1800s One of the first computers for the American
Nautical Almanac was
Maria Mitchell. Her work on the assignment was to compute the motion of the planet
Venus. The
Almanac never became a reality, but Mitchell became the first
astronomy professor at
Vassar.
Ada Lovelace was the first person to publish an
algorithm intended to be executed by the first modern computer, the
Analytical Engine created by
Charles Babbage. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer
programmer. Lovelace was introduced to Babbage's
difference engine 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 to show how the engine would handle calculations of
Bernoulli Numbers on its own. The proofs are considered the first examples of a computer program. The women working for Pickering cataloged around ten thousand stars, discovered the
Horsehead Nebula and developed the system to describe stars. One of the "computers,"
Annie Jump Cannon, 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 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, 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. 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, Karl Pearson and his Biometrics Lab helped produce
ballistics calculations for the British
Ministry of Munitions.
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. 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 telephone switchboard In the early 1920s,
Iowa State College, 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 company. These human computers worked with
electrical engineers to help figure out how to boost signals with
vacuum tube 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 was the first woman to earn a
degree in
electrical engineering and who worked as the first professionally employed electrical engineer in the United States. She was hired by
General Electric as a full engineer in 1923. It was granted in 1925. The women worked on the data coming from
wind tunnel and flight tests. This was largely seen as menial labor, and much of the work was focused on calculations and less on problem solving.
1940s computing device "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 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 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 computers worked as hard (or more often, even harder) 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." Women were also working on ballistic missile calculations. In 1948, women such as
Barbara Paulson were working on the
WAC Corporal, determining trajectories the missiles would take after launch. Women worked with
cryptography and, after some initial resistance, many operated and worked on the
Bombe machines.
Joyce Aylard operated the Bombe machine testing different methods to break the
Enigma code.
Joan Clarke was a cryptographer who worked with her friend,
Alan Turing, on the Enigma machine at
Bletchley Park. 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 the United States, several faster Bombe machines were created. Women, like Louise Pearsall, were recruited from the
WAVES to work on code breaking and operate the American Bombe machines.
Hedy Lamarr and co-inventor,
George Antheil, worked on a
frequency hopping method to help the Navy control torpedoes remotely. 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
blueprints and
wiring diagrams 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 started working at the
National Research Council of Canada 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.
Grace Hopper was the first person to create a
compiler for a
programming language 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'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" 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 at NASA 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 which she joined in 1949. Other women who were hired to program UNIVAC included
Adele Mildred Koss,
Frances E. Holberton,
Jean Bartik, Frances Morello and Lillian Jay. To program the UNIVAC, Hopper and her team used the
FLOW-MATIC programming language, which she developed. Holberton wrote a code, C-10, that allowed for
keyboard inputs into a general-purpose computer. Holberton also developed the
Sort-Merge Generator in 1951 which was used on the
UNIVAC I. 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.
Klara Dan von Neumann was one of the main programmers of the
MANIAC, a more advanced version of ENIAC. Her work helped the field of meteorology and weather prediction. They discovered a paradox whereby a system expected to thermalise instead showed quasi-periodic behaviour. The problem became known as the
Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem, and spawned the use of computers for numerical experiments in nonlinear science. The NACA, and subsequently NASA, recruited women computers following World War II. West was involved in calculations that let to the development of
GPS.
Mary Coombs (of England) was employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the
LEO computers, and as such she is recognized as the first female commercial programmer. Ukrainian
Kateryna Yushchenko created
Address (programming language) for the cоmputer "Kyiv" in 1955 and invented indirect addressing of the highest rank, called
pointers.
1960s Milly Koss who had worked at UNIVAC with Hopper, started work at
Control Data Corporation (CDC) in 1965. There she developed algorithms for graphics, including graphic storage and retrieval.
Mary K. Hawes of
Burroughs Corporation 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 (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 Executive Committee, Betty Holberton did further editing on the language before it was submitted to the
Government Printing Office 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. 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 in 1972. in 1969, standing next to listings of the software she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project 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 where "expert seamstresses" called the "Little Old Ladies" actually hardwired the code by threading copper wire through magnetic rings. 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 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 began working for NASA's computing pool in 1967 having graduated from the
Hampton Institute. Women were involved in the development of
Whirlwind, including
Judy Clapp. 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, made the first Resource Handbook for
ARPANET. 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 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. working at
NASA in 1966
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. Her idea to connect Bay Area bookstores, libraries and Project One was an early prototype of the
Internet. 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. 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 directory. Feinler set up a server at the
Network Information Center (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 (ACM), holding the position between 1974 and 1976.
Adele Goldberg was one of seven programmers that developed
Smalltalk in the 1970s, and wrote the majority of the language's documentation. It was one of the first
object-oriented programming languages the base of the current
graphic user interface, that has its roots in the 1968
The Mother of All Demos by
Douglas Engelbart. Smalltalk was used by Apple to launch
Apple Lisa in 1983, the first personal computer with a GUI, and a year later its
Macintosh. 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. Voyager continues to carry their codes inside its own memory banks as it leaves the
Solar System. In 1979,
Ruzena Bajcsy founded the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the
University of Pennsylvania. In the mid-70s,
Joan Margaret Winters began working at IBM as part of a "human factors project," called SHARE. The museum, which collected computer artifacts became a non-profit organization in 1982 and in 1984, Bell moved it to downtown
Boston. In 1981,
Deborah Washington Brown became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University (at the time the degree was part of the applied mathematics program). Her thesis was titled "The solution of difference equations describing array manipulation in program loops". Shortly after, in 1982,
Marsha R. Williams became the second African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. Sometimes known as the "
Betsy Ross of the personal computer," according to the
New York Times,
Susan Kare worked with
Steve Jobs to design the original icons for the
Macintosh. Kare designed the moving watch, paintbrush and trash can elements that made using a Mac
user-friendly. 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 featured prominently and consequently were not inviting towards women.
Carol Shaw, considered to be the first modern female games designer, released a 3D version of
tic-tac-toe for the
Atari 2600 in 1980.
Roberta Williams and her husband Ken, founded
Sierra Online and pioneered the
graphic adventure game format in
Mystery House and the ''
King's Quest series. The games had a friendly graphical user interface and introduced humor and puzzles. Cited as an important game designer, her influence spread from Sierra to other companies such as LucasArts and beyond. Brenda Laurel ported games from arcade versions to the Atari 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She then went to work for Activision and later wrote the manual for Maniac Mansion''. 1984 was the year of
Women into Science and Engineering (WISE Campaign). A 1984 report by
Ebury Publishing 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 publicized in
Good Housekeeping.
Anita Borg, who had been noticing that women were under-represented in computer science, founded an email support group,
Systers, in 1987. As
Ethernet became the standard for networking computers locally,
Radia Perlman, 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. In 1986,
Lixia Zhang 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.
Borka Jerman Blažič, a
Yugoslavian computer scientist was invited to work on the project. 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. In 1988,
Stacy Horn, who had been introduced to
bulletin board systems (BBS) through
The WELL, 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, which she and her friends taught to one another. Eventually ECHO moved an office in
Tribeca 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.
1990s helped popularise the e-Zine in the 1990s. 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, including Nicole Yankelovich and
Karen Catlin, developed
Intermedia and invented the anchor link.
Apple partially funded their project and incorporated their concepts into Apple
operating systems.
Sun Microsystems 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 created a
hypertext project called
Microcosm, which was based on digitized
multimedia material found in the Mountbatten archive.
Cathy Marshall worked on the
NoteCards system at
Xerox PARC. NoteCards went on to influence Apple's
HyperCard. As the Internet became the
World Wide Web, 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, the co-founder of
After Effects, co-founded a commercial software company called CoSA in 1990. In 1995, she started working on the
Shockwave team for
Macromedia where she was the lead developer of the Shockwave Mulituser Server, the
Flash Media Server and
Flash video. and the technical and support forum
LinuxChix. Women's WIRE, launched by Nancy Rhine and Ellen Pack in October 1993, was the first Internet company to specifically target this demographic. Later, she renamed the
zine to
Electronic Hollywood. In the early 1990s,
Nancy Hafkin was an important figure in working with the
Association for Progressive Communications (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 (DNSSEC) in
Sweden. She later made sure that the domain,
.se, was the world's first top level domain name to be signed with DNSSEC. From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s,
Misha Mahowald developed several key foundations of the field of
Neuromorphic engineering, while working at the
California Institute of Technology and later at the
ETH Zurich. 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 Search Products and User Experience, former president and CEO of
Yahoo!,
Marissa Mayer 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 tests 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 was established by
Lucy Sanders to address the gender gap.
Carnegie Mellon University 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 revealed only 22% of game designers are women, although this is substantially higher than figures in previous decades. By 2018, over 40,000 software projects have started using the Contributor Covenant, including
TensorFlow,
Vue and
Linux. In 2017,
Michelle Simmons founded the first
quantum computing company in
Australia. The team, which has made "great strides" in 2018, plans to develop a 10-
qubit prototype silicon quantum integrated circuit by 2022.
Xaviera Kowo is a programmer from Cameroon, who won the Margaret award, for programming a robot which processes waste in 2022.
2020s In 2023 the EU-Startups, the leading online publication with a focus on startups in Europe, published the list of top 100 of the most influential women in the startup and venture capital space in Europe. The theme of the list reflects the era of innovation and technological change, and encourages a new generation of female for entrepreneurship and innovation. == Gender gap in computing ==