A brief history of female programmers
In this current day, the software engineering field is occupied mainly by males. It’s rare to see any females who are interesting in programming. Surprisingly to me, women were actually among the first programmers since the 18th to 20th century. It wasn’t until the 1960’s to 1980’s that the participation of women in the field dropped drastically.
Ada Lovelace is regarded as the first computer programmer. In the 1840s, she published the first algorithm intended to be executed by a machine.
She was an English mathematician and writer. She is known chiefly for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine.
“Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage’s world his engines were bound by number…What Lovelace saw — what Ada Byron saw — was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules”
— Doron Swade, historian of computing
After the American Civil War, more women were hired as human computers. Widows looked for jobs to support themselves and there was a shortage of men.
In 1880, Edward Charles Pinkering hired a group of women to process astronomical data for him at Harvard. He felt that women could do the job as well as men and he could ask them to volunteer or work for less pay (though some of the women were astronomy graduates). Although these women started primarily as calculators, they often rose to contribute to the astronomical field, and even publish in their own names.
By the 1943, almost all human computers were women. Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) recognized in 1942 that “the engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.”
“Designing the hardware was ‘men’s work’ and programming the software was ‘women’s work.’”
— Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women”
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 in 1943, an electro-mechanical computer based on Analytical Engine. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934. She tried to enlist in the Navy but was disqualified for her age, but still served on the reserves. While working on the development team for the UNIVAC computer during the 1950s, she created a compiler that allowed programmers to write their code in English and translated the code into machine symbols.
In 1954 Hopper was named the company’s first director of automatic programming, and her department released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.
By the end of the decade, the general demographics of programmers had shifted away from being predominantly women, as they had before the 1940s.
Though women accounted for around 30 to 50 percent of computer programmers during the 1960s, few were promoted to leadership roles and women were paid significantly less than their male counterparts.
By the 1970s, a study revealed that the numbers of men and women who expressed an interest in coding as a career were equal. Men were more likely to enroll in computer-science programs, but women’s participation rose steadily and rapidly through the late ’70s until, by the 1983–84 academic year, 37.1 percent of all students graduating with degrees in computer and information sciences were women.
And then from 1984 onward, female participation dropped and by the time 2010 rolled around, it had been cut in half. Only 17.6 percent of the students graduating from computer-science and information-science programs were women. At this time, girls were being raised to be homemakers and given dolls to play with, whereas boys were encourage to play with electronics and computers. Fathers spent time mentoring their sons and teaching them how to use computers, typically leaving out their daughters in these bonding time.
So women who entered computer science in college had less experience and exposure to computers compared to men in their classes. Those women were at a disadvantage since they were learning everything for the first time. This began the stereotype/ false belief that women aren’t suitable for programming compared to men. Obviously that notion is wrong, considering how many women were pioneers and contributors in the field (There are many more notable women in computer science I haven’t mentioned in this blog. ).
Further reading:
The Secret History of Women in Coding (New York Times)
