Women in Computing

Many people know about Ada Lovelace, often dubbed the first computer programmer and programmer of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming and inventor of one of the first compilers. Besides the accomplishments of these extraordinary women, many other women have made lesser-known but still incredible contributions to the field of computing, some before computers were even used.

The earliest women in computing found their starts in mathematics and astronomy, putting their talents into tracing comets and discovering stars. One of the first known human computers was Nicole-Reine Etable de la Briėre Lepaute, called “savant calculatrice” (which translates to “learned calculator”). In the 1700s, she worked on a team of scientists and mathematicians to predict the date of the return of Halley’s Comet, a project which took six months to complete. Impressively, she and her team accomplished a feat incredibly challenging without computers, and correctly forecasted the comet’s arrival in mid- April 1759. She subsequently worked on orbit calculations of a new comet, as well as calculations related to a solar eclipse set for later in the decade, and then joined the Academy of Science, where she continued to compute the positions of planets, the sun, and the moon.

In 1875, R.T. Rogers, R.G. Saunders, and Anna Winlock were among the first women to join the Harvard Conservatory as human computers, for 25 cents an hour or as volunteer. Many other women were hired within the next few years by Edward Charles Pickering to catalogue stars, a job which included discovering new stars as well as studying and counting galaxies. These women examined and maintained Harvard’s glass plate photograph collection and by the end of their employment had catalogued around ten thousand stars and discovered the Horsehead Nebula. One of the women, Annie Jump Cannon, could classify three stars per minute and she, along with several of the other women (Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin), went on to become famous astronomers.

In the 1920s, Edith Clarke, the first woman to get a degree in electrical engineering, filed and was granted a patent for a graphical calculator. With the arrival of World War II in the 1940s, more women took on roles as human computers and the “kilogirl” was coined, a unit of energy that corresponded to about a thousand hours of computing labor. Though largely uncredited, women took on the “unglamorous” work of ballistics computing during the war. It was in this decade that women also began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), later NASA, using data from wind tunnel tests and flight tests. These women were exceptional at their jobs – “The engineers [admitted] themselves that the girl computers [did] the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.”

In the early and mid 1960s, women held most of the computing jobs available but by the end of the decade, programmers shifted from being primarily women to eventually comprising no more than 20 percent of the computing roles.