Women in computing
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.
[22][21] 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.
[35] 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.
[48] 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".
[43] 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.
[96] Hopper became involved in developing COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) where she innovated new symbolic ways to write computer code.
[96] 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.
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.
[135] 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).
[138] 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.
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.
[141] 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.
[154] 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).
[164] A team of women at Brown University, including Nicole Yankelovich and Karen Catlin, developed Intermedia and invented the anchor link.
[182] Jaime Levy created 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.
[183] 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.
[187] 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.
[190] 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.
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.
[192] 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.
[141] Working to bring inclusion to the world of open source project development, Coraline Ada Ehmke drafted the Contributor Covenant in 2014.
[196] 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.
That being said, there are plenty of inspiring women in Europe's startup and all around the world in VC space who are making daily changes possible and encouraging a new generation of female for entrepreneurship and innovation.
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.
[203] 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.
[208] The ratio of female to male computer scientists is significantly higher in India compared to the West,[209] and in 2015, over half of internet entrepreneurs in China were women.
[214] 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.
[218] 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.
[219][209][220] 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.
[221][222] 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.
