appeared as ''Connoissance des temps'', and for several ye ...
and publishing predictions of
solar eclipse
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of the Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six month ...
s.
1800s
![Astronomer_Edward_Charles_Pickering's_Harvard_computers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Astronomer_Edward_Charles_Pickering%27s_Harvard_computers.jpg)
One of the first computers for the American ''
Nautical Almanac
A nautical almanac is a publication describing the positions of a selection of celestial bodies for the purpose of enabling navigators to use celestial navigation to determine the position of their ship while at sea. The Almanac specifies for ea ...
'' was
Maria Mitchel. Her work on the assignment was to compute the motion of the planet
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never fa ...
. The ''Almanac'' never became a reality, but Mitchell became the first
astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...
professor at
Vassar.
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...
was the first person to publish an
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
intended to be executed by the first modern computer, the
Analytical Engine
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a des ...
created by
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered ...
. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer
programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
.
Lovelace was introduced to Babbage's
difference engine
A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial, polynomial functions. It was designed in the 1820s, and was first created by Charles Babbage. The name, the difference engine, is derived from the method ...
when she was 17. In 1840, she wrote to Babbage and asked if she could become involved with his first machine. By this time, Babbage had moved on to his idea for the Analytical Engine. A paper describing the Analytical Engine, ''Notions sur la machine analytique'', published by
L.F. Menabrea, came to the attention of Lovelace, who not only translated it into English, but corrected mistakes made by Menabrea. Babbage suggested that she expand the translation of the paper with her own ideas, which, signed only with her initials, AAL, "synthesized the vast scope of Babbage's vision." Lovelace imagined the kind of impact of the Analytical Engine might have on society. She drew up explanations of how the engine could handle inputs, outputs, processing and data storage. She also created several
proofs
Proof most often refers to:
* Proof (truth), argument or sufficient evidence for the truth of a proposition
* Alcohol proof, a measure of an alcoholic drink's strength
Proof may also refer to:
Mathematics and formal logic
* Formal proof, a co ...
to show how the engine would handle calculations of
Bernoulli Numbers
In mathematics, the Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of rational numbers which occur frequently in analysis. The Bernoulli numbers appear in (and can be defined by) the Taylor series expansions of the tangent and hyperbolic tangent functions, ...
on its own. The proofs are considered the first examples of a computer program.
Lovelace downplayed her role in her work during her life, for example, in signing her contributions with AAL so as not be "accused of bragging."
After the
Civil War
A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).
The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
in the United States, more women were hired as human computers. Many were war widows looking for ways to support themselves. Others were hired when the government opened positions to women because of a shortage of men to fill the roles.
Anna Winlock asked to become a computer for the Harvard Observatory in 1875 and was hired to work for 25 cents an hour. By 1880,
Edward Charles Pickering
Edward Charles Pickering (July 19, 1846 – February 3, 1919) was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote ''E ...
had hired several women to work for him at
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
because he knew that women could do the job as well as men and he could ask them to volunteer or work for less pay. The women, described as "Pickering's harem" and also as the
Harvard Computers
The Harvard Computers was a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering (1877 to 1919) and, followi ...
, performed clerical work that the male employees and scholars considered to be tedious at a fraction of the cost of hiring a man. The women working for Pickering cataloged around ten thousand stars, discovered the
Horsehead Nebula
The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion molecular cloud co ...
and developed the system to describe stars. One of the "computers,"
Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon (; December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of ...
, could classify stars at a rate of three stars per minute. The work for Pickering became so popular that women volunteered to work for free even when the computers were being paid. Even though they performed an important role, the Harvard Computers were paid less than
factory
A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. T ...
workers.
By the 1890s, women computers were college graduates looking for jobs where they could use their training in a useful way. Florence Tebb Weldon, was part of this group and provided computations relating to biology and evidence for
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
, working with her husband, W.F. Raphael Weldon. Florence Weldon's calculations demonstrated that statistics could be used to support
Darwin's theory of evolution. Another human computer involved in biology was
Alice Lee, who worked with
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university st ...
. Pearson hired two sisters to work as part-time computers at his Biometrics Lab,
Beatrice and
Frances Cave-Brown-Cave.
1910s
During
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, Karl Pearson and his Biometrics Lab helped produce
ballistics
Ballistics is the field of mechanics concerned with the launching, flight behaviour and impact effects of projectiles, especially ranged weapon munitions such as bullets, unguided bombs, rockets or the like; the science or art of designing and a ...
calculations for the British
Ministry of Munitions
The Minister of Munitions was a British government position created during the First World War to oversee and co-ordinate the production and distribution of munitions for the war effort. The position was created in response to the Shell Crisis of ...
.
Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave helped calculate trajectories for bomb shells. In 1916, Cave-Brown-Cave left Pearson's employ and started working full-time for the Ministry. In the United States, women computers were hired to calculate ballistics in 1918, working in a building on the
Washington Mall
Washington Mall was an enclosed shopping mall located in South Strabane Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania, just outside the city of Washington, formerly managed by J J Gumberg Co. and now by Oxford Development Company. It is owned by ...
. One of the women, Elizabeth Webb Wilson, worked as the chief computer. After the war, women who worked as ballistics computers for the U.S. government had trouble finding jobs in computing and Wilson eventually taught high school math.
1920s
![Bell telephone magazine (1922) (14570000517)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Bell_telephone_magazine_%281922%29_%2814570000517%29.jpg)
In the early 1920s,
Iowa State College
Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...
, professor
George Snedecor worked to improve the school's science and engineering departments, experimenting with new punch-card machines and calculators. Snedecor also worked with human calculators most of them women, including
Mary Clem. Clem coined the term "zero check" to help identify errors in calculations. The computing lab, run by Clem, became one of the most powerful computing facilities of the time.
Women computers also worked at the
American Telephone and Telegraph
AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
company. These human computers worked with
electrical engineers
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the ...
to help figure out how to boost signals with
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied.
The type kn ...
amplifiers. One of the computers, Clara Froelich, was eventually moved along with the other computers to their own division where they worked with a mathematician, Thornton Fry, to create new computational methods. Froelich studied IBM
tabulating equipment and desk calculating machines to see if she could adapt the machine method to calculations.
Edith Clarke
Edith Clarke (February 10, 1883 – October 29, 1959) was the first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States, and the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. She was the first ...
was the first woman to earn a degree in
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
and who worked as the first professionally employed electrical engineer in the United States.
She was hired by
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...
as a full engineer in 1923.
Clarke also filed a patent in 1921 for a
graphical calculator to be used in solving problems in power lines.
It was granted in 1925.
1930s
The
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a United States federal agency founded on March 3, 1915, to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958, the agency was dissolved and its assets ...
(NACA) which became
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
hired a group of five women in 1935 to work as a computer pool.
The women worked on the data coming from
wind tunnel
Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft ...
and flight tests.
1940s
!['bombe'](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/%27bombe%27.jpg)
"Tedious" computing and calculating was seen as "women's work" through the 1940s resulting in the term "kilogirl", invented by a member of the
Applied Mathematics Panel The Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP) was created at the end of 1942 as a division of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) within the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in order to solve mathematical problems related to t ...
in the early 1940s. A kilogirl of energy was "equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor." While women's contributions to the United States war effort during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
was championed in the media, their roles and the work they did was minimized. This included minimizing the complexity, skill and knowledge needed to work on computers or work as human computers. During WWII, women did most of the ballistics computing, seen by male engineers as being below their level of expertise.
Black women
Black women are women of sub-Saharan African and Afro-diasporic descent, as well as women of Australian Aboriginal and Melanesian descent. The term 'Black' is a racial classification of people, the definition of which has shifted over time and acr ...
computers worked as hard (or more often, twice as hard) as their white counterparts, but in segregated situations. By 1943, almost all people employed as computers were women; one report said "programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for detail and those are traits that many girls have".
NACA expanded its pool of women human computers in the 1940s. NACA recognized in 1942 that "the engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could."
In 1943 two groups, segregated by race, worked on the east and west side of
Langley Air Force Base. The black women were the
West Area Computers
The West Computers (West Area Computing Unit, West Area Computers) were the African American, female mathematicians who worked as human computers at the Langley Research Center of NACA (predecessor of NASA) from 1943 through 1958. These women wer ...
. Unlike their white counterparts, the black women were asked by NACA to re-do college courses they had already passed and many never received promotions.
Women were also working on ballistic missile calculations. In 1948, women such as
Barbara Paulson were working on the
WAC Corporal
The WAC Corporal was the first sounding rocket developed in the United States and the first vehicle to achieve hypersonic speeds. It was an offshoot of the Corporal program, that was started by a partnership between the United States Army Ordn ...
, determining trajectories the missiles would take after launch.
Women worked with
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
and, after some initial resistance, many operated and worked on the
Bombe
The bombe () was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functiona ...
machines.
Joyce Aylard operated the Bombe machine testing different methods to break the
Enigma code.
Joan Clarke
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE (''née'' Clarke; 24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist best known for her work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not ...
was a cryptographer who worked with her friend,
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
, on the Enigma machine at
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...
.
When she was promoted to a higher salary grade, there were no positions in the civil service for a "senior female cryptanalyst," and she was listed as a linguist instead. While Clarke developed a method of increasing the speed of double-encrypted messages, unlike many of the men, her decryption technique was not named after her. Other cryptographers at Bletchley included
Margaret Rock,
Mavis Lever (later Batey), Ruth Briggs and Kerry Howard.
In 1941, Batey's work enabled the
Allies
An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...
to break the Italians' naval code before the
Battle of Cape Matapan
The Battle of Cape Matapan ( el, Ναυμαχία του Ταινάρου) was a naval battle during the Second World War between the Allies, represented by the navies of the United Kingdom and Australia, and the Royal Italian navy, from 27 t ...
. In the United States, several faster Bombe machines were created. Women, like Louise Pearsall, were recruited from the
WAVES
Waves most often refers to:
*Waves, oscillations accompanied by a transfer of energy that travel through space or mass.
* Wind waves, surface waves that occur on the free surface of bodies of water.
Waves may also refer to:
Music
* Waves (ban ...
to work on code breaking and operate the American Bombe machines.
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood's golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actress ...
and co-inventor,
George Antheil
George Johann Carl Antheil (; July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the modern sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of t ...
, worked on a
frequency hopping
Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly changing the carrier frequency among many distinct frequencies occupying a large spectral band. The changes are controlled by a code known to both tra ...
method to help the Navy control torpedoes remotely.
The Navy passed on their idea, but Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for the work on August 11, 1942.
This technique would later be used again, first in the 1950s at Sylvania Electronic Systems Division and is used in everyday technology such as
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...
and
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...
.
![Reprogramming_ENIAC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Reprogramming_ENIAC.png)
The programmers of the
ENIAC
ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one packa ...
computer in 1944, were six female mathematicians;
Marlyn Meltzer
Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer (1922 – December 7, 2008) was an American mathematician and computer programmer, and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
Early life
Meltzer was born Mar ...
,
Betty Holberton
Frances Elizabeth Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers wer ...
,
Kathleen Antonelli
Kathleen Rita Antonelli ( McNulty; formerly Mauchly;
12 February 1921 – 20 April 2006), known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish-born American computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purp ...
,
Ruth Teitelbaum
Ruth Teitelbaum ( Lichterman; February 1, 1924 – August 9, 1986) was one of the first computer programmers in the world. Teitelbaum was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer.
The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bar ...
,
Jean Bartik
Jean Bartik ( Betty Jean Jennings; December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Bartik studied mathematics in school then began work at the University of Pennsylvania, first manually ca ...
, and
Frances Spence
Frances V. Spence ( Bilas; March 2, 1922 – July 18, 2012) was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC (the first electronic digital computer). She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history.
The other five ENIAC progr ...
who were human computers at the
Moore School's computation lab.
Adele Goldstine was their teacher and trainer and they were known as the "ENIAC girls." The women who worked on ENIAC were warned that they would not be promoted into professional ratings which were only for men. Designing the hardware was "men's work" and programming the software was "women's work." Sometimes women were given
blueprint
A blueprint is a reproduction of a technical drawing or engineering drawing using a contact print process on light-sensitive sheets. Introduced by Sir John Herschel in 1842, the process allowed rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number ...
s and
wiring diagram
A wiring diagram is a simplified conventional pictorial representation of an electrical circuit. It shows the components of the circuit as simplified shapes, and the power and signal connections between the devices.
A wiring diagram usually gi ...
s to figure out how the machine worked and how to program it. They learned how the ENIAC worked by repairing it, sometimes crawling through the computer, and by fixing "bugs" in the machinery. Even though the programmers were supposed to be doing the "soft" work of programming, in reality, they did that and fully understood and worked with the hardware of the ENIAC. When the ENIAC was revealed in 1946, Goldstine and the other women prepared the machine and the demonstration programs it ran for the public. None of their work in preparing the demonstrations was mentioned in the official accounts of the public events. After the demonstration, the university hosted an expensive celebratory dinner to which none of the ENIAC six were invited.
In Canada,
Beatrice Worsley
Beatrice Helen Worsley (18 October 1921 – 8 May 1972) was a Canadian computer scientist who was the first female computer scientist in Canada. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser,
the ...
started working at the
National Research Council of Canada
The National Research Council Canada (NRC; french: Conseil national de recherches Canada) is the primary national agency of the Government of Canada dedicated to science and technology research & development. It is the largest federal research ...
in 1947 where she was an aerodynamics research officer.
A year later, she started working in the new Computational Centre at the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...
.
She built a
differential analyzer
The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operat ...
in 1948 and also worked with IBM machines in order to do calculations for
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) is a Canadian federal Crown corporation and Canada's largest nuclear science and technology laboratory. AECL developed the CANDU reactor technology starting in the 1950s, and in October 2011 licensed thi ...
.
She went to study the
EDSAC
The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universi ...
at the
University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
in 1949.
She wrote the program that was run the first time EDSAC performed its first calculations on May 6, 1949.
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy Rear admiral (United States), rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, Harvard Mar ...
was the first person to create a
compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...
for a
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
and one of the first programmers of the
Harvard Mark I computer, an electro-mechanical computer based on Analytical Engine. Hopper's work with computers started in 1943, when she started working at the
Bureau of Ordnance The Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) was a United States Navy organization, which was responsible for the procurement, storage, and deployment of all naval weapons, between the years 1862 and 1959.
History
Congress established the Bureau in the Departmen ...
's Computation Project at Harvard where she programmed the Harvard Mark I. Hopper not only programmed the computer, but created a 500-page comprehensive manual for it. Even though Hopper created the manual, which was widely cited and published, she was not specifically credited in it. Hopper is often credited with the coining of the term "bug" and "
debugging
In computer programming and software development, debugging is the process of finding and resolving '' bugs'' (defects or problems that prevent correct operation) within computer programs, software, or systems.
Debugging tactics can involve in ...
" when a moth caused the Mark II to malfunction. While a moth was found and the process of removing it called "debugging," the terms were already part of the language of programmers.
1950s
![Annie_Easley_in_NASA](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Annie_Easley_in_NASA.jpg)
Grace Hopper continued to contribute to computer science through the 1950s. She brought the idea of using compilers from her time at Harvard to
UNIVAC
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
which she joined in 1949. Other women who were hired to program UNIVAC included
Adele Mildred Koss,
Frances E. Holberton,
Jean Bartik
Jean Bartik ( Betty Jean Jennings; December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Bartik studied mathematics in school then began work at the University of Pennsylvania, first manually ca ...
, Frances Morello and Lillian Jay. To program the UNIVAC, Hopper and her team used the
FLOW-MATIC
FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper from 1955 to 1959, and helped shape the development of CO ...
programming language, which she developed. Holberton wrote a code, C-10, that allowed for
keyboard
Keyboard may refer to:
Text input
* Keyboard, part of a typewriter
* Computer keyboard
** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping
** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware
Music
* Musi ...
inputs into a general-purpose computer. Holberton also developed the
Sort-Merge Generator in 1951 which was used on the
UNIVAC I
The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the invento ...
. The Sort-Merge Generator marked the first time a computer "used a program to write a program." Holberton suggested that computer housing should be beige or oatmeal in color which became a long-lasting trend. Koss worked with Hopper on various algorithms and a program that was a precursor to a
report generator
A report generator is a computer program whose purpose is to take data from a source such as a database, XML stream or a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabu ...
.
Klara Dan von Neumann Klara may refer to:
* Klara, a female given name, see Clara (given name)
* Klara (radio), a classical-music radio station in Belgium
* Klara (singer), birth name Klára Vytisková (born 1985), Czech singer
* Klara (Stockholm), an area of central S ...
was one of the main programmers of the
MANIAC
Maniac (from Greek μανιακός, ''maniakos'') is a pejorative for an individual who experiences the mood known as mania. In common usage, it is also an insult for someone involved in reckless behavior.
Maniac may also refer to:
Film
* ' ...
, a more advanced version of ENIAC.
Her work helped the field of meteorology and weather prediction.
The NACA, and subsequently NASA, recruited women computers following World War II.
By the 1950s, a team was performing mathematical calculations at the
Lewis Research Center
NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field is a NASA center within the cities of Brook Park and Cleveland between Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the Rocky River Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks, with a subsidiary facilit ...
in
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
, including
Annie Easley
Annie Jean Easley (April 23, 1933 – June 25, 2011) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist. She worked for the Lewis Research Center (now Glenn Research Center) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administrat ...
,
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson (née Coleman; August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. ...
and
Kathryn Peddrew. At the
National Bureau of Standards
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...
,
Margaret R. Fox was hired to work as part of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory in 1951.
In 1956,
Gladys West
Gladys Mae West (née Brown; born October 27, 1930) is an American mathematician known for her contributions to the mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of the satellite geodesy models that were even ...
was hired by the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory as a human computer.
West was involved in calculations that let to the development of
GPS
The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...
.
At
Convair
Convair, previously Consolidated Vultee, was an American aircraft manufacturing company that later expanded into rockets and spacecraft. The company was formed in 1943 by the merger of Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft. In 1953, it ...
Aircraft Corporation,
Joyce Currie Little was one of the original programmers for analyzing data received from the wind tunnels. She used
punch cards
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...
on an
IBM 650
The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine is an early digital computer produced by IBM in the mid-1950s. It was the first mass produced computer in the world. Almost 2,000 systems were produced, the last in 1962, and it was the first ...
which was located in a different building from the wind tunnel. To save time in the physical delivery of the punch cards, she and her colleague, Maggie DeCaro, put on
roller skates
Roller skates, are shoes or bindings that fit onto shoes that are worn to enable the wearer to roll along on wheels. The first roller skate was an inline skate design, effectively an ice skate with wheels replacing the blade. Later the "quad ska ...
to get to and from the building faster.
In Israel,
Thelma Estrin
Thelma Estrin (née Austern; February 21, 1924 – February 15, 2014) was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. Estrin was one of the first to apply compute ...
worked on the design and development of
WEIZAC
WEIZAC (''Weizmann Automatic Computer'') was the first computer in Israel, and one of the first large-scale, stored-program, electronic computers in the world.
It was built at the Weizmann Institute during 1954–1955, based on the Institute for ...
, one of the world's first large-scale programmable electronic computers. In the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
a team of women helped design and build the first digital computer in 1951. In the UK,
Kathleen Booth
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth ( Britten, 9 July 1922 – 29 September 2022) was a British computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbe ...
worked with her husband,
Andrew Booth on several computers at
Birkbeck College
Birkbeck, University of London (formally Birkbeck College, University of London), is a public university, public research university, located in Bloomsbury, London, England, and a constituent college, member institution of the federal Universit ...
. Kathleen Booth was the programmer and Andrew built the machines. Kathleen developed
Assembly Language
In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence be ...
at this time.
Mary Coombs
Mary Clare Coombs ( Blood, 4 February 1929 – 28 February 2022) was a British computer programmer and schoolteacher. Employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the LEO computers, she is recognised as the first female commercia ...
(of England) was employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the
LEO computers, and as such she is recognised as the first female commercial programmer.
Ukrainian
Kateryna Yushchenko
Kateryna Mykhaylivna Yushchenko ( uk, Катерина Михайлівна Ющенко, née Chumachenko (Чумаченко); September 1, 1961 in Chicago) was the First Lady of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010. She is married to former Ukrainian Pr ...
created the
Address programming language
The Address programming language (russian: Адресный язык программирования uk, Адресна мова програмування) is one of the world's first high-level programming languages. It was created in 1955 by ...
for the cоmputer "Kyiv" in 1955 and invented indirect addressing of the highest rank, called
pointers
Pointer may refer to:
Places
* Pointer, Kentucky
* Pointers, New Jersey
* Pointers Airport, Wasco County, Oregon, United States
* The Pointers, a pair of rocks off Antarctica
People with the name
* Pointer (surname), a surname (including a l ...
.
1960s
Milly Koss who had worked at UNIVAC with Hopper, started work at
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...
(CDC) in 1965. There she developed algorithms for graphics, including graphic storage and retrieval.
Mary K. Hawes of
Burroughs Corporation
The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many ...
set up a meeting in 1959 to discuss the creation a computer language that would be shared between businesses. Six people, including Hopper, attended to discuss the philosophy of creating a common business language (CBL). Hopper became involved in developing
COBOL
COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...
(Common Business Oriented Language) where she innovated new symbolic ways to write computer code. Hopper developed programming language that was easier to read and "self-documenting." After COBOL was submitted to the
CODASYL
CODASYL, the Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages, was a consortium formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers. This effort led to the development of the programming l ...
Executive Committee, Betty Holberton did further editing on the language before it was submitted to the
Government Printing Office
The United States Government Publishing Office (USGPO or GPO; formerly the United States Government Printing Office) is an agency of the legislative branch of the United States Federal government. The office produces and distributes information ...
in 1960. IBM were slow to adopt COBOL, which hindered its progress but it was accepted as a standard in 1962, after Hopper had demonstrated the compiler working both on UNIVAC and RCA computers. The development of COBOL led to the generation of compilers and generators, most of which were created or refined by women such as Koss, Nora Moser, Deborah Davidson, Sue Knapp, Gertrude Tierney and
Jean E. Sammet.
Sammet, who worked at IBM starting in 1961 was responsible for developing the programming language,
FORMAC __NOTOC__
FORMAC, the FORmula MAnipulation Compiler, was the first computer algebra system to have significant use.
It was developed by Jean E. Sammet and her team, as an extension of FORTRAN IV. The compiler was implemented as a preprocessor tak ...
. She published a book, ''Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals'' (1969), which was considered the "standard work on programming languages," according to Denise Gürer It was "one of the most used books in the field," according to ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' in 1972.
![Margaret_Hamilton - restoration](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg)
Between 1961 and 1963,
Margaret Hamilton began to study software reliability while she was working at the US SAGE air defense system. In 1965, she was responsible for programming the software for the onboard flight software on the
Apollo mission computers.
After Hamilton had completed the program, the code was sent to
Raytheon
Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitaliza ...
where "expert seamstresses" called the "Little Old Ladies" actually hardwired the code by threading copper wire through magnetic rings.
Each system could store more than 12,000 words that were represented by the copper wires.
In 1964, the British
Prime Minister
A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is not ...
Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from October 1964 to June 1970, and again from March 1974 to April 1976. He ...
announced a "White-Hot" revolution in technology, that would give greater prominence to IT work. As women still held most computing and programming positions at this time, it was hoped that it would give them more positive career prospects. In 1965,
Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a doctorate in computer science. Keller helped develop
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
while working as a graduate student at
Dartmouth, where the university "broke the 'men only' rule" so she could use its computer science center.
In 1966,
Frances "Fran" Elizabeth Allen who was developing programming language compilers at IBM Research, published a paper entitled "Program Optimization,". It laid the conceptual basis for systematic analysis and transformation of computer programs. This paper introduced the use of graph-theoretic structures to encode program content in order to automatically and efficiently derive relationships and identify opportunities for optimization.
Christine Darden
Christine Darden (born September 10, 1942, as Christine Mann) is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. ...
began working for NASA's computing pool in 1967 having graduated from the
Hampton Institute
Hampton University is a private, historically black, research university in Hampton, Virginia. Founded in 1868 as Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, it was established by Black and White leaders of the American Missionary Association aft ...
. Women were involved in the development of
Whirlwind
A whirlwind is a weather phenomenon in which a vortex of wind (a vertically oriented rotating column of air) forms due to instabilities and turbulence created by heating and flow (current) gradients. Whirlwinds occur all over the world and i ...
, including
Judy Clapp
Judith A. Clapp (born 1930) is a computer scientist who began her career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently moved to the Lincoln Laboratory and then to MITRE, where she was a leader in the Semi-Automatic Ground E ...
. She created the prototype for an air defense system for Whirlwind which used radar input to track planes in the air and could direct aircraft courses.
In 1969,
Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, who was working for
Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...
, made the first Resource Handbook for
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
. This led to the creation of the ARPANET directory, which was built by Feinler with a staff of mostly women. Without the directory, "it was nearly impossible to navigate the ARPANET."
By the end of the decade, the general demographics of programmers had shifted away from being predominantly women, as they had before the 1940s. Though women accounted for around 30 to 50 percent of computer programmers during the 1960s, few were promoted to leadership roles and women were paid significantly less than their male counterparts. ''
Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan may refer to:
Food and drink
* Cosmopolitan (cocktail), also known as a "Cosmo"
History
* Rootless cosmopolitan, a Soviet derogatory epithet during Joseph Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign of 1949–1953
Hotels and resorts
* Cosmopoli ...
'' ran an article in the April 1967 issue about women in programming called "The Computer Girls." Even while magazines such as ''Cosmopolitan'' saw a bright future for women in computers and computer programming in the 1960s, the reality was that women were still being marginalized.
1970s
In the early 1970s,
Pam Hardt-English led a group to create a computer network they named Resource One and which was part of a group called
Project One
Project One is a DJ and production supergroup consisting of two hardstyle artists, Willem Rebergen (Headhunterz) and Joram Metekohy (Wildstylez). So far, the act has released an album, an EP, and several singles.
"Headhunterz and Wildstylez Pr ...
. Her idea to connect Bay Area bookstores, libraries and Project One was an early prototype of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. To work on the project, Hardt-English obtained an expensive
SDS-940 computer as a donation from TransAmerica Leasing Corporation in April 1972. They created an electronic library and housed it in a record store called Leopold's in Berkeley. This became the Community Memory database and was maintained by hacker,
Jude Milhon
Judith udeMilhon (March 12, 1939 – July 19, 2003), in Washington D.C., best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author in the ...
. After 1975, the SDS-940 computer was repurposed by Sherry Reson, Mya Shone, Chris Macie and Mary Janowitz to create a social services database and a Social Services Referral Directory. Hard copies of the directory, printed out as a subscription service, were kept at city buildings and libraries. The database was maintained and in use until 2009.
In the early 1970s, Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, who worked on the Resource Directory for ARPANET, and her team created the first
WHOIS
WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomou ...
directory. Feinler set up a server at the
Network Information Center
The Network Information Center (NIC), also known as InterNIC from 1993 until 1998, was the organization primarily responsible for Domain Name System (DNS) domain name allocations and X.500 directory services. From its inception in 1972 until Oc ...
(NIC) at Stanford which would work as a directory that could retrieve relevant information about a person or entity. She and her team worked on the creation of
domains, with Feinler suggesting that domains be divided by categories based on where the computers were kept. For example, military computers would have the domain of .mil, computers at educational institutions would have .edu. Feinler worked for NIC until 1989.
Jean E. Sammet served as the first woman president of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
(ACM), holding the position between 1974 and 1976.
Adele Goldberg was one of seven programmers that developed
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
in the 1970s, and wrote the majority of the language's documentation. It was one of the first
object-oriented programming languages
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...
the base of the current
graphic user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
,
that has its roots in the 1968
The Mother of All Demos
"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Compu ...
by
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
. Smalltalk was used by Apple to launch
Apple Lisa
Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to present a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Its development began in 1978. ...
in 1983, the first personal computer with a GUI, and a year later its
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
. Windows 1.0, based on the same principles, was launched a few months later in 1985.
In the late 1970s, women such as Paulson and Sue Finley wrote programs for the
Voyager mission
The Voyager program is an American scientific program that employs two robotic interstellar probes, ''Voyager 1'' and ''Voyager 2''. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable alignment of Jupiter and Saturn, to fly near th ...
. Voyager continues to carry their codes inside its own memory banks as it leaves the
solar system
The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...
. In 1979,
Ruzena Bajcsy
Ruzena Bajcsy (born 1933 in Bratislava, now Slovakia) is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where sh ...
founded the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
.
In the mid-70s,
Joan Margaret Winters began working at IBM as part of a "human factors project," called SHARE.
In 1978, Winters was the deputy manager of the project and went on to lead the project between 1983 and 1987.
The SHARE group worked on researching how software should be designed to consider
human factors
Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Four primary goals of human factors learnin ...
.
Erna Schneider Hoover
Erna Schneider Hoover (born June 19, 1926) is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which "revolutionized modern communication" according to several reports. It prevented system overloads by mon ...
developed a computerized switching system for telephone calls that would replace switchboards.
Her software patent for the system, issued in 1971, was one of the first software patents ever issued.
1980s
Gwen Bell developed the
Computer Museum in 1980.
The museum, which collected computer artifacts became a non-profit organization in 1982 and in 1984, Bell moved it to downtown
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
.
Adele Goldberg served as president of ACM between 1984 and 1986. In 1986,
Lixia Zhang
Lixia Zhang () is the Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.. Her expertise is in computer networks; she helped found the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed the Resource Reservation ...
was the only woman and graduate student to participate in the early Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings.
[.] Zhang was involved in early Internet development.
In 1982,
Marsha R. Williams became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science.
Sometimes known as the "
Betsy Ross
Elizabeth Griscom Ross (née Griscom;Addie Guthrie Weaver, ''"The Story of Our Flag..."'', 2nd Edition, A. G. Weaver, publ., 1898, p. 73 January 1, 1752 – January 30, 1836), also known by her second and third married names, Ashburn an ...
of the personal computer," according to the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'',
Susan Kare worked with
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...
to design the original icons for the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
.
Kare designed the moving watch, paintbrush and trash can elements that made using a Mac
user-friendly
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a soft ...
.
Kare worked for Apple until the mid-1980s, going on to work on icons for
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predeces ...
.
Other types of computer graphics were being developed by
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is a computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer dis ...
in Canada. Thalmann started working on computer animation to develop "realistic virtual actors" first at the
University of Montréal in 1980 and later in 1988 at the
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
.
In the field of
human–computer interaction
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design tec ...
(HCI), French computer scientist,
Joëlle Coutaz developed the
presentation-abstraction-control (PAC) model in 1987. She founded the User Interface group at the Laboratorire de Génie Informatique of IMAG where they worked on different problems relating to user interface and other software tools.
As
Ethernet
Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
became the standard for networking computers locally,
Radia Perlman
Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her inventi ...
, who worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was asked to "fix" limitations that Ethernet imposed on large network traffic. In 1985, Perlman came up with a way to route information packets from one computer to another in an "infinitely scalable" way that allowed large networks like the Internet to function. Her solution took less than a few days to design and write up. The name of the algorithm she created is the
Spanning Tree Protocol
The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a network protocol that builds a loop-free logical topology for Ethernet networks. The basic function of STP is to prevent bridge loops and the broadcast radiation that results from them. Spanning tree also al ...
. In 1988,
Stacy Horn, who had been introduced to
bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...
s (BBS) through
The WELL
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL, was launched in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. ...
, decided to create her own online community in New York, which she called the East Coast Hang Out (ECHO). Horn invested her own money and pitched the idea for ECHO to others after bankers refused to hear her business plan. Horn built her BBS using
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
, which she and her friends taught to one another. Eventually ECHO moved an office in
Tribeca
Tribeca (), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Stre ...
in the early 1990s and started getting press attention. ECHO's users could post about topics that interested them, and chat with one another, and were provided email accounts. Around half of ECHO's users were women. ECHO was still online as of 2018.
Europe was somewhat behind other countries in developing an Internet infrastructure.
A project was developed in the mid-1980s to create an academic network in Europe using the
Open System Interconnection
The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that 'provides a common basis for the coordination of SOstandards development for the purpose of systems interconnection'. In the OSI reference model, the communications ...
(OSI) standards.
Borka Jerman Blažič, a
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...
n computer scientist was invited to work on the project.
She was involved in establishing a Yugoslav Research and Academic Network (YUNAC) in 1989 and registered the domain of
.yu
.yu was the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that was assigned to SFR Yugoslavia in 1989 and was mainly used by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states after 1994. After Serbia and Montenegro acquired separate ...
for the country.
Computer and video games became popular in the 1980s, but many were primarily action-oriented and not designed from a woman's point of view. Stereotypical characters such as the
damsel in distress
The damsel in distress is a recurring narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has either been kidnapped or placed in general peril. Kinship, love, or lust (or a combination of those) gives the male protagonist the motiv ...
featured prominently and consequently were not inviting towards women.
Dona Bailey
Dona Bailey (born 1955) is an American video game programmer and educator. Bailey, along with Ed Logg in 1981, developed Atari, Inc.'s arcade video game ''Centipede''.
Early life and education
Dona Bailey was born in 1955 in Little Rock, ...
designed ''
Centipede
Centipedes (from New Latin , "hundred", and Latin , " foot") are predatory arthropods belonging to the class Chilopoda (Ancient Greek , ''kheilos'', lip, and New Latin suffix , "foot", describing the forcipules) of the subphylum Myriapoda, an ...
'', where the player shoots insects, as a reaction to such games, later saying "It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug".
Carol Shaw
Carol Shaw (born 1955) is one of the first female game designers and programmers in the video game industry. She is best known for creating the Atari 2600 vertically scrolling shooter ''River Raid'' (1982) for Activision. She worked for Atari, In ...
, considered to be the first modern female games designer, released a 3D version of
tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with ''X'' or ''O''. T ...
for the
Atari 2600
The Atari 2600, initially branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) from its release until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized microprocessor- ...
in 1980.
Roberta Williams
Roberta Lynn Williams (; born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game, ''Mystery House'', became a modest commerci ...
and her husband Ken, founded
Sierra Online
Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (formerly On-Line Systems and Sierra On-Line, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre ...
and pioneered the
graphic adventure game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...
format in ''
Mystery House
''Mystery House'' is an adventure game released by On-Line Systems in 1980. It was designed, written and illustrated by Roberta Williams, and programmed by Ken Williams for the Apple II. ''Mystery House'' is the first graphical adventure ga ...
'' and the ''
King's Quest
''King's Quest'' is a graphic adventure game series, released between 1980 and 2016 and created by the American software company Sierra Entertainment. It is widely considered a classic series from the golden era of adventure games. Following th ...
'' series. The games had a friendly
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
and introduced humor and puzzles. Cited as an important game designer, her influence spread from Sierra to other companies such as
LucasArts
Lucasfilm Games (known as LucasArts between 1990 and 2021) is an American video game brand licensing, licensor that is part of Lucasfilm. It was founded in May 1982 by George Lucas as a video game development group alongside his film company; as ...
and beyond.
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic. ...
worked on porting games from
arcade
Arcade most often refers to:
* Arcade game, a coin-operated game machine
** Arcade cabinet, housing which holds an arcade game's hardware
** Arcade system board, a standardized printed circuit board
* Amusement arcade, a place with arcade games
* ...
versions to the
Atari 400
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE ...
and
Atari 800
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE ...
computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She then went to work for
Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one o ...
, writing the manual for ''
Maniac Mansion
''Maniac Mansion'' is a 1987 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It follows teenage protagonist Dave Miller as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sandy Pantz from a mad scientist, whose mind has been ensla ...
''.
1984 was the year of Women Into Science and Engineering (WISE). A 1984 report by
Ebury Publishing
Ebury Publishing is a division of Penguin Random House, and is a publisher of general non-fiction books in the UK. Ebury was founded in 1961 as a division of Nat Mags and was originally located on Ebury Street in London. It was sold to Century ...
reported that in a typical family, only 5% of mothers and 19% of daughters were using a computer at home, compared to 25% of fathers and 51% of sons. To counteract this, the company launched a series of software titles designed towards women and publicised in ''
Good Housekeeping
''Good Housekeeping'' is an American women's magazine featuring articles about women's interests, product testing by The Good Housekeeping Institute, recipes, diet, and health, as well as literary articles. It is well known for the "Good House ...
''.
Anita Borg
Anita Borg (January 17, 1949 – April 6, 2003) was an American computer scientist. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
Education and early life
Borg was born Anita Borg Naf ...
, who had been noticing that women were under-represented in computer science, founded an email support group,
Systers, in 1987.
1990s
![Jaimelevyrussell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Jaimelevyrussell.jpg)
By the 1990s, computing was dominated by men. The proportion of female computer science graduates peaked in 1984 around 37 per cent, and then steadily declined. Although the end of the 20th century saw an increase in women scientists and engineers, this did not hold true for computing, which stagnated. Despite this, they were very involved in working on hypertext and hypermedia projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A team of women at
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
, including Nicole Yankelovich and
Karen Catlin, developed
Intermedia
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to work ...
and invented the anchor link.
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
partially funded their project and incorporated their concepts into Apple
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
s.
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
Sun Link Service was developed by Amy Pearl.
Janet Walker developed the first system to use bookmarks when she created the
Symbolics Document Examiner. In 1989,
Wendy Hall
Dame Wendy Hall (born 25 October 1952) is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Early life and education
Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar ...
created a
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
project called
Microcosm, which was based on digitized
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...
material found in the Mountbatten archive.
Cathy Marshall worked on the
NoteCards
NoteCards was a hypertext-based personal knowledge base system developed at Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards was developed after Trigg's pioneering 1983 Ph.D. thesis on hypertext while at the Universi ...
system at
Xerox PARC
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
. NoteCards went on to influence Apple's
HyperCard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...
. As the Internet became the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
, developers like Hall adapted their programs to include Web viewers. Her Microcosm was especially adaptable to new technologies, including animation and 3-D models. In 1994, Hall helped organize the first conference for the Web.
Sarah Allen
Sarah Allen is a Canadian actress. She studied acting at the National Theatre School of Canada and graduated in 2002.
''Being Human''
Allen is perhaps best known for playing vampire Rebecca Flynt on SyFy's '' Being Human''. For the role ...
, the co-founder of
After Effects
Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Inc., and used in the post-production process of film making, video games and television production. Among other things, After Ef ...
, co-founded a commercial software company called CoSA in 1990.
In 1995, she started working on the
Shockwave team for
Macromedia
Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems ...
where she was the lead developer of the Shockwave Mulituser Server, the
Flash Media Server
Adobe Media Server (AMS) is a proprietary data and media server from Adobe Systems (originally a Macromedia product). This server works with the Flash Player and HTML5 runtime to create media driven, multiuser RIAs ( Rich Internet Applications ...
and
Flash video
Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ar ...
.
Following the increased popularity of the Internet in the 1990s, online spaces were set up to cater for women, including the online community
Women's WIRE and the technical and support forum
LinuxChix LinuxChix is a women-oriented Linux community. It was formed to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users, although men are encouraged to contribute. Members of the community are referred to as "a Linux chick" (singular) and "L ...
. Women's WIRE, launched by Nancy Rhine and Ellen Pack in October 1993, was the first Internet company to specifically target this demographic.
A conference for women in computer-related jobs, the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. The celebra ...
, was first launched in 1994 by Anita Borg.
Game designer
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic. ...
started working at
Interval Research
Interval Research Corporation was founded in 1992 by Paul Allen and David Liddle. It was a Palo Alto laboratory and technology incubator focusing on consumer product applications and services with a focus on the Internet.
A 1997 version of the co ...
in 1992, and began to think about the differences in the way girls and boys experienced playing video games. After interviewing around 1,000 children and 500 adults, she determined that games weren't designed with girls' interests in mind. The girls she spoke with wanted more games with open worlds and characters they could interact with. Her research led to Interval Research giving Laurel's research team their own company in 1996,
Purple Moon
Purple Moon was an American developer of girls' video games based in Mountain View, California. Its games were targeted at girls between the ages of 8 and 14. The company was founded by Brenda Laurel and others, and supported by Interval Researc ...
. Also in 1996,
Mattel's game, ''
Barbie Fashion Designer'', became the first best-selling game for girls. Purple Moon's first two games based on a character called Rockett, made it to the 100 best-selling games in the years they were released. In 1999, Mattel bought out Purple Moon.
Jaime Levy created the one of the first e-Zines in the early 1990s, starting with ''CyberRag'', which included articles, games and animations loaded onto diskettes that anyone with a
Mac could access.
Later, she renamed the
zine
A zine ( ; short for '' magazine'' or '' fanzine'') is a small-circulation self-published
Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to writ ...
to ''Electronic Hollywood.''
Billy Idol
William Michael Albert Broad (born 30 November 1955), known professionally as Billy Idol, is a British-American singer, songwriter, and musician. He first achieved fame in the 1970s emerging from the London punk rock scene as the lead singer o ...
commissioned Levy to create a disk for his album, ''
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyber ...
''.
She was hired to be the creative director of the online magazine, ''
Word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
'', in 1995.
Cyberfeminists,
VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Interne ...
, made up of
Josephine Starrs,
Juliane Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and
Virginia Barratt, created art in the early 1990s linking computer technology and women's bodies. In 1997, there was a gathering of
cyberfeminists in
Kassel
Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...
, called the First Cyberfeminist International.
In China,
Hu Qiheng
Hu Qiheng (born 1934) is a Chinese computer scientist. Hu was the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1996 and led the National Computing and Networking Facility of China which connected China to the Internet in April ...
, was the leader of the team who installed the first
TCP/IP
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
connection for China, connecting to the Internet on April 20, 1994. In 1995,
Rosemary Candlin
Rosemary Candlin (born Rosemary Shaw in 1927) is a crystallographer and computer scientist who joined the University of Edinburgh Computer Science Department shortly after it was first established, and for some time was the only woman lecturer on ...
went to write software for
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
in
Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
. In the early 1990s,
Nancy Hafkin
Nancy Jane Hafkin is a pioneer of networking and development information and electronic communications in Africa, spurring the Pan African Development Information System (PADIS) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) from 1 ...
was an important figure in working with the
Association for Progressive Communications
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is an international network of organizations that was founded in 1990 to provide communication infrastructure, including Internet-based applications, to groups and individuals who work for peace ...
(APC) in enabling email connections in 10 African countries. Starting in 1999,
Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder began to work with
Domain Name System Security Extensions
The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) are a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protocol ...
(DNSSEC) in
Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
.
She later made sure that the domain,
.se
.se, formerly branded as .SE, is the Internet country code top-level domain ( ccTLD) for Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is ...
, was the world's first top level domain name to be signed with DNSSEC.
In the late 1990s, research by
Jane Margolis
Jane Margolis is a social scientist and faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies who studies why so few African American, Latino, and female students are learning computer sc ...
led
Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie may refer to:
People
* Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name
* Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan
Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie
*Carnegie Building (Troy, New York), on the campus of Rensselaer Polyt ...
to try to correct the male-female imbalance in computer science.
From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s,
Misha Mahowald
Michelle Anne Mahowald (January 12, 1963 – December 26, 1996) was an American computational neuroscientist in the emerging field of neuromorphic engineering. In 1996 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame f ...
developed several key foundations of the field of
Neuromorphic engineering
Neuromorphic engineering, also known as neuromorphic computing, is the use of electronic circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial ne ...
, while working at the
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
and later at the
ETH Zurich
(colloquially)
, former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule
, image = ETHZ.JPG
, image_size =
, established =
, type = Public
, budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021)
, rector = Günther Dissertori
, president = Joël Mesot
, ac ...
. More than 20 years after her untimely death, the Misha Mahowald Prize was named after her to recognize excellence in the field which she helped to create.
2000s
![Marissa Mayer LeWeb 2008 VI](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Marissa_Mayer_LeWeb_2008_VI.jpg)
In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to reduce the gender disparity in IT and get more women involved in computing again. A 2001 survey found that while both sexes use computers and the internet in equal measure, women were still five times less likely to choose it as a career or study the subject beyond standard secondary education. Journalist
Emily Chang said a key problem has been
personality test
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report questionnaire ( ...
s in job interviews and the belief that good programmers are introverts, which tends to self-select the stereotype of an asocial white male nerd.
In 2004, the
National Center for Women & Information Technology
The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to increase the meaningful participation of girls and women in computing. NCWIT was founded in 2004 by Lucinda (Lucy) Sanders, Dr. T ...
was established by
Lucy Sanders
Lucinda "Lucy" Sanders (born 1954) is the current CEO and a co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She is the recipient of many distinguished honors in the STEM fields, including induction into the US News STEM Lea ...
to address the gender gap.
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
has made a concerted attempt to increase gender diversity in the computer science field, by selecting students based on a wide criteria including leadership ability, a sense of "giving back to the community" and high attainment in maths and science, instead of traditional computer programming expertise. As well as increase the intake of women into CMU, the programme produced better quality students because of the increased diversity making a stronger team.
2010s
Despite the pioneering work of some designers, video games are still considered biased towards men. A 2013 survey by the
International Game Developers Association
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is a nonprofit professional association whose stated mission is to "support and empower game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable careers."
The IGDA is incorpo ...
revealed only 22% of game designers are women, although this is substantially higher than figures in previous decades.
Working to bring inclusion to the world of open source project development,
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer and open source advocate based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, ...
drafted the
Contributor Covenant
The Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct for contributors to Free and open-source software, free/open source software projects, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Its stated purpose is to reduce harassment of minority, LGBT and otherwise underrepr ...
in 2014.
By 2018, over 40,000 software projects have started using the Contributor Covenant, including
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...
,
Vue
Vue or VUE may refer to:
Places
* Vue, Loire-Atlantique, a commune in France
* The Vue, a skyscraper in Charlotte, North Carolina
Arts, entertainment and media
* Vue (band), a rock and roll band from San Francisco, California
* Vue Cinemas, a c ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
.
In 2014,
Danielle George
Danielle Amanda George (née Kettle; born 27 January 1976) is a Professor of Radio frequency engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of Manche ...
, professor at the
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester spoke at the
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are a series of lectures on a single topic each, which have been held at the Royal Institution in London each year since 1825, missing 1939–1942 because of the Second World War. The lectures present sc ...
on the subject of "how to hack your home", describing simple experiments involving computer hardware and demonstrating a giant game of
Tetris
''Tetris'' (russian: link=no, Тетрис) is a puzzle video game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the approp ...
by remote controlling lights in an office building.
In 2017,
Michelle Simmons
Michelle Yvonne Simmons, (born 14 July 1967) is a Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales and has twice been an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and is an Australian Res ...
founded the first
quantum computing
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...
company in
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
.
The team, which has made "great strides" in 2018, plans to develop a 10-
qubit
In quantum computing, a qubit () or quantum bit is a basic unit of quantum information—the quantum version of the classic binary bit physically realized with a two-state device. A qubit is a two-state (or two-level) quantum-mechanical system, ...
prototype silicon quantum integrated circuit by 2022.
In the same year,
Doina Precup became the head of
DeepMind
DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsid ...
Montreal, working on
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
.
Xaviera Kowo is a programmer from Cameroon, who won the Margaret award, for programming a robot which processes waste in 2022.
Gender gap in computing
While computing began as a field heavily dominated by women, this changed in western countries shortly after World War II. In the US, recognising software development was a significant expense, companies wanted to hire an "ideal programmer". Psychologists William Cannon and Dallis Perry were hired to develop an aptitude test for programmers, and from an industry that was more than 50% women they selected 1400 people, 1200 of whom were male. This paper was highly influential and claimed to have "trained the industry" in hiring programmers, with a heavy focus on introverts and men. In Britain, following the war, women programmers were selected for redundancy and forced retirement, leading to the country losing its position as computer science leader by 1974.
Popular theories are favoured about the lack of women in computer science, which discount historical and social circumstances. In 1992,
John Gray's ''
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus'' theorised that men and women tend to differ in ways of thinking, leading to them approaching technology and computing in different ways. A significant issue is that women find themselves working in an environment that is largely unpleasant, so they decline to continue in those careers. A further issue is that if a class of computer scientists contains few women, those few can be singled out, leading to isolation and feelings of non-belonging, which can culminate in leaving the area.
The gender disparity in IT is not global. The ratio of female to male computer scientists is significantly higher in India compared to the West,
[ and in 2015, over half of internet entrepreneurs in China were women. In Europe, Bulgaria and Romania have the highest rates of women going into computer programming. In government universities in Saudi Arabia in 2014, Arab women made up 59% of students enrolled in computer science. It has been suggested there is a greater gap in countries where people of both sexes are treated more equally, contradicting any theories that society in general is to blame for any disparity.] However, the ratio of African American female computer scientists in the US is significantly lower than the global average. In IT-based organisations, the ratio of men to women can vary between roles; for example, while most software developers at InfoWatch are male, half of usability designers and 80% of project managers are female.
In 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
undergraduate Ellen Spertus
Ellen R. Spertus is an American Computer Scientist who is currently the Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of computer science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a former senior research scientist at Google.
Early life and education
Spertu ...
wrote an essay "Why Are There So Few Women in Computer Science?", examining inherent sexism in IT, which was responsible for a lack of women in computing. She subsequently taught computer science at Mills College
Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...
, Oakland
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...
in order to increase interest in IT for women. A key problem is a lack of female role models in the IT industry, alongside computer programmers in fiction and the media generally being male.
The University of Southampton
, mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour
, type = Public research university
, established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...
's Wendy Hall
Dame Wendy Hall (born 25 October 1952) is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Early life and education
Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar ...
has said the attractiveness of computers to women decreased significantly in the 1980s when they "were sold as toys for boys", and believes the cultural stigma has remained ever since, and may even be getting worse.[ Kathleen Lehman, project manager of the BRAID Initiative at ]UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
has said a problem is that typically women aim for perfection and feel disillusioned when code does not compile
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...
, whereas men may simply treat it as a learning experience.[ A report in the '']Daily Telegraph
Daily or The Daily may refer to:
Journalism
* Daily newspaper, newspaper issued on five to seven day of most weeks
* ''The Daily'' (podcast), a podcast by ''The New York Times''
* ''The Daily'' (News Corporation), a defunct US-based iPad new ...
'' suggested that women generally prefer people-facing jobs, which many computing and IT positions do not have, while men prefer jobs geared towards objects and tasks. One issue is that the history of computing has focused on the hardware, which was a male dominated field, despite software being written predominantly by women in the early to mid 20th century.
In 2013, a National Public Radio
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other n ...
report said 20% of computer programmers in the US are female. There is no general consensus for any key reason there are less women in computing. In 2017, an engineer was fired from Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
after claiming there was a biological reason for a lack of female computer scientists.
Dame Stephanie Shirley using the name Steve Shirley addressed some of the problems facing women in computing in the UK by setting up the software company Freelance Programmers (later F.I, then Xansa now Steria Sopra) offering the chance for women to work from home and part-time work
Awards
The Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...
, sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of computing, was named in honor of Alan Turing. This award has been won by three women between 1966 and 2015.
* 2006 – Frances "Fran" Elizabeth Allen
* 2008 – Barbara Liskov
Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the development of the Liskov ...
* 2012 – Shafi Goldwasser
en, Shafrira Goldwasser
, name = Shafi Goldwasser
, image = Shafi Goldwasser.JPG
, caption = Shafi Goldwasser in 2010
, birth_place = New York City, New York, U.S.
, birth_date =
, death_date ...
The British Computer Society
Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...
Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the British Computer Society created an award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Sparck Jones is a computer science researcher and innovator who pioneered the search engine algorithm known as inverse document frequency (IDF). While many early information scientists and computer engineers were focused on developing progr ...
, a Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
and one of the most remarkable women in computer science. The KSJ award has been won by four women between 2009 and 2017:
*2009 – Mirella Lapata
*2012 – Diane Kelly
*2015 – Emine Yilmaz
*2016 – Jaime Teevan
Organizations
Several important groups have been established to encourage women in the IT industry. The Association for Women in Computing
The Association for Women in Computing (AWC) is a professional organization for women in computing. It was founded in 1978 in Washington, D.C., and is a member of the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP).
Purpose
The pur ...
was one of the first and is dedicated to promoting the advancement of women in computing professions. The CRA-W: Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research established in 1991 focused on increasing the number of women in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research and education at all levels. AnitaB.org
AnitaB.org (formerly Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and Institute for Women in Technology) is a global nonprofit organization based in Belmont, California. Founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, the institute's ...
runs the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. The celebra ...
yearly conference. The National Center for Women & Information Technology
The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to increase the meaningful participation of girls and women in computing. NCWIT was founded in 2004 by Lucinda (Lucy) Sanders, Dr. T ...
is a nonprofit that aims to increase the number of women in technology and computing. The Women in Technology International
Women in Technology International (WITI) is an organization promoting the achievements of women in technology and extending support, opportunities, and inspiration. It was founded by Carolyn Leighton in 1989 as the International Network of Women in ...
(WITI) is a global organization dedicated to the advancement of women in business and technology. The Arab Women in Computing has many chapters across the world and focuses on encouraging women to work with technology and provides networking opportunities between industry experts and academicians and university students.
Some major societies and groups have offshoots dedicated to women. The Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has over 36,000 members. BCSWomen
BCSWomen is a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society, The Chartered Institute for IT, that provides networking opportunities for all BCS professional women working in IT around the world, as well as mentoring and encouraging girls and w ...
is a women-only specialist group of the British Computer Society
Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...
, founded in 2001. In Ireland, the charity Teen Turn run after school training and work placements for girls, and Women in Technology and Science (WITS) advocate for the inclusion and promotion of women within STEM industries.
The Women's Technology Empowerment Centre
The Women's Technology Empowerment Centre (W.TEC) is a non-profit organization that provides technology education for women and girls in Nigeria. W.TEC offers services and programs including mentoring, training, technology camps, awareness campai ...
(W.TEC) is a non-profit organisation focused on providing technology education and mentoring to Nigerian women and girls. Black Girls Code
Black Girls CODE (BGC) is a not-for-profit organization that focuses on providing technology education for African-American girls. Kimberly Bryant, an electrical engineer who had worked in biotech for over 20 years, founded Black Girls Code in ...
is a non-profit focused on providing technology education to young African-American women.
Other organisations dedicated to women in IT include Girl Develop It
Girl Develop It (GDI) is a nonprofit organization devoted to getting women the materials they need to pursue careers in software development. Founded in 2010 in New York City, GDI provides affordable programs for adult women interested in learnin ...
, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable programs for adult women interested in learning web and software development in a judgment-free environment, Girl Geek Dinners, an International group for women of all ages, Girls Who Code
Girls Who Code (also known as GWC) is an international nonprofit organization that aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science. The organization works toward closing the gender employment difference in computing. They h ...
: a national non-profit organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology, LinuxChix LinuxChix is a women-oriented Linux community. It was formed to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users, although men are encouraged to contribute. Members of the community are referred to as "a Linux chick" (singular) and "L ...
, a women-oriented community in the open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
movement and Systers, a moderated listserv dedicated to mentoring women in the IT industry.
See also
* African-American women in computer science
African-American women in computer science were among early pioneers in computing in the United States, and there are notable African-American women working in computer science.
History
African-American women were hired as mathematicians to do ...
*
* List of female mathematicians
This is a list of women who have made noteworthy contributions to or achievements in mathematics. These include mathematical research, mathematics education, the history and philosophy of mathematics, public outreach, and mathematics contests.
...
* List of female scientists
This is a ''historical'' list, intended to deal with the time period where it is believed that women working in science were rare. For this reason, this list ends with the 20th century.
Antiquity
* Gargi Vachaknavi (7th century BCE), Indian p ...
* List of organizations for women in science
This is a list of notable organizations for women in science and, more generally; science, technology, engineering, and math.
General STEM-oriented groups
International groups who cover the general topics of science, technology, engineering, and m ...
* List of prizes, medals, and awards for women in science
This list of science and technology awards for women is an index to articles about notable awards made to women for work in science and the STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields generally. It includes awards for astronomy ...
* List of women in the video game industry
This is a list of notable women in the video game industry.
Notable women in the video game industry
* Mabel Addis wrote the mainframe game ''The Sumerian Game'' (1964), becoming the first female video game designer.
* Anna Anthropy, ...
* Timeline of women in computing
This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other ...
* Women and video games
The relationship between women and video games has received extensive academic and media attention. Since the 1990s, female gamers have commonly been regarded as a minority. However, industry surveys have shown that over time, the gender ratio h ...
* Women in computing in Canada
Many in Canada share concerns about the current and future roles of women in computing, especially as these occupations increase in importance. As in many nations where computing and information technology are large industries, women in Canada have ...
* Women in engineering
Women are often under-represented in the academic and professional fields of engineering, however many females have contributed to the diverse fields of engineering historically and currently. A number of organizations and programs have been crea ...
* Women in science
The presence of women in science spans the earliest times of the history of science wherein they have made significant contributions. Historians with an interest in gender and science have researched the scientific endeavors and accomplishments ...
* Women in the workforce
Since the industrial revolution, participation of women in the workforce outside the home has increased in industrialized nations, with particularly large growth seen in the 20th century. Largely seen as a boon for industrial society, women in ...
* Women in venture capital
Women in venture capital or ''VC'' are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small (usually less than 10%) fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number ...
References
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* Natarajan, Priyamvada, "Calculating Women" (review of Margot Lee Shetterly
Margot Lee Shetterly (born June 30, 1969) is an American non-fiction, nonfiction writer who has also worked in investment banking and media startups. Her first book, ''Hidden Figures (book), Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Stor ...
, ''Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race'', William Morrow; Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947) is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Her books include ''Longitude'', about English clockmaker John Harrison, and '' Galileo's Daughter'', about Galileo's daughter Maria Celeste, and ' ...
, ''The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars'', Viking; and Nathalia Holt, ''Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars'', Little, Brown), ''The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...
'', vol. LXIV, no. 9 (May 25, 2017), pp. 38–39.
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External links
Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science
National Center for Women & Information Technology
US
Equate Scotland
Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science
MNT – Mulheres na Tecnologia
Brazil
Resources related to Women in Computing
US
Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology
Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology
UK
Women's Engineering Society
UK
When Women Stopped Coding
{{DEFAULTSORT:Women In Computing
History of computer science