Table of contentsSummaryIntroduction19th century (before 1900)Progress during the world wars (1900 - 1950)The birth of programming languages ​​(1950 - 1970)ConclusionReferencesSummaryWomen have always played an important role in computer science discoveries, but its history has always been written by men. Today, men outnumber women three to one in all IT occupations in the United States, but women are nonetheless essential to the development of the technology field. This work aims to write this story through the achievements and contributions of several important women throughout history, from the first human computers to modern computers. The main objective is to highlight the importance of their discoveries and the impact they have on the ground, obscured throughout history. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayIntroductionThe etymology of the word computer comes from the Latin putare which means to think and to carve. Its first known use dates back to 1613 (Stevenson 2010) in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Braithwait: "I read (sic) the truest computer of the time, and the best arithmetic that ever breathed (sic), and he reduces your days to a short number. » Usage of the word initially referred to a human, a person who performed calculations or calculations, but it became popular during World War II, when it was used by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, precursor of NASA) to describe the group of women mathematicians who took care of the calculations, relieving engineers of this essential and exhaustive work (Grier 2013). However, the role of women in computing began well before World War II (Margolis and Fisher 2003). In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm tested on a computing machine that existed only on paper. But over the years, women and their primary contribution to this field slowly declined, with the significant gender gap only appearing in the 1980s. At that time, concern and research into the gender gap genders increased (Brecher 1985, Frenkel 1990), attracting community attention. Nevertheless, the number of women in the region continues to decline each year, attracting research attempting to explain this phenomenon (Cohoon and Aspray 2006). Additionally, a large number of projects and groups have been created with the aim of reversing this problem and encouraging women to apply in IT-related fields (Gürer and Camp 2002). Keeping this problem in mind, this work intends to emphasize the place of women in computing. history (Tatnall 2010), telling it through the eyes of women, not only showing specific moments and momentary discoveries, but placing women in their actual roles throughout history, as equal participants in the IT development where permitted. We'll start in 1822 with Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and the Analytical Engine, going through all the major discoveries and developments that lead us to the computer we know today, focused on female achievement. Alongside Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014), Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015) and Margaret Hamilton (Piazza 2018), we will also talk about some little-known, but equally important women, such as Mavis Batey, Elizabeth Webb Wilson and Beatrice Worsley. , the main objective of this work is to place women at the forefront of the history of computing,even though men outnumber women three to one in all IT occupations in the United States (Ashcraft, McLain, and Eger 2016). We want to show how their work was not only timely, but essential for the development of today's technologies, and also show the impact they have in a traditionally male scientific field.19th century (before 1900) Although the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard invented in 1801 a programmable loom using perforated wooden cards, similar to that used years later by the first computers (Delve 2007), the beginning of the history of computing is always attributed to the mathematician English Charles Babbage. He is considered “the father of the computer”. Babbage created the first mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. It was first described in 1837 and, although it is considered Babbage's greatest achievement, he never saw it completed (Bromley 1982). The analytical engine had a structure similar to modern computers: an arithmetic logic unit, a control flow with conditional branches and loops, and on-board memory. Henry Prevost Babbage, Charles Babbage's son, continued his father's work, but he was also unable to complete the construction. It was not until 1991 that the London Science Museum built a complete, working version of the machine, called Difference Engine No 2 (Markoff 2011). While working on his inventions, Babbage corresponded with Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014). Ada was the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron, but she and her mother were abandoned by him when she was only a month old. Bitter, her mother, who had herself studied mathematics, raised Ada by motivating her interest in mathematics and logic in an attempt to prevent her from becoming a poet like her father (Moore 1977). Her correspondence with Babbage began while 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, even though no programming language had yet been invented (Fuegi and Francis 2003). The late 19th century saw the construction of a punch card system used to calculate the 1880 census. Herman Hollerith, its inventor, founded the Tabulated Machine Company which later became IBM (Campbell-Kelly 2018). At the same time, Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined one of Harvard's first "computers," a group of human calculators, usually made up of women, since at that time women were not allowed to operate telescopes (Vishveshwara 2015 ). She performed calculations on measuring and cataloging the brightness of stars, discovering Cepheid variables, a type of star, which led to evidence of the expansion of the universe (Johnson 2005). Advancement during the world wars (1900 - 1950) The beginning of the 20th century was marked by the great wars. These events led to great advances in several scientific fields, including computer science. This also allowed women to participate in the process, as many men were fighting on the battlefield. Women were first called upon during World War I to perform ballistic calculations as human computers. Although Elizabeth Webb Wilson did not take part in the suffrage movement, her actions reassured him. She had a remarkable talent for mathematics and turned down nine positions in Washington until they offered her an IT chief position, which she thought would match her mathematical talents (Grier 2013).Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave worked as a human computer for the Ministry of Munitions, conducting research for the government on the mathematics of aeronautics (Jones 2009). Even after the war ended in 1930, NASA continued to hire women to work in its computer fleet, analyzing data from wind tunnels and flight tests (Atkinson 2015). During World War II, Alan Turing developed the main concepts of a universal system. machine that would serve as the basis for most modern computer ideas, several American women were recruited to operate early computing machines such as the WREN Colossus at Bletchley Park (Copeland 2010) and later the ENIAC and MANIAC I computers (Pearson Frehill and McNeely 2015). Alan Turing is also known for cracking the Enigma code, a German naval encryption machine, helping to end the war. What is generally forgotten is that Mavis Batey also hacked an Enigma machine, that of the Italian navy, at the age of just 19, alongside Dilly Knox. She worked at Bletchley Park and is considered one of the keys to the success of D-Day, unveiling important messages from the Germans and Italians. Besides the Italian naval machine Enigma, she also deciphered the Abwehr Enigma and the GGG (Batey 2017). During the same war, actress Hedy Lamarr, with George Antheil, developed a radio guidance system using spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology. Although never used by the US Navy, the principles of their work are integrated with Bluetooth and WiFi technologies. She had no formative training and did not fit in with the Hollywood style. She spent her free time inventing rather than attending parties or drinking. His invention was taken for granted and it was not recognized until the 1990s when it was in his early 80s (Rhodes 2012). As for businesses, in 1939 David Packard and Bill Hewlett founded theirs in a Palo Alto garage, while a few years later Ruth Leach Amonette was elected vice president of IBM, a over 30 years old. She was the first woman to hold this position. At the end of the wars, women were able to maintain their role by participating in the computer development of the time. Dorothy Vaughan, who left her teaching job to join the Langley Research Center as a human computer. In 1948, she was promoted and became NACA's first black supervisor in 1948. She later specialized in FORTRAN computer programming by teaching herself and taught other women programming languages ​​to open up more opportunities for them. opportunities. She raised six children while working at NACA and encouraged other women to develop their careers (Allen 2017). At the same time, Gertrude Blanch led the Mathematical Tables Project from 1938 to 1948, a computer organization that was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the project closed at the end of the war, she headed the computer office of the UCLA Institute for Numerical Analysis (Grier 1997). The late 1940s saw one of the greatest advances in computing history: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter. Brattain of Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals that are the fundamental building block of modern computers (Brinkman, Haggan, and Troutman 1997). Meanwhile, Grace Hopper, a U.S. naval officer, was programming on the Harvard Mark I, a large electromechanical computer 51 feet long and 8 feet high, using more than 765,000 components andhundreds of kilometers of wire (Williams 1999). She developed the first electronic computer compiler, known as A-0, and was one of the creators of the COBOL programming language. He is also credited with popularizing the term debugging after discovering a moth on a relay on the Harvard Mark II computer that was causing malfunctions in its programs (Beyer 2015). At the same time, Irma Wyman was working on a missile guidance project at Harvard University. Willow Run Research Center during her visit to the US Naval Proving Ground, where she met Grace Hopper. Their meeting changed Irma's life, saying it excited her about new technologies and directed her career (Gilbert and Moore 2012). She later joined Honeywell, an American multinational conglomerate, and eventually became Honeywell's first female CIO. Like most women in this field, she enjoyed passing on her knowledge to young women in computer science, even granting them a scholarship to the Center for Women's Education at the University of Michigan, her alma mater (Bjorhus 2015). In the 1950s, women played a remarkable role in the development of computing around the world: Canadian scientist Beatrice Worsley led the first program on the EDSAC computer in 1949 (Campbell 2003); Edith Clarke, an American electrical engineer, had filed patents for a graphing calculator and became the first female professor of electrical engineering in the United States in 1947 (Layne 2009); German mathematician Grete Hermann published the seminal paper for calculus in 1926, and her critique of John von Neumann's proof of the hidden non-variable theorem in 1935, the latter being ignored by the physics community for more than 30 years. years, slowing the development of quantum mechanics (Herzenberg 2008); and Austrian mathematician Johanna Piesch published two pioneering papers on Boolean algebra, one of the fundamental principles of digital computing (Zemanek 1993). The birth of programming languages ​​(1950 - 1970) An important point in the development of computing was the creation of programming languages. Using a notation closer to human language than the machine language originally used, he made programming more accessible and began to popularize computer science. COBOL is considered the first programming language and 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, focused on numerical computing and engineering applications (Backus 1978). In the early 1950s, Ida Rhodes, who had worked with Gertrude Blanch on the mathematical tables project in 1940 (Blanch and Rhodes 1974), with Betty Holberton, also designed a programming language. The C-10 language was used on the UNIVAC I computer and is considered the prototype of modern programming languages. Betty Holberton also participated in the early development of the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages ​​alongside Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015). She is known for being one of six women to program ENIAC along with Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings and Fran Bilas during World War II. They were classified as “sub-professionals” and performed ballistic trajectory calculations electronically, which had a major impact on computing (Fritz 1996). Later, in 1962, Jean E. Sammet, who was also in 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 languages ​​ofprogramming 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 of 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 struggled to maintain their opportunities in computing. While Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science (Gürer 1995), Dame Stephanie Shirley advocated for the involvement of women in computing. She founded a software company and employed more women than men, with only 1% male programmers, until it became illegal in 1975 (Shirley and Askwith 2017). She also adopted the name "Steve" to survive in a male-dominated world and programmed the Concorde's black-box flight recorder (Tickle 2017). Like Shirley, more women wrote important programs; Mary Coombs, for example, was the first female programmer on LEO. , the first professional computer in 1952. At NASA, orbital calculations for the Explorer 1 satellite were performed by an all-female computer group. At the same NASA laboratory, Dana Ulery, the first female engineer, developed real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit computer and programmed the capabilities of the Deep NASA Space Network (Kresser and Sippel 1962). , some women also Margaret R. Fox was appointed chief of the Office of Computer Information in 1966, part of the NBS Institute of Computer and Technology. She held this position until 1975 (Fox 1984). A major breakthrough occurred in 1969, when a group of programmers at Bell Labs developed UNIX, an operating system written in the C programming language. Its main advantage was that it was portable across multiple platforms and it quickly became popular with business and government entities. Personal computers were rare and UNIX was not the first operating system. A few years earlier, in 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes had designed the first personal computer, the LINC, and wrote LAP, its operating system, considered the first operating system (Clark 1987). However, women were not only pioneers in technical programs: Joan Ball launched a computer dating service in 1964, years before social media and dating apps (Ball 2014). As during the Great World Wars, women also played an important role in the Cold War. . In the late 1960s, Margaret Hamilton was director of the software engineering division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which worked with NASA on the Apollo space program. It programmed the onboard flight software and its robust architecture was crucial during the aborted Apollo 11 moon landing (Hamilton and Hackler 2008). She coined the term software engineering, referring to the application of engineering to software development using a systematic method (Hamilton and Hackler 2007). ConclusionWomen were essential to the development of computing and their role was overshadowed by men, leading to an alarming phenomenon. number of women occupying less than a quarter of all IT occupations in the United States (Ashcraft, McLain, and Eger 2016). This underrepresentation leads to a male-dominated environment hostile to women, as can be seen in the recent problems of large companies like Google (Wakabayashi 2017) and Facebook (Conger and Frenkel 2018), and affects itsdevelopment, since diversity is important in any field (Hicks 2017). Another problem arises from their recognition through awards and recognition. The ACM Turing Award, for example, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to individuals who have made major technical contributions to the field of computing. In 2019, out of nearly seventy prizes awarded, only three were awarded to women: Frances Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Liskov and Shafi Goldwasser. All were given after 2006, showing how women were erased from computing history until recently. To try to reverse this problem, several groups and organizations have been created, such as the 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 more than 36,000 members. They attempt to support and empower women already active in this field, while encouraging girls to engage in computer science and related fields. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Therefore, although still suffering from many years of male observation, women in the IT field are fighting for their place and I hope that with time we can have a more equitable field. 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