This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other types of programming. Women have also been involved in computer science, various related types of engineering and computer hardware.
18th century 1757
Nicole-Reine Etable de la Brière Lepaute worked on a team of human computers to determine the next visit of Halley's Comet. The methods they developed have been used by successive human computing teams.
19th century 1842
Ada Lovelace was an analyst of Charles Babbage's analytical engine and is considered by many the "first computer programmer".
1849 Maria Mitchell is hired by the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office to work as a computer on tables for the planet Venus.
1875 Anna Winlock joined the Harvard computers, a group of women engaged in the production of astronomical data at Harvard.
1893 Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined the Harvard "computers". She was instrumental in discovery of the cepheid variable stars, which are evidence for the expansion of the universe.
20th century
1916 Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave went to work as a human computer for the Ministry of Munitions.
1918 Women were hired to do ballistics calculations as human computers in Washington, D.C. The "chief computer" of the group was Elizabeth Webb Wilson.
1920 Mary Clem leads the computing lab at Iowa State College.
1921 Edith Clarke files a patent for a graphical calculator for problem solving electric power-line transmission problems.
1926 Grete Hermann published the foundational paper for computerized algebra. It was her doctoral thesis, titled "The Question of Finitely Many Steps in Polynomial Ideal Theory", and published in Mathematische Annalen.
1935 The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which became NASA, hired a group of five women to work in their computer pool analyzing data from wind tunnels and flight tests.
1939 The Austrian Johanna Piesch published two pioneering papers on switching algebra.
1940 American women were recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers during WWII. Around 1943–1945, these women "computers" used a differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to speed up their calculations, though the machine required a mechanic to be totally accurate and the women often rechecked the calculations by hand.Gumbrecht, Jamie (8 February 2011). . CNN. Archived from the original on 10 May 2012. Phyllis Fox ran a differential analyzer single-handedly, with differential equations as her program specification.
1941
Mavis Batey broke the Italian Naval code while working at Bletchley Park. The United States begins recruiting African-American college graduates to work at Langley Air Force Base as human computers.
1942 On 11 August, Hedy Lamarr and co-inventor, George Antheil, received their patent for frequency hopping.
1943
Women worked as WREN Colossus operators during WW2 at Bletchley Park. Wives of scientists working on the Manhattan Project with mathematical training were hired as human computers to work on the ENIAC and MANIAC I computers. This included Klara Dan von Neumann, Augusta H. Teller, and Adele Goldstine. Gertrude Blanch led the Mathematical Tables Project group from 1938 to 1948. During World War II, the project operated as a major computing office for the U.S. government and did calculations for the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Army, the Navy, the Manhattan Project and other institutions. Ruth Leach Amonette was elected vice president at IBM, the first woman to hold that role.
1945 Marlyn Meltzer is hired as one of the first ENIAC programmers. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli is hired as one of the ENIAC programmers and is accredited with creating the first 'subroutine'.
1946 Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Frances Spence, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman were the regularly working programmers of the ENIAC. Adele Goldstine, also involved in the programming, wrote the program manual for the ENIAC.
1947 Irma Wyman worked on a missile guidance project at the Willow Run Research Center. To calculate trajectory, they used mechanical calculators. In 1947–48, she visited the U.S. Naval Proving Ground where Grace Hopper was working on similar problems and discovered they were using a prototype of a programmable Mark II computer.
1948 Kathleen Booth is credited with writing the assembly language for the ARC2 computer. Dorothy Vaughn becomes the first black supervisor at NACA.
1949 Grace Hopper, was a United States Navy officer and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, known as the "Mother of COBOL". She developed the first compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0. She also popularized the term "debugging" – a reference to a moth extracted from a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer. Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman in the U.S. to receive a PhD in mathematics. From 1956 to 1960, she worked for IBM on the Project Vanguard and Project Mercury space programs, analyzing orbits and developing computer procedures. On 6 May, the EDSAC performs its first calculations using a program written by Beatrice Worsely.
1950
Ida Rhodes was one of the pioneers in the analysis of systems of programming. She co-designed the C-10 language in the early 1950s for the UNIVAC I – a computer system that was used to calculate the census. Kathleen Booth creates Assembly Language.
1951 Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Snyder develops a UNIVAC program, the first sort-merge generator.
1952 Mary Coombs was one of the first programmers on, and was the first female programmer on LEO, the first business computer. She went on to work on LEO II and LEO III. Hungarian-born Klara Dan von Neumann pioneers the programming of MANIAC I. Canadian, Beatrice Worsley, completes her doctorate in computer science, becoming the first woman to earn that degree.
1954 Thelma Estrin works on Israel's first computer, the WEIZAC.
1955 Annie Easley starts working as a human computer for NACA. Kateryna Yushchenko creates Address (programming language) that made possible indirect addressing and addresses of the highest rank – analogous to pointers. Mary Tsingou runs code on MANIAC I to describe interacting waves on a string. The famous Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem revealed a paradox in nonlinear dynamics, and the value of computer simulation in analyzing complex systems. Also appeared in Collected Works of Enrico Fermi, University of Chicago Press, Vol. II, 978–988 (1965).Fermi, E. et al. (1955). _______ . Front page: "Work done by: E. Fermi J. Pasta S. Ulam M. Tsingou"; and footnote: "We wish to thank Miss Mary Tsingou ... for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine, ..." The FPUT work stimulated the emerging field of nonlinear computational science that relies on computers to carry out numerical experiments.
1958 Orbital calculations for the United States' Explorer 1 satellite were solved by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's all-female "computers", many of whom were recruited out of high school. Mechanical calculators were supplemented with logarithmic calculations performed by hand. Grace Hopper designs the computer language, FLOWMATIC. 5 May, Langley desegregates, closing down the West Area Computers. Kathleen Booth publishes a book about programming APE(X)C computers.
1959 Mary K. Hawes convenes a meeting to discuss specifications for a business programming language. This would lead to the creation of COBOL.
1961 Dana Ulery was the first female engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit word size computer.
1962 Jean E. Sammet developed the FORMAC programming language. She was also the first to write extensively about the history and categorization of programming languages in 1969, and became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1974. Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley founded the UK software company F.I. She was concerned with creating work opportunities for women with dependents, and predominantly employed women, only 3 out of 300-odd programmers were male, until that became illegal. She adopted the name "Steve" to help her in the male-dominated business world. From 1989 to 1990, she was president of the British Computer Society. In 1985, she was awarded a Recognition of Information Technology Award.
1964 Joan Ball was the first person to start a computer dating service in 1964. Sharla Boehm performed pioneering work in packet switching.
1965 Mary Allen Wilkes was the first person to use a computer in a private home (in 1965) and the first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer (LINC). Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1965. Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns".
1966 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. She was also actively involved in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and served as the first Secretary for the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS).
1968 Vera Molnár is one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts. In 1968 she began working with computers, where she began to create algorithmic drawings based on simple geometric shapes geometrical themes.
1969 Jean E. Sammet publishes Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, which was the standard in the field at the time. Margaret Hamilton was, in the late 1960s, Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. MIT work prevented an abort of the Apollo 11 Moon landing by using robust architecture. Later, she was awarded the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for her scientific and technical contributions.NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has commented saying "The concepts she and her team created became the building blocks for modern software engineering. It's an honor to recognize Ms. Hamilton for her extraordinary contributions to NASA".NASA Press Release "NASA Honors Apollo Engineer" (3 September 2003)Michael Braukus NASA News "NASA Honors Apollo Engineer" (3 September 2003) Alexandra Illmer Forsythe is a co-author of the first computer science textbook, Computer Science: A First Course (Wiley & Sons).
1970 Drude Berntsen is appointed director of the Norwegian Computing Center.
1971 Erna Schneider Hoover is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which developed modern communication according to several reports. At Bell Laboratories, where she worked for over 32 years, Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology. Margaret Burnett became the first woman software developer ever hired by Procter & Gamble/Ivorydale, a 13,000-employee complex that included their R&D center. Her position as a software developer also made her the first woman ever hired into a management-level position there.
1972 Mary Shaw became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Adele Goldberg was one of developers of the Smalltalk language. Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers of information retrieval and natural language processing. Sandra Kurtzig founded ASK Computer Systems, an early Silicon Valley startup, on a $20,000 budget.
1973 Susan Nycum co-authored Computer Abuse, a minor classic that was one of the first studies to define and document computer-related crime. Phyllis Fox worked on the PORT portable mathematical/numerical library.