After completing her degree she was offered a fellowship by Richard van der Riet Woolley to work at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia, from 1947 to 1951 when she joined Ferranti in Manchester as a computer programmer.

On joining the UK and electrical engineering and equipment firm, Ferranti, she started working in a group led by John Makepeace Bennett.

The Ferranti programming team members found it useful to commit the following sequence of characters to memory, which represented the numbers 0–31 in the International Telegraph Alphabet No.

This could be argued as the logically sensible choice, but was changed to the more conventional system of the most significant bit on the left for the Mark 1 Star.

[7] The Baudot teleprinter code was also abandoned for one that was in the following order:[8] Program errors for the Ferranti Mark 1 computers were difficult to find.

The challenge of her routine, 'Stopandprint', was that it had to monitor the program under diagnosis without interfering with it, and the limited space in the fast store made this difficult.

At the centre of this was a program that Woods had written for inverting a matrix to solve 40 simultaneous equations, which was a large number for the time.

For one dispute Woods went to Tom Kilburn, who was second only to Professor Sir Frederic Calland Williams in the engineering department.

On 10 July 1954 at St Saviour's Church, Hampstead, she married Conway Berners-Lee whom she met while working in the Ferranti team, and together they had four children; Timothy (Tim), Peter, Helen and Michael (Mike).

[14][15][16] After a period devoted to bringing up children, she became a schoolteacher of mathematics, and then a programmer using BASIC, Fortran and other languages before retiring in 1987.