Before the advent of the home computer in the early 1980s, substantially more women undertook computer science degrees. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 1984-1985 academic year women accounted for nearly 37% of all computer science undergraduate students. This number steadily dropped as the widespread use of home computers became more common. A 1985 report on the everyday usage of personal computers within the home found that men were both far more likely to use a computer, and to use it for more hours per week than women. Only 27% of men reported not using a computer on a weekly basis, compared to 55% of females surveyed. As of 2010-2011, women made up just 17.6% of computer science students.
However, women have been at the forefront of computing since the beginning. From programming languages to interaction design to robotics, women have been contributing to the evolution of computing for over a century. Here are some of the innovative women who made today’s technology possible.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815 - November 27, 1852)
She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Over one hundred years after her death, in 1953, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after being forgotten. The engine now has been recognized as an early model for a computer and Ada Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software. On December 10, 1980, (Ada's birthday), the U.S. Defense Department approved the reference manual for its new computer programming language and named it after her, "Ada".
Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992)
She was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. After the war, Hopper remained with the Navy as a reserve officer. As a research fellow at Harvard, she worked with the Mark II and Mark III computers. She was at Harvard when a moth was found to have shorted out the Mark II, and is sometimes given credit for the invention of the term "computer bug"—though she didn't actually author the term, she did help popularize it.
Wanting to continue to work with computers, Hopper moved into private industry in 1949, first with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, then with Remington Rand, where she oversaw programming for the UNIVAC computer. In 1952, her team created the first compiler for computer languages (a compiler renders worded instructions into code that can be read by computers). This compiler was a precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, a widely adapted language that would be used around the world. Though she did not invent COBOL, Hopper encouraged its adaptation.
Jean E. Sammet (1928)
She is a mathematician and computer scientist; developed FORMAC programming language. She spent 27 years at IBM where she developed FORMAC, the first widely used computer language for symbolic manipulation of mathematical formulas. She was also a member of the subcommittee which created COBOL.
Adele Goldstine
Adele was the wife of Dr. Herman Goldstine, who assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, the world's first electronic digital computer, at UPenn in the 1940's. She made an indelible contribution to the ENIAC project herself by authoring the Manual for the ENIAC in 1946. This original technical description of the ENIAC detailed the machine right down to its resistors.
Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jennings, and Fran Bilas
These women are the original programmers of the ENIAC. ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. On February 15, 1946, the ENIAC Computer was unveiled to the public and press. It ran the ballistics trajectory programmed by the six programmers and captured the world's imagination. In 1947, the ENIAC was turned into a "stored program" computer, the world's first. Thus, these six programmers were the only generation of programmers to program it at the machine level. All six women contributed to the programming the ENIAC. Many of these pioneer programmers went on to develop innovative tools for future software engineers and to teach others early programming techniques.
Erna Schneider
In 1954, after teaching for a number of years at Swarthmore College, Erna began a research career at Bell Laboratories. While there, she invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic, to replace existing hard-wired, mechanical switching equipment. For this ground-breaking achievement -- the principles of which are still used today -- she was awarded one of the first software patents ever issued (Patent #3,623,007, Nov. 23, 1971). At Bell Labs, she became the first female supervisor of a technical department.
Anita Borg
Anita is the founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT). Anita Borg died sadly in April of 2003 from brain cancer at the age of 54. Beginning in 1997, the institute was supported and funded by Xerox. Her goals for the institute were threefold:
- bring non-technical women into the design process
- encourage more women to become scientists
- help the industry, academia, and the government accelerate these changes.
Founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Borg is also a leader on women's computing issues in the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computing Research Association and the National Academy of Engineering.
Borg has received many awards, including the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association of Women in Computing. In 1998, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Women in Technology International.
Barbara H. Liskov
Barbara became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD from a computer science department, in 1968 from Stanford University. A pioneer in object-oriented programming, Dr. Barbara H. Liskov is perhaps best known for her seminal work on data abstraction, a fundamental tool for organizing programs. Her research in the early 1970s led to the design and implementation of CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction. Since 1975, every important programming language, including Java, has borrowed ideas from CLU.
Eva Tardos
Eva is the recipient of the Fulkerson Prize in 1988 for her paper "A strongly polynomial minimum cost circulation algorithm". She is a professor and chair of the Computer Science department at Cornell University and currently serving as the Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Information Science. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of a Packard, Sloan Foundation, and Guggenheim fellowship, and ACM Fellow, INFORMS Fellow, and is winner of the Fulkerson Prize (1988), and the George B. Dantzig Prize.
She is a theoretical computer scientist, two-time recipient of the Godel Prize. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Goldwasser's research areas include complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory.
Carly was a chairman of the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2000-2005 and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999-2005. She was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine from 1998-2003. Currently she is a director at the Revolution Health Group and is on the board of Cybertrust, a large computer security firm
Meg has been the CEO of the popular online auction site eBay since March 1998 taking the company from fewer than 100 employees to over 9,000 employees worldwide. Meg also was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine in 2004.
She is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. She was also the first female recipient of the ACM'S Turing Award in 2006. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization.
In addition to the above mentioned, here are some other significant female character who were very influential to the field of computing.
Shafi Goldwasser
She is a theoretical computer scientist, two-time recipient of the Godel Prize. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Goldwasser's research areas include complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory.
Carly Fiorina
Carly was a chairman of the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2000-2005 and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999-2005. She was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine from 1998-2003. Currently she is a director at the Revolution Health Group and is on the board of Cybertrust, a large computer security firm
Meg Whitman
Meg has been the CEO of the popular online auction site eBay since March 1998 taking the company from fewer than 100 employees to over 9,000 employees worldwide. Meg also was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine in 2004.
Frances E. Allen
She is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. She was also the first female recipient of the ACM'S Turing Award in 2006. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization.
In addition to the above mentioned, here are some other significant female character who were very influential to the field of computing.
- Carol Bartz, President and CEO of Yahoo! (started 2009), previously Chairman, President, and CEO at Autodesk (1992-2009), WITI Hall of Fame 1997
- Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
- Safra A. Catz, President Oracle Corporation since 2004, CFO Oracle since 2005, Member Oracle Board since 2001
- Diane Greene, VMWare co-founder and CEO (1998-2008)
- Helen Greiner, 1990-2008 Co-founder, Board Chair of iRobot, Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Innovation award winner 2008, WITI Hall of Fame 2007
- Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, 2008 ACM President, 2009 Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), 2009 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
- Mary Lou Jepsen, Founding CTO of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Founder and CEO, Pixel Qi, WITI Hall of Fame 2008
- Maria Klawe, 5th president of Harvey Mudd College (1st woman in that role), previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, 2002 ACM President, ACM Fellow 1996
- Sandra Kurtzig, founder and CEO of ASK computers (1972-1991)
- Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Social Impact award winner 2008
- Evi Nemeth, Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Co-author of the best-selling UNIX System Administration Handbook (Prentice Hall, 1995)
- Radia Perlman, the 'Mother of the Internet', 1st Sun Microsystems female Fellow, 1st Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Innovation award winner 2005, IEEE Fellow 2008
- Janie Tsao Co-Founder of Linksys (1988-2003), 1st Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Leadership award winner 2005
- Jeanette Wing, President's Professor of Computer Science (former CS Department Head), Carnegie Mellon University, Assistant Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, IEEE Fellow 2003, ACM Fellow 1998
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