Computer Programming - A (Historically) Female Profession

Introduction

I have never been one for history. I've always found it extremely boring and irrelevant. Why look to the past for making waves in the future? Well, I recently fell down a bit of a rabbit hole of programming history. Only when I realized history had been purposely cut out did I begin to appreciate why we need it to begin with. For this post, I have broken my thoughts into sections. The first section are some snippets of my own experiences as a young professional looking to major in computer science. Next, I'll share some important history about the first programmers. I wrap up my thoughts in reflecting why this information, along with my story, is important not just for women in computing, but all women. This is a very, very short explanation, so I added some supplementary material at the bottom, in case you're also interested in this topic.

My story

Six years ago…

I had known that I wanted to major in computer science since my junior year of high school. I knew I had wanted to be a scientist from around age 12 and narrowed it down first to physics, then engineering, then finally computer science. It was the “brain” of computing that interested me. The “why” something worked.

In my freshman year in college, I joined a living learning community (LLC) of women in STEM, hoping to make fast friends with other women who shared my interests. Unfortunately I was the only woman who was a CS major, but found I related most to three women who were math majors. My roommate, like a majority of the community, was a biology major for premed. We all reveled in the camaraderie of extensive homework and lab blocks and round off errors together.

In our first semester, the professor in charge of the LLC met with each of us in an informal interview to see how we were adjusting. It was a bit of a walk, since her office was located in the psychics department building. This was an obvious choice since she was the head of the department. My interview was in mid September and I remember being a bit nervous as I walked into her office. She asked very simple questions. “How was moving in?” “Did I like my roommate?” “Did I have a meal card for the dining hall?” It was all very standard until she got to a question about halfway through our meeting time.

“Are you worried about your classes, since it’s such a male dominated field?” She asked, concern on her face.

“Not really,” I shrugged, and it was the truth. “Most of my classes have been a pretty even 50/50 split thus far.”

So often we female students heard about how STEM degrees were male dominated, yet my classes were almost a majority of women. Most of the professors were male, but more and more young ladies grew interested in different degree programs. We were certainly not few and far between. Not only that, but a lot of women among the classes’ top performers.

She continued on the interview for about 10 more minutes and set me on my merry way. But I don’t remember a thing after that question was asked. It stuck me as odd. Not the question itself, lots of people wondered why I chose computing as my passion and it never bothered me. Computers, ones that resemble the computers we use to day, are less than a century old. Although computer science is one of the most rapidly growing fields of the 21st century, it doesn’t have a deep rich history like the medical or law fields that have been around since the rise of civilization.

No, what struck me as odd was who the question came from. Physics is not exactly known to be a woman-dominated field, yet she wasn’t only a professor, but the head of the department. It baffled me that she saw computer science so different, especially since it included many aspects from physics.

I ended up leaving the LLC after my first semester and had to move all my stuff to a new dorm mid-year. I also didn't feel very certain about computer science. My interest was not in IT or hardware or networks. I wanted to solve complex mathematical problems. I threw myself out into the ether at the end of my first fall semester, hoping something might catch my interest.

Five years ago…

I decided to switch my major to scientific computing. Very similar to CS, but with an emphasis on solving physical and mathematical problems. And I was happy; it combined all my interests: physics, engineering, science, and computing. It was in one of these courses I met another sophomore who would soon become my best friend. Her name was Abby and after our first meeting, we became fast friends and study partners.

One day, I was walking through the innovation hub with a mutual friend from our major and we watched as a professor was maneuvering a drone the size of a battery through the tables and chairs. My friend went up to chat with him and they talked about drones, to which I nodded along because I knew a lot about them - some of my classes in high school had been in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UASs). The professor looked to me finally and said to my male friend: “Sorry I didn’t mean to not include her. Don’t know if she’s a humanities major or something.”

My male friend didn’t correct him so I mumbled: “No, we’re in the same major.” I remember blaming the comment on my outfit. I was in one of my favorite T-shirts: a men’s XS NASA tee I got on my trip to the Kennedy Space Center, combined with a black skirt and heeled boots. It’s the skirt and heels, I remember thinking, that’s why he didn’t take me seriously.

Neither that professor nor I would have guessed that he would become the advisor for my senior project. Or that he would offer me a job researching surrogate data creation for object detection algorithms. I’m not even sure he remembered our first encounter. It took me a few months of working with him to recall our first meeting. Fate is weird like that.

Three years ago…

I couldn’t be happier that I had found a job barely six months after graduation. Lots of people were struggling as the job market was at a startling low after the global pandemic. It was even sweeter because I would be a contractor for the navy, researching new technology and using every bit of my knowledge. It was exciting and daunting. I had met two or three other women in the same job, but not on the same projects as me. I was also the only person in my groups without a graduate level degree. Still, my teams were full of experts that welcomed me with warm arms. Most days, I had trouble believing that I fit in with such incredible scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The imposter syndrome loomed over my shoulder in every project meeting. Although my confidence began to grow, the feeling of inadequacy hung over me.

It was helpful that I was not alone in feeling this way. Abby, who I still talked to daily, had received a similar job with a different company. We talked about the pressure of being young professionals in such a serious-feeling workplace. Although we worked thousands of miles apart, we were brought closer through our shared experiences.

One month ago…

One afternoon, I received a text from Abby.

“I’m listening to an audiobook,” it said. “Did you know women were the first programmers?”

“Yes,” I replied back. I had heard that tidbit before but hadn’t thought much about it.

Long after that message, I got a nagging feeling. I had heard it before, but where? Who were they? We certainly hadn’t talked about it in any of our classes. That thought gave me pause. Why didn’t we talk about it in any of our classes? We talked about all the different European men in the 15th - 20th centuries that came up with our mathematical theories. The Newton, Einstein, Fourier, Monge, Euler, and Dijkstra to name a very short few. We covered computer hardware history from the abacus, to the first idea of a programmable computer, to Microsoft and modern computers. But we never talked about the birth of programming. It was like missing the Big Bang: first there was a computer, then we had programming languages! Where was the in-between?

The Birth of Programming

So I did what any sane person would do: I ran a quick google search. If you google “Who was the first programmer,” the first result is a lady by the name of Ada Lovelace. She was a young countess who was the child of a poet and a reformer. But wow, did she have an extraordinary friend group. Perhaps most relevant, Charles Babbage, the guy who had that idea for the first programmable computer, and Michael Faraday, a renowned physicist and chemist who made notable contributions to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

Ada was intrigued by these scientist’s findings but especially by Babbage’s idea for an Analytical Engine. She wrote a sequence to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a special sequence of numbers that appear in multiple calculus problems, which is considered to be the very first computer program. Unfortunately, the Analytical Engine was never completed, so this program was only theoretical.

I was both excited and bummed. How exciting is it that a woman created the first computer program in 1843, almost 200 years ago? But also anticlimactic, since it was never used in practice. This lead me to my next question: who actually programmed the first computer? Well, the answer turned out to not be one, but six women.

These six women, Betty Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Bilas Spence, were hired by the army as computers in the early 1940s. During this time “computers” were not machines, rather a job title of mathematicians. These women were recent college graduates with a degree in mathematics, looking for work.

These women answered a job search from the army who was in need of women computers because all the men were currently fighting out fighting in the Second World War. It was these women’s jobs to calculate, by hand, projectile trajectories. Each trajectory equation took on average 30 hours to complete and was entered into a table of values that varied depending on temperature, wind, distance, elevation, and other factors.

With the war drawing to a brutal close, the US wanted an edge over its opponents, and needed the calculations done faster. This is where John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert entered with an idea which, after a lot of convincing, was funded and began building in secret. These 6 women were the select few to see the project before the rest of the world. They bore witness to a monstrous web of panels, cables, and knobs that filled an entire conference room. This was ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. This was the first fully electric computer - the ancestor to our current, modern computers.

And these six women were handed a few diagrams of ENIAC’s 40 panels and basically told to figure out how to get the massive computer to compute their trajectories. This was no easy task. Each panel handled specific operations: the accumulators stored up to ten numbers at a time, the square rooters handled squaring and taking the roots of numbers, the multipliers performed multiplications. The ladies had to get the panels to communicate with each other by physically wiring the panels together in the right places.

After months of trials, they did it. While Eckert and Mauchley assisted them with the physical components and understanding how the machine worked, these women invented programming all on their own. While the war had ended at this point, their hand-calculated trajectories helped soldiers win the war and programming helped solve a slew of new technological challenges.

As a programmer myself, I thought this was incredible. This was the Programming Big Bang. So, why hadn’t I heard of the ENIAC 6? I listened fervently to an audiobook about them ( Proving Ground by Kathy Kleiman) and at the end the author shares that at the 50th anniversary of ENIAC, where all inventors, engineers, and those involved with ENIAC where gathered for recognition, these women were not included on the guest list. In fact, most of the organizers didn’t even know who they were.

After work on the ENIAC, most of the women continued on with their profession, but they were the select few. Other women computers either returned to their home on their own accord, or were out of a job when men returned home from war in search of jobs again. What was previously seen as “menial” work, now drew the attention of men who had the free time to work on new technologies. Without historians like Kathy Kleiman, who tracked 4 out of 6 of these original programmers down and invited them herself, this piece of history would surely have been lost.

The Impact of Women’s Role on History

And maybe you’re thinking: “Okay, that was almost 100 years ago; why does it matter?” It matters because women's stories are so often diminished. I mean, this is a huge invention. Without programming, there is no Instagram, Facebook, ChatGPT, modern cars, autopilot on planes, alarms to wake you up. Anytime you tell a computer to do something, you're utilizing programming. For our classes to not even mention the inception of the very degree we studied is a bit shocking. For these six women to be written off as "merely operators" is an understatement to the highest degree. It's also important because the women of the present can relate to these stories. I was teary eyed while listening to this book and frequently updated Abby with texts saying “You won’t believe it. They were just like us.”

It was extremely hard to write about my own story as a female programmer, a researcher, a software engineer, because I often think it is silly and no one will really care. Like I said, I didn’t face any crazy hardships or setbacks and I’m incredibly happy with my career that I’ve worked hard for. I’ve never felt discriminated against. I’ve only felt welcomed and accepted.

However, many women, myself included, find ourselves struggling with imposter syndrome. Sometimes we feel like we don’t belong. There’s a big difference in enjoying something and being grateful because you were afforded that opportunity from others and enjoying something because it is in your blood, because you have always belonged there. These women’s stories have made me feel like a truly, deeply belong here. I hope that my story will only add to this rich history for all the current and future women in computing.

The fact that this piece of history was almost lost because these women’s stories were not deemed worthy or important enough to be told is frightening and appalling. It has helped me and multiple other women in computing hold our heads a little higher.

So this is my love letter to specifically to women in computing, but also to all women: you are worthy and your story is worth remembering.

Check these out for more info:

https://www.britannica.com/story/ada-lovelace-the-first-computer-programmer

https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/eniac-six-women-programmed-computer/

Proving Ground by Kathy Kleiman