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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in computing | 1/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:17:23.795787+00:00 | kb-cron |
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'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 computing 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 Cushing Whitman, president and chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Marissa Mayer, president and CEO of Yahoo! and key spokesperson at Google. In November 2023, national media reported an ICT training programme for female founders in Abuja organised through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
== History ==
=== 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. 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-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 ===