The Impact of Women in Computer Science History

Abstract

Women have always played an important role in Computer Science findings, but its history has always been written by men. Nowadays men outnumber women by 3 times of all computing occupations in the US, but still women prove to be essential on the development of technological field. This work intents to write this history through the achievements and contributions of several important women throughout the history, since the first human computers to the modern computers. The main goal is to highlight the importance of their findings and the impact that they have in the field, shadowed throughout history.

Introduction

The etymology of the word computer comes from the Latin putare which means to think and to prune. Its first known use was in 1613 (Stevenson 2010) in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue (sic) read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer (sic) breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”

The usage of the word initially referred to a human, a person who carried out calculations or computations, but it became popular during the Second World War, when it was used by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) to describe the group of women mathematicians that took on calculations, relieving engineers of this essential and exhaustive work (Grier 2013).

However, the role of women in computing starts long before Second World War (Margolis and Fisher 2003). In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be tested on a computing machine that existed only on paper. But through the years, women and their main contribution to the field were slowly decreasing with the big gender gap appearing only on the 1980s. By this time, concern and follow research with the gender gap grew (Brecher 1985, Frenkel 1990), gathering attention of the community. Nevertheless, the number of women in the area is still decreasing every year, attracting researches trying to explain this phenomenon (Cohoon and Aspray 2006). Moreover, a great number of projects and groups were created in an effort to reverse this issue and encourage woman to apply for computer related fields (Gürer and Camp 2002).

With this issue in mind, this work intents to emphasizes women's place in Computer Science history (Tatnall 2010), telling it through the women's eyes, not only showing specific moments and momentary discoveries, but placing women in their actual role trough out the history, as equal participants of computers development when allowed.

We will start in 1822 with Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and the Analytical Engine, passing trough all main discoveries and developments that lead us to the computer we know nowadays focusing on the female achievement. Beside Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014), Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015) and Margaret Hamilton (Piazza 2018), we will also talk about some not well known woman, but as important, such as Mavis Batey, Elizabeth Webb Wilson and Beatrice Worsley.

Therefore, the main goal of this work is to place women at the forefront in Computer Science history, even though men outnumber women by 3 times of all computing occupations in the US (Ashcraft, McLain and Eger 2016). We want to show how their work was not only punctual, but essential for the development of current technologies, and also making clear the impact they have in a traditional male science field.

19th Century (before 1900)

Although French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard invented in 1801 a programmable loom that used punched wooden cards, similar to the one used years later by early computers (Delve 2007), the beginning of computer history is always credited to English polymath Charles Babbage. He is considered “the father of computer”.

Babbage created the first mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. It was first described in 1837, and even though it considered the greatest achievement of Babbage, he never saw it completed built (Bromley 1982). The Analytical Engine had a structure similar to modern computers: an arithmetic logic unit, control flow with conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory. Henry Prevost Babbage, Charles Babbage's son continued his father's work, but he was also not able to finish the construction. Only in 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete and working version of the machine, called Difference Engine No 2 (Markoff 2011).

While working on its inventions, Babbage corresponded with Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014). Ada was the only legitimate daughter of poet Lord Byron but she and her mother were abandoned by him when she was only one month old. Bitter, her mother, who had studied mathematics herself, raised Ada motivating her interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to keep her from becoming a poet like her father (Moore 1977). Her correspondence with Babbage began when she was still a teenager and allowed her to develop an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers on the Analytical Engine (Hammerman and Russell 2015). For this creation she is considered the first computer programmer, though no programming languages had yet been invented (Fuegi and Francis 2003).

The late 19th century saw the construction of a punch card system that was used to calculate the 1880 census. Herman Hollerith, its inventor, founded the Tabulating Machine Company that later became IBM (Campbell-Kelly 2018). At the same time, Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined one of the first 'computers' at Harvard, groups of human calculators, usually composed by women, since at that time women were not allowed to operate telescopes (Vishveshwara 2015). She did calculations on measuring and cataloging the brightness of stars, discovering the Cepheid variables, a type of star, that led to the evidence for the expansion of the universe (Johnson 2005).

The Advance During the World Wars (1900 - 1950)

The beginning of the 20th century was marked by the great wars. These events led to a great advance on several science fields, including computing. It also gave space for women to participate in the process, since many men were fighting at the battlefield.

Women were first called during the First World War to do ballistics calculations as human computers. Although Elizabeth Webb Wilson did not take part of the suffrage movement, her actions did reassure it. She had a striking talent for mathematics and refused nine job positions at Washington until they offer her a position of chief computer, that according to her would fit her mathematical talents (Grier 2013). At the same time, at United Kingdom, Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave work as a human computer for the Ministry of Munitions, carrying out research for the government on the mathematics of aeronautics (Jones 2009). Even after the end of the war, in 1930, NASA kept hiring women to work in their computer pool analyzing data from wind tunnels and flight tests (Atkinson 2015).

While during the Second World War, Alan Turing developed the main concepts of a universal machine that would be the base for most of the ideas for modern computers, several American women were recruited to operate the first computing machines such as the WREN Colossus at Bletchley Park (Copeland 2010) and later on the ENIAC and MANIAC I computers (Pearson Frehill and McNeely 2015). Alan Turing is also known for cracking the Enigma Code, a German naval cipher machine, helping ending the war. What is usually forgotten is that Mavis Batey also cracked an Enigma machine, the Italian Naval one, at the age of only 19, along with Dilly Knox. She worked at Bletchley Park and she is considered one of the keys to the success of D-Day, breaking important messages from the Germans and Italians. Beside the Italian Naval Enigma machine, she also cracked the Abwehr Enigma and the GGG (Batey 2017).

During the same war, actress Hedy Lamarr, along with George Antheil, developed a radio guidance system that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology. Although never used by the US Navy, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and WiFi technologies. She had no format training and did not fit into Hollywood style. She spent her free time inventing rather then attending parties or drinking. Her invention was took for granted and she was only recognized in the 1990s when she was in her early 80s (Rhodes 2012).

Regarding to companies, in 1939, David Packard and Bill Hewlett were founded theirs in a Palo Alto garage, while a few years later, Ruth Leach Amonette was elected Vice President at IBM, a company with more than 30 years. She was the first woman to hold that role.

By the end of the wars, women were able to keep their roles as being part of the computer developments at that time. Dorothy Vaughan, who left her teaching job to join Langley Research Center as a human computer. In 1948, she was promoted and became the first black supervisor at NACA at 1948. She later specialized in FORTRAN computer programming by teaching herself, and taught other women programming languages in order to open more opportunities for them. She raised six children while working at NACA and encourage other women to grow their career (Allen 2017).

At the same time Gertrude Blanch led the Mathematical Tables Project group from 1938 to 1948, a computing organizations that was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the closure of the project with the end of the war, she lead the computing office of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA (Grier 1997).

The late 1940s saw one the greatest advances on computer history: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals which are the fundamental building block of modern computers (Brinkman, Haggan, and Troutman 1997). Meanwhile, Grace Hopper, a United States Navy officer, programmed on the Harvard Mark I, a large eletromechanical computer with 51 feet in length and 8 feet in height, using more than 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire (Williams 1999). She developed the first compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0 and was one the creators of the COBOL programming language. She is also credited for popularizing the term debugging after finding a moth on a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer that was causing faults on its programs (Beyer 2015).

At the same time, Irma Wyman was working on a missile guidance project at the Willow Run Research Center when she visited the US Naval Proving Ground, meeting Grace Hopper. Their encounter changed Irma's life, stating that it made her an enthusiastic about new technology and it led her life's career (Gilbert and Moore 2012). She later joined Honeywell, an American multinational conglomerate company, and eventually became the the first female CIO of Honeywell. She, much like most of women in this field, enjoyed passing her knowledge to young women in computer science, even endowing a scholarship at the University of Michigan's Center for the Education of Women, her alma mater (Bjorhus 2015).

By the beginning of 1950s, women had made some remarkable part on the development of Computer Science all over the world: Canadian scientist Beatrice Worsley had ran the the first program on the EDSAC computer in 1949 (Campbell 2003); Edith Clarke, an American electrical engineer, had filed patents for a graphical calculator and became the first female professor of Electrical Engineering in the United States in 1947 (Layne 2009); German mathematician Grete Hermann had published the foundational paper for computer algebra in 1926, and her critique to John von Neumann's proof of the no-hidden-variable theorem in 1935, the later being ignored by the physics community for more than 30 years holding back the development of quantum mechanics (Herzenberg 2008); and Austrian mathematician Johanna Piesch published two pioneering papers on Boolean algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing (Zemanek 1993).

The Birth of Programming Languages (1950 - 1970)

One important point of development for Computer Science was the creation of programming languages. Using a notation more close to human language than the machine language originally used, it made programming more accessible and started to popularize Computer Science. COBOL is considered the first programming language and it was developed by Grace Hopper in 1953 (Bemer 1971). At the same time, a team of programmers at IBM led by John W. Backus created another programming language, FORTRAN, that focused on numeric computation and and engineering applications (Backus 1978).

At the early 50s, Ida Rhodes, which had worked with Gertrude Blanch on the Mathematical Tables Project in 1940 (Blanch and Rhodes 1974), along with Betty Holberton also designed a programming language. The C-10 language was used on the UNIVAC I computer and it is considered the prototype of modern programming languages. Betty Holberton also participated in the early development of COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages along with Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015). She is known for being one of the six women to program the ENIAC along with Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas during World War II. They were classified as 'subprofessionals' and performed calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically having a major impact on Computer Science (Fritz 1996). Later, in 1962, Jean E. Sammet who also has contact with Grace Hopper and the UNIVAC I team, not only developed a new language, the FORMAC programming language, but also studied the history of programming languages so far. She later became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery (Bergin 2009).

The mid-1960s marked the first step towards the popularization to modern computers, Douglas Engelbart developed a machine with a mouse and a graphical user interface (English, Engelbart and Berman 1967). At the same time, women were struggling to maintain their opportunities in the Computer Science field. While Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Gürer 1995), Dame Stephanie Shirley was advocating for the involvement of women in computing. She founded a software company and employed more women than men, having only 1% of male programmers, until that became illegal in 1975 (Shirley and Askwith 2017). She also adopted the name 'Steve' to survive a male-dominant world and programmed the Concorde's black box flight recorder (Tickle 2017).

As Shirley, more women wrote important programs, Mary Coombs, for example, was the first female programmer on LEO, the first business computer back in 1952. At NASA, the orbital calculations for the Explorer 1 satellite was done by a group of all-female computers. At the same laboratory at NASA, Dana Ulery, the first female engineer, developing real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit word size computer and programmed NASA’s Deep Space Network capabilities (Kresser and Sippel 1962) Moreover, some women also Margaret R. Fox was appointed Chief of the Office of Computer Information in 1966, part of the Institute for Computer Science and Technology of NBS. She held the post until 1975 (Fox 1984).

A great breakthrough happen in 1969, when a group of programmers from the Bell Labs developed UNIX, an operating system written in the C programming language. Its main advantage was to be portable across multiple platforms and it soon became popular among companies and government entities. Personal computers were rare and UNIX was not the first operating system. A few year before, in 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes designed the first personal computer, the LINC, and wrote LAP, its operating system, considered the first OS (Clark 1987). Women were not pioneers only in technical programs, though, Joan Ball started a computer dating service in 1964, years before social networks and dating applications (Ball 2014).

As during the Great World Wars, women also played an important role in the Cold War. In late 1960s, Margaret Hamilton was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory that worked with NASA on the Apollo space program. She programmed the on-board flight software and its robust architecture was crucial during the abort of the Apollo 11 moon landing (Hamilton and Hackler 2008). She came up with the term Software Engineering, as the application of engineering to the development of software in a systematic method (Hamilton and Hackler 2007).

Conclusion

Women were essential to the development of computing and their role were outshined by men, leading to the alarming number of women occupying less than one quarter of all computing occupations in the US (Ashcraft, McLain and Eger 2016). This underrepresentation leads to a male dominant environment, hostile to women, as can be seen in recent issues with big companies such as Google (Wakabayashi 2017) and Facebook (Conger and Frenkel 2018), and affects its development, since diversity is important in any field (Hicks 2017).

Another problem arrises from their recognition through rewards and awards. The ACM Turing Award, for example, is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to individuals with a major technical contribution to the computer science field. By 2019, from the almost seventy awards given, only three were given to women: Frances Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Liskov and Shafi Goldwasser. All were given after 2006, showing how women were erased from the history of computing until recently.

Trying to revert this issue, several groups and organizations were created, such as Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (Gabbert and Meeker 2002) or the Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (Gürer and Camp 2002) with over 36 thousand members. They try to support and empower women already active on the field, while encouraging girls to engage in Computer Science and related areas.

Therefore, although still suffering from the several years of shadowing by men, women in computing field are fighting for their space and hopefully, with time, we may have a field with more equity.

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