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= Women in computing =
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Introduction
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Women in computing have shaped the evolution of information
technology. They 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's prediction of Halley's Comet, and
Maria Mitchell's computation of the motion of Venus. The first
algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada
Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field. Grace Hopper was the first
person to design a compiler for a programming language. Throughout the
19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was
predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard
Computers, codebreaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA.
After the 1960s, the "soft work" that had been dominated by women
evolved into modern software, 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, president and chief executive officer
of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Marissa Mayer, president and CEO of
Yahoo! and key spokesperson at Google.
1700s
=======
Nicole-Reine Etable de la Brière Lepaute was one of a team of human
computers who worked with Alexis-Claude Clairaut and Joseph-Jérôme Le
Français de Lalande to predict the date of the return of Halley's
Comet. 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
de Temps' and publishing predictions of solar eclipses.
1800s
=======
One of the first computers for the American 'Nautical Almanac' was
Maria Mitchel. 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. 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 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 had hired several women to work for him at Harvard
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, 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 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-Brown-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
=======
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. 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 (NACA) which became
NASA hired a group of five women in 1935 to work as a computer pool.
The women worked on the data coming from wind tunnel and flight tests.
1940s
=======
"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, twice as hard) as their white
counterparts, but in segregated situations. By 1943, almost all people
employed as computers were women.
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. 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,
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 1941, Batey's work enabled the Allies to break the
Italian's naval code before the Battle of Cape Matapan. 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 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 and Wi-Fi.
The programmers of the ENIAC computer in 1944, were six female
mathematicians; Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli,
Ruth Teitelbaum, Jean Bartik, and Frances Spence 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 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. She built a differential analyzer
in 1948 and also worked with IBM machines in order to do calculations
for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. She went to study the EDSAC at
the University of Cambridge in 1949. She wrote the program that was
run the first time EDSAC performed its first calculations on May 6,
1949.
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 the manual. 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
=======
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.
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 in Cleveland, Ohio,
including Annie Easley, Katherine Johnson and Kathryn Peddrew. At the
National Bureau of Standards, Margaret R. Fox was hired to work as
part of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory in
1951. In 1956, Gladys West 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.
At Convair Aircraft Corporation, Joyce Currie Little was one of the
original programmers for analyzing data received from the wind
tunnels. She used punch cards on an IBM 650 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 to get to and from the building faster.
In Israel, Thelma Estrin worked on the design and development of
WEIZAC, one of the world's first large-scale programmable electronic
computers. In the Soviet Union the IT industry was dominated by women;
a team of them designed the first digital computer in 1951. In the UK,
Kathleen Booth worked with her husband, Andrew Booth on several
computers at Birkbeck College. Kathleen Booth was the programmer and
Andrew built the machines. Kathleen developed Assembly Language at
this time. Kateryna Yushchenko created the Address programming
language for the MESM in 1955.
1960s
=======
Adele Mildred 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.
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.
Each system could store more than 12,000 words that were represented
by the copper wires.
In 1964, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson 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 while working as a graduate
student at Dartmouth, where the university "broke the 'men only' rule"
so she could use its computer science center.
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."
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. 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.
Erna Schneider Hoover 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. Adele Goldberg served
as president of ACM between 1984 and 1986. 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.
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. Kare worked for Apple until the mid-1980s, going on to
work on icons for Windows 3.0. Other types of computer graphics were
being developed by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann 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
�cole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
In the field of human-computer interaction (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 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 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.
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 (OSI)
standards. Borka Jerman Blaži�, a Yugoslavian 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 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 featured
prominently and consequently were not inviting towards women. Dona
Bailey designed 'Centipede', where the player shoots insects, as a
reaction to such games, later saying "It didn't seem bad to shoot a
bug". 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 influenced spread from Sierra to other companies such as
LucasArts and beyond. Brenda Laurel worked on porting games from
arcade versions to the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers in the late
1970s and early 1980s. She then went to work for Activision, writing
the manual for 'Maniac Mansion'.
1984 was the year of Women Into Science and Engineering (WISE). 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 publicised 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.
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.
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.
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, was first launched in
1994 by Anita Borg.
Game designer Brenda Laurel started working at Interval Research 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. 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 to 'Electronic Hollywood.' Billy Idol
commissioned Levy to create a disk for his album, 'Cyberpunk'. She was
hired to be the creative director of the online magazine, 'Word', in
1995.
Cyberfeminists, VNS Matrix, 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, called the First
Cyberfeminist International.
In China, Hu Qiheng, was the leader of the team who installed the
first TCP/IP connection for China, connecting to the Internet on April
20, 1994. In 1995, Rosemary Candlin went to write software for CERN in
Geneva. 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.
In the late 1990s, research by Jane Margolis led Carnegie Mellon to
try to correct the male-female imbalance in computer science.
2000s
=======
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 antisocial 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 resulted in
better quality students overall, as they found the increased diversity
made for 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. Working to bring inclusion to the world of open source
project development, Coraline Ada Ehmke drafts the Contributor
Covenant in 2014. By 2018, over 40,000 software projects have started
using the Contributor Covenant, including TensorFlow, Vue and Linux.
In 2014, Danielle George, professor at the School of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester spoke at the Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures on the subject of "how to hack your
home", describing simple experiments involving computer hardware and
demonstrating a giant game of Tetris by remote controlling lights in
an office building.
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. Also in 2017, Doina Precup became the head of DeepMind Montreal,
working on artificial intelligence.
Gender gap in computing
======================================================================
One of the biggest problems facing women in computing in the modern
era is that they often find themselves working in an environment that
is largely unpleasant, so they don't stay on in the careers in
programming and technology. In 2013, a National Public Radio 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, James Damore was fired from Google after claiming
there was a biological reason for a lack of female computer
scientists. The following year, Wikipedia was criticised for not
having an article about scientist Donna Strickland until shortly after
she won the Nobel Prize for Physics, which was attributed to a severe
gender disparity of the site's editors.
In 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate Ellen
Spertus wrote an essay "Why Are There So Few Women in Computer
Science?", which complained about inherent sexism in IT, which was
responsible for a lack of women in computing. She subsequently taught
computer science at Mills College, Oakland 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's
Wendy Hall 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 has said a problem is that typically women aim for
perfection and feel disillusioned when code does not compile, whereas
men may simply treat it as a learning experience. A report in the
'Daily Telegraph' 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.
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. 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. However, the ratio of African American female
computer scientists in the US is significantly lower than the global
average. 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.
Turing Award recipients
======================================================================
The Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award, sometimes
referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of computing, was named in honor of
Alan Turing. It award has been won by three women between 1966 and
2015.
* 2006 - Frances "Fran" Elizabeth Allen
* 2008 - Barbara Liskov
* 2012 - Shafi Goldwasser
Karen Spärk Jones Award recipients
======================================================================
The British Computer Society 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, a
Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of
Cambridge 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 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 runs the Grace Hopper Celebration
of Women in Computing yearly conference. The National Center for Women
& Information Technology is a nonprofit that aims to increase the
number of women in technology and computing. The Women in Technology
International (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 is a women-only specialist
group of the British Computer Society, 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 (W.TEC) is a non-profit
organisation focused on providing technology education and mentoring
to Nigerian women and girls. Black Girls Code 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,
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: a national non-profit
organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology,
LinuxChix, a women-oriented community in the open source movement and
Systers, a moderated listserv dedicated to mentoring women in the IT
industry.
See also
======================================================================
* African-American women in computer science
* 'Hidden Figures'
* List of female mathematicians
* List of female scientists
* List of organizations for women in science
* List of prizes, medals, and awards for women in science
* List of women in the video game industry
* Timeline of women in computing
* Women and video games
* Women in computing in Canada
* Women in engineering
* Women in science
* Women in venture capital
* Women in the workforce
References
======================================================================
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
======================================================================
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* Natarajan, Priyamvada, "Calculating Women" (review of Margot Lee
Shetterly, 'Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story
of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race',
William Morrow; Dava Sobel, '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', vol. LXIV, no. 9 (May 25, 2017), pp. 38-39.
*
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External links
======================================================================
* [
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/index.html
Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science]
* [
http://ncwit.org National Center for Women & Information
Technology] US
* [
http://www.equatescotland.org.uk/ Equate Scotland]
* [
http://www.iwitts.com/ Institute for Women in Trades, Technology
and Science]
* [
http://mulheresnatecnologia.org MNT - Mulheres na Tecnologia]
Brazil
* [
http://blue.butler.edu/~phenders/resources/ Resources related to
Women in Computing] US
* [
http://www.scwist.ca/ Society for Canadian Women in Science and
Technology]
* [
http://www.wiset.org.uk/ Women in Science, Engineering, and
Technology] UK
* [
http://www.wes.org.uk/ Women's Engineering Society] UK
*
[
https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-sto
pped-coding
When Women Stopped Coding]
License
=========
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License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
