The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/345799830/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech

by jcater • 12 years ago

83 35 12 years ago

npr.org

yarrel• 12 years ago

I knew of Lovelace and Hopper but not the others by name.

I do wonder to what extent this is a socioeconomic class thing.

jacalata• 12 years ago

What do you mean?

kps2• 12 years ago

Before that time, ‘computing’ was considered largely ‘women's work’, along with other clerical tasks like filing and word processing. I'm fond of this photo of a room full of computers, taken sometime between between 1909 and 1932: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90710989/

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

The "computers" being the people, the machines are computing machines - or more likely here, merely calculating machines. At least that's the early usage in the UK.

calibraxis2• 12 years ago

Interesting point! There's one tentative idea that in the 1960-70's, people had the fear that compilers would deskill programming. So you want to protect the profession's wages somehow, like other professionals do. (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-open-source-identity-...)

Regardless of details, it's obviously useful to make your job seem so arcane that only gifted people can do it. Exploiting cultural prejudices, you'd better have white males (maybe "honorary whites"); otherwise it might seem like anyone can do it. For good measure, they should probably be cismale; after all, Turing was basically killed by the government for transgressing gender roles. (That is, his life made unlivable.)

kps2• 12 years ago

The piece mentions CHM's Oral History interview with Jean Bartik, which is available here: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658322

There are a lot of other interesting interviews — http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/

stdwhat• 12 years ago

Can we have a publication named "The Forgotten Male Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" now?

sama• 12 years ago

this is from a newly-created troll account from a dorm in the netherlands. please go back to 4chan.

jonah• 12 years ago

While the GP comment is completely inappropriate, I also think it's inappropriate for you to use your power to dox the trolls. Can't their comment stand on it's own demerits and downvotes?

darkly• 12 years ago

Hi there. Female Programmer here. Long time reader, long time anonymous poster who's cycled through many a throwaway account. Anonymity and throwaways enabling freedom of discourse are important to me: as a woman, being identified in what is honestly a very insular industry is not something I want to fear when posting about my hobby & profession online. I know that I'm not alone in those feelings: there is a reason our community tends to rally behind those fighting Real Name Policies and doxxing. HN has, I thought, always been a relatively safe space for all.

Sama: what you've just done, in your post above, will now drive me, and others like me, off HN. You might say, "fine, good riddance" - and that would just be sad. Whether or not a poster is a "troll" account should not grant the right to disclose any identifying information about that person, in a public space, to whoever wields the largest hammer. I may not agree with GP, but I certainly defend his right to anonymity, as the only way to guarantee my own.

Someone below said that it shouldn't matter, because the "troll" could be posting from behind a proxy for all we know: so I suppose that means that, in order to maintain any sense of security from power-wielding HNers, I can only post from behind a proxy myself. Otherwise I'm explicitly opting-in to public identification, any time a mod disagrees with my opinions on NodeJS or Linux vs MacOS. Noted.

SamReidHughes• 12 years ago

At least he capitalizes.

fredo6992• 12 years ago

What's this? Someone disagreeing with me? On HN? THIS WILL NOT STAND!

cremno2• 12 years ago

Why do Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper count as forgotten?

Dewie2• 12 years ago

Doesn't seem that way to me, either. She comes up in any discussion about women and programming (in a historical perspective). She even has a programming language named after her.

Ada Lovelace is the Marie Curie of computer science - the canonical example of a woman scientist that is brought up any time one is talking about women being ignored in CS, which makes the fact that she is so famous kind of ironic.

mkr-hn• 12 years ago

I don't know if it counts if they're only wheeled out as token examples when the topic of women in technology comes up.

was_hellbanned• 12 years ago

I took a trip to ground zero for today's computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew.

I'm simultaneously horrified and amused at myself because, as I was reading along with the article, I thought to myself, "Linda Lovelace!"

BigChiefSmokem• 12 years ago

Not sure if you meant to say Linda, but I make this mistake all the time too!

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

My high school CS teacher taught us about Grace Hopper. He had been a nuclear engineer for the Navy in the sixties and seventies if I remember correctly, so he seemed to really enjoy surprising the largely male class (and encouraging the female students to stick around) that a woman had invented Cobol.

I'm pretty sure the first time I heard about Ada Lovelace was from the Boy Scout Computers Merit Badge book when I was 14. Ironic, given that organizations reputation as of late.

I don't really recall any college courses really focusing on the history of technological development unless it was particularly relevant, except maybe grad level courses in which we read historical research papers.

HillRat• 12 years ago

To me, the saddest part of this is that there are plenty of high-caliber female computer scientists out there right now -- Denning, Liskov and Wing, Hamilton (computer science and the Apollo program!), Greif, and many others. On a more prosaic and less-theoretical level, I recall that my copy of A Quarter-Century of Unix showed that women were key developers in many parts of that OS. But, of course, those were more elegant applications for a more civilized age.

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

It's pretty silly that although a common (and fallacious) argument against women as software engineers has something to do with math ability when a casual look at the wikipedia list on Women in computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing) mostly lists women with theory and systems programming, which are arguably a lot more mathy than most work in tech. The ACM even had it's first female president in 1974!

tzs• 12 years ago

I'd be interested in how many people do not know Ada Lovelace but do know Charles Babbage.

olado• 12 years ago

Walter Isaacson has created a playlist for his book, and has a personal video post on the female programmers here: http://milq.com/bead/great-digital-innovations?sort=recent

The playlist is a collaborative; where Walter asks the community to provide the top digital innovations: "I've just written a book, The Innovators, about how a group of inventors, hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution. I thought this Bead might be a great way for us to share examples of great innovations around the development of computers and the Internet and the stories behind them."

WBrentWilliams• 12 years ago

I was taken more by the lack of historical grounding of the students in the story. Then I remembered two things:

1) The journalist probably didn't have dig hard, but could easily have cherry-picked a fun interaction for story color. 2) Most history is taught as iconoclasm until the college level, leaving most college students with just a vauge idea of how events happened and why.

I think it more important to show that women have always been part of computing and that they, traditionally, did not get the desired work. They got the parts the men did not want. The "lack" of women in Computer Science then becomes a challenge: Can you highlight and surpass the work of the un-sung who came before?

fredo6992• 12 years ago

Please never talk about politics, HN.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Forgotten? This is the fifth time this year alone I am reading about both (Hopper is a bit overrated and part of military propaganda). Besides how could someone who knows about Babbage wouldn't know about Lovelace?

cafard• 12 years ago

There are two questions here: forgotten by whom, and forgotten compared to whom?

I have to say that Ms. Bartik's name rang no bells. But Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are not at all unknown. Nor are a number of other women in the field, some of whose names are mentioned in other comments.

Next, how would Grace Hopper do on a name recognition quiz versus John Backus, Adriann Van Wijngaarden (whose first name & double-a I had to look up), or John McCarthy? Remember, I'm talking about the general public, not the HN gang. As for Ada Lovelace, she greatly expanded on a description of Babbage's Analytic Engine, and added the algorithm, but how many of us can name the Italian engineer's description that she started from? I sure can't, without looking it up.

The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech

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