The History of Women in Programming

Ruby on Ales 2013

by Jessica Suttles and Elise Worthy

The video titled 'The History of Women in Programming' features speakers Jessica Suttles and Elise Worthy at Ruby on Ales 2013, exploring women's pivotal roles in the development and evolution of programming. The discussion unveils how women significantly influenced computing, from the early 1800s with Ada Lovelace—recognized as the first programmer—to the mid-20th century when women filled roles as 'human computers' during World War II. Key points discussed include:

Historical Contributions: Women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were instrumental in early computer science, contributing foundational concepts and inventions such as the first algorithm and early programming languages.
Impact of World Wars: The need for workers during World War II created opportunities for women, allowing them to occupy roles in technical fields, with many becoming key programmers and mathematicians.
Feminist Movements and Education: The feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s spurred an increase in women pursuing education in STEM fields, particularly computer science. The discussion highlights key figures like Adele Goldberg, who contributed to the development of object-oriented programming languages.
Decline in Representation: Despite early gains, the 1980s saw a decline in women entering computing as it became associated with rigid gender stereotypes, which contributed to fewer women in programming fields despite many still advancing in other scientific careers.
Challenges into the 2000s: Even as notable female figures like Fran Allen and Barbara Liskov made advancements, later decades illustrated continued disinterest from women in computing due to enduring societal stereotypes.
Modern Initiatives: Programs such as Rails Girls and organizational grants aim to encourage women to enter computing by creating supportive environments, which have successfully increased female participation in programming endeavors.

The discussion concludes with a call to action, encouraging attendees to support initiatives that promote women's involvement in the tech industry, emphasizing that the landscape of software engineering continues to evolve. The overall message underscores the importance of recognizing women's historical contributions and fostering a more inclusive future in technology.

00:00:23.199 So before we get started, this is total serendipity. Today is International Women's Day.

00:00:38.640 My name is Elise Worthy. I am from Seattle, currently live in Portland, and I'm moving back to Seattle in one week. Today is actually my last day at LivingSocial.

00:00:50.879 I was part of the Hungry Academy program with Jonathan Shafler, who presented yesterday. It was an amazing program—five months of intense developer training. I've worked for the past seven months as a developer, but I decided to take the next six months off to focus on my health.

00:01:07.920 Since the beginning of my life, I've always focused on brain endeavors, not body endeavors. So I'm really excited to see what I can do athletically instead of mentally.

00:01:27.200 And hi, my name is Jessica Lynn Suttles. This is the face that I use on the internet, and I tweet at @jlsuttles. I live in Santa Monica, California, part of Los Angeles, with my two cats, Bobby and Sabe. I really love being a software engineer.

00:01:39.040 I'm currently employed at G5 here in Bend, Oregon, and I work remotely from LA. The most exciting thing I've done lately is start writing a Microformats 2 processor or parser. If you don't know what Microformats are, you should look them up; they are essentially HTML classes that add more semantics to your markup.

00:02:11.120 Awesome! Okay, so we'll get started. I'm going to talk about the history while Jessica is going to discuss more recent history and the future of women in computing. The one point I want to drive home today is that women made programming what it is today. Regardless of everything you know about programming, without women, we wouldn't have what we have today.

00:02:24.480 Women did that in the face of serious inequities socially and culturally, particularly in the United States. So that's my takeaway. Hopefully, some of you watched Rocky and Bullwinkle; I will be your Dr. Peabody to Sherman.

00:03:09.040 So we're going to hop in the Wayback Machine and go way, way back to the 1800s. Computing had pretty simple roots. Imagine living in the early 1800s; most of your needs were basic, and technology was basic, too. The first real punch card computer was the Jacquard loom, made in 1801, which introduced the idea of punch cards.

00:03:32.960 This was very simple; there was no additional logic related to the punch cards. It simply guided the loom to create different patterns. In the 1830s, this loom idea with punch cards was adapted to the analytical engine.

00:03:39.519 Now, the analytical engine was never completed; it was only a theoretical concept. Some of you hopefully know of Ada Lovelace. She was one of the programmers of the analytical engine, along with its primary designer, Charles Babbage. Ada is incredibly important because she wrote the first program.

00:04:03.360 The first program! I mean, this is huge. The analytical engine, although it was just an idea at the time, introduced the first programmer. I really like the story of Ada. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron; if anyone is into poetry, you know that Lord Byron is a particularly famous early 1800s poet.

00:04:14.640 I just love that he wrote all about emotion and matters of the heart, and then his daughter became an incredible mathematician. Of course, he didn’t stay with Ada's mom, so some of those sappy, sentimental vibes did not get passed down.

00:04:26.960 But Ada was a pretty saucy character. I said that the analytical engine was not completed in its time because they ran out of money. Ada and Charles were really entrepreneurial, but their startup just ran out of funds. To finance the project, they decided to try their luck at horse racing and lost everything they had. That's why the analytical engine wasn’t completed.

00:04:45.759 Ada even had to pawn all her jewelry to stay out of debt. So not only was she the first programmer, but she was also one of the first entrepreneurs taking significant risks. I didn’t mention that the analytical engine was Turing complete and had integrated memory, which was very advanced for its time.

00:05:10.080 Unfortunately, computing didn't progress quickly, as most of the innovation stemmed from the Industrial Revolution and industrial applications, like we saw with the Jacquard loom. However, things started to improve for women and computing in the early to mid-1920s.

00:05:26.400 In the 1920s, hopefully, you’ve all heard of the women's suffrage movement. Imagine that women in the United States couldn't vote until the 1920s. Consider our position related to technology and innovation: just voting rights and property rights were extremely limited for women at that time.

00:05:39.680 However, computing rapidly advanced in the 1940s, and something that I don't like but is part of our history is that it gained momentum due to World War II. Before World War II, in World War I in particular, we still used very old-school military techniques. In World War II, we had the technology necessary for advancing military goals.

00:06:00.000 So I’m not happy about that, but it’s just history. During World War II, as well, the majority of the men were called into active service.

00:06:13.760 If you know of Rosie the Riveter, in 1942, there was a program called Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, which enabled women to fill traditional men’s jobs. Even if you were a highly educated woman, like one with a doctorate in physics or math, your best options were typically professor, physician, or teacher. Most women held secretary positions, with very limited choices.

00:06:31.520 In some ways, this was a significant leap forward for women’s ability to take on different kinds of work in the United States. There were lots of advertisements encouraging women to do men’s work. Among the women employed in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service were the first computers—who were actually people, not machines.

00:06:45.839 In fact, the first six programmers of the ENIAC were hired by the Navy as human computers. These women were mathematicians who went on to work with ENIAC.

00:07:03.120 If you remember one name from my talk, I hope it’s Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper was one of the women involved in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. She was a PhD in math and physics at Vassar and also a professor there. However, she decided that the tenured professor track was boring, so she joined the military.

00:07:25.280 One interesting aspect about Grace is that because she was so well-educated when she joined the military, she was placed higher in rank. Some people have proposed that because the military has such rigid protocols concerning rank, she faced slightly less insubordination and sexism due to her higher status.

00:07:38.880 Regardless of one's opinion of the military, most of Justice Hopper's significant contributions were post-war. Grace decided not to return to Vassar but to remain in the military. This was a groundbreaking decision during the post-war demobilization, as everyone urged women to go back to their traditional roles.

00:07:55.920 But she insisted on staying in the military and eventually started the Harvard Computation Lab as an active service member.

00:08:10.560 After Harvard, she went to Remington Rand, an old-school American manufacturing company that produced UNIVAC, as well as guns and typewriters. Grace was remarkable; she became the director of automated computing and wrote the first compiler.

00:08:29.120 Imagine being in Grace's position in the early 1950s, when most programmers believed that computers were just big calculators meant only for writing machine code. But she challenged that notion, advocating for the idea that we could do incredible things with computers. Although she faced great resistance, she ultimately advanced her vision.

00:08:50.240 You may also have heard of her as the mother of COBOL. In her role at Remington Rand, she was involved in developing the precursors to COBOL and was one of the main contributors to this programming language.

00:09:06.240 This illustrates the dramatic leap from low-level machine code to high-level programming languages.

00:09:25.280 I found this interesting piece of data: even as late as the 1990s, eighty percent of all code was written in COBOL. In fact, fifty percent of new applications were also written in COBOL.

00:09:35.280 Such statistics explain the Y2K issue, yet it is pretty remarkable that many early programming languages were still relevant years later.

00:09:51.440 So imagine looking at some assembly code for a 'Hello World' program. Picture that, and if someone hadn't made that significant leap, we could still be writing solely in machine code.

00:10:04.000 And of course, now we have advanced languages that make programming accessible and efficient.

00:10:16.720 However, it wasn't all sunshine and roses. These women faced incredible challenges in their careers, particularly in the 1950s.

00:10:34.480 I found an ad for Remington, the company where Grace was a director. Can you imagine the hardships she faced, considering societal expectations for women at the time?

00:10:51.519 And here’s another ad from IBM around the same period. I don’t see any women in that picture, which shows how limited the opportunities were.

00:11:02.640 Things might have changed a bit in the 1960s as we engaged in the space race. Walter Cronkite talked about this era, marked by a manpower shortage and thus, more job opportunities for women. There was a huge focus on science and technology. An article in Cosmo during the late 1960s suggested computer programming as a field that resembled planning a dinner party.

00:11:50.080 As ridiculous as that sounds, it illustrates the era's perception of women in computing. Nevertheless, women were somewhat encouraged to enter the workforce, albeit in limited roles.

00:12:06.720 Most programmers were still men, previously sitting in upper-level offices to write their codes while women performed the keypunching in basements.

00:12:23.920 This dynamic paints a picture of the work environment, and this photo depicts keypunch operators, doing data entry.

00:12:38.720 Things started to change, and Jessica will cover how these changes unfolded. The women’s liberation movement, also known as the second wave of feminism, began as women spoke out against limited reproductive rights, job issues, and cultural expectations that felt restrictive.

00:12:55.680 The decade of the 70s saw various milestones for women, and now I’ll pass it over to Jessica.

00:18:24.160 I realize that I forgot to mention in my introduction that G5 is hiring. If you're looking for something new, come talk to us and maybe change your mind.

00:18:38.799 In the 1970s, the wave of feminism truly took hold, which began in the 1960s. Women started to gain significant rights. The 1970s marked the 50th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement, emphasizing milestones such as the passage of the 19th Amendment.

00:19:00.960 The Equal Rights Amendment was designed to further those rights; it passed in both houses of Congress and moved to states for ratification. The Supreme Court also ruled on Roe versus Wade, which constitutionalized abortion.

00:19:19.360 The 70s proved to be an exciting decade for women, and this graph will be a recurring theme in my talk, revealing more as we move forward.

00:19:32.639 It shows the percentage of women earning bachelor's degrees in selected fields, primarily STEM fields. The lowest line represents engineering, above that is physics, but the most critical is the green dashed line representing computer science. You can observe a significant upward trend in all these lines during this period, attributed largely to the feminist movement.

00:19:59.200 An increase in women’s awareness led many to pursue careers in traditionally male-dominated fields, and computer science was particularly exciting at the time.

00:20:13.760 A key figure from this era was Adele Goldberg, a researcher at Xerox PARC who played an essential role in defining Smalltalk. Earlier, Evan Light mentioned that Alan Kay developed Smalltalk, but it was indeed a team effort, and Goldberg was crucial to its development.

00:20:33.440 Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamic reflective language, which might sound familiar, as it has influenced many languages we use today.

00:20:46.320 In case you don't believe me, here’s a quote from Matt mentioning that he was influenced by Smalltalk.

00:20:58.720 Additionally, Smalltalk paved the way for GUI interfaces; many features developed in Smalltalk later appeared in Mac applications, following Steve Jobs' tour of Xerox PARC where he got a glimpse of Smalltalk in action.

00:21:11.040 By this time, personal computing was still an emerging concept. People mainly interacted with computers through arcade games, marking the golden age of gaming.

00:21:27.840 Everyone remembers classic games such as Pong, Asteroids, and Space Invaders. Then came the 1980s, when some gains achieved by the feminist movement started to erode.

00:21:46.000 In the 80s, the Equal Rights Amendment, which had passed in both houses of Congress, ultimately failed to be ratified by states by the deadline. However, women continued entering the workforce and undergraduate programs.

00:22:12.160 Interestingly, women started to dissociate from their marital status by retaining their maiden names or utilizing 'Ms.' instead of 'Mrs.' or 'Miss.' Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court during this decade.

00:22:28.000 At the same time, personal computing experienced a boom, and you may remember the Commodore 64 introduced in the early 80s.

00:22:48.000 In the first half of the 80s, we saw a rise in women entering all these fields, which is fantastic. A key woman of this time is Elizabeth Feinler, who worked as an information scientist at SRI, defining top-level domain names like .com, .gov, and .org.

00:23:04.640 And remember Adele Goldberg, who served as the president of the ACM during this period. However, something happened: notice that the green line for computer science begins to diverge from the upward trend of the other fields.

00:23:22.560 Women ceased entering computing at the same rate; they continued their advances in other scientific fields. Some theorize that when computer science was a new discipline, it sprung from a diverse set of departments within universities.

00:23:41.760 However, as computer science matured, it found its place in the engineering department, a domain typically associated with fewer women.

00:23:56.639 Simultaneously, we began to see the rise of gender stereotypes, especially in video games. Before, we had Pac-Man, but then Mrs. Pac-Man was introduced, and we encountered games featuring male protagonists with female characters in distress.

00:24:07.600 This trend is evident in titles like Super Mario Brothers, where gender roles were highlighted. Games began to infiltrate everyday life as technology advanced to allow pocket-sized devices.

00:24:29.040 You might remember the introduction of the Game Boy, for instance. The 1990s then ushered in exciting new developments for women.

00:24:52.320 1992 was dubbed the 'Year of the Woman,' marking a record number of women appointed to high office in the United States. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as first lady, represented the State Department globally.

00:25:07.680 Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State, and Janet Reno served as Attorney General, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed as the second woman on the Supreme Court.

00:25:20.800 Moreover, the rise of the third wave of feminism emerged. Just to clarify, the rise of feminism isn't merely about popularity but also encompasses different influential ideas.

00:25:28.480 Unfortunately, the notable increase in female representation in computing that coincided with early feminism didn’t occur this time around.

00:25:42.639 A significant study began in 1995, led by social scientist Jane Margolies, who examined gender dynamics in education, alongside Alan Fisher, the founding dean of Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate computer science program.

00:26:02.560 They aimed to understand the gender imbalance in their program. A couple of years into their research, they adjusted admission standards, including maintaining high GRE scores but emphasizing leadership qualities and eliminating prior programming experience.

00:26:24.080 They introduced catch-up courses and increased the female enrollment in the program from seven percent to forty-two percent in five years. None of these changes were gender-specific.

00:26:44.640 They also observed a significant increase in the retention rate of women; typically, only forty percent remained in the program after two years, whereas five years later, about ninety percent were still enrolled.

00:27:02.000 Into the 2000s, while women continued to exit computing, the male nerd stereotype underwent a transformation. Nonetheless, computing remained unappealing to many women, especially regarding stereotypes that persisted.

00:27:14.560 However, women still achieved remarkable accomplishments in the computing sphere. Fran Allen became the first woman to win the Turing Award, often regarded as the Nobel Prize of Computing.

00:27:29.760 This recognition came forty years after the award was first given, and she earned it for her work in optimizing high-level programming.

00:27:50.000 Just two years later, Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award for her contributions to programming language design. You might recall Liskov for the Liskov Substitution Principle, integral to the SOLID principles of object-oriented programming, introduced by Michael Feathers.

00:28:00.800 And looking to the present, recently, companies like Etsy, followed by 37 Signals and Yammer, offered grants for women to attend a Hacker School in Manhattan.

00:28:18.640 While the school was free, Manhattan’s living expenses are notably high. They actively encouraged women to apply, ensuring that they received the message to do so. The results were phenomenal.

00:28:35.680 Before the grants, the bar on the left represents the number of applicants, while the bar on the right shows the surge in applications post-grant. The green indicates women who applied, reflecting a significant increase.

00:29:02.720 There are fantastic programs like Rails Girls, which focus on reaching out to women while welcoming men as well. Typically, these events span two days, including an installation party, followed by one day of building a Rails app.

00:29:18.560 I attended one of these events in January, and it was an amazing turnout. What we observed was that if we invite women specifically, it draws a large crowd.

00:29:38.160 We also had numerous coaches, which allowed for small teams and effective learning experiences. This photograph shows me collaborating with two individuals, assisting them in building Rails apps.

00:29:55.360 You don't have to be a woman to teach these skills; you just need an interest in helping women learn. Similarly, RailsBridge operates like Rails Girls but has a broader curriculum.

00:30:11.760 They teach HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and many other topics. Numerous organizations exist, both across the country and around the globe, focused on encouraging women to enter computing.

00:30:27.760 So, if you’re interested in promoting women in computing, please find an organization or start something in your area.

00:30:37.760 As we all know, software engineers are shaping the future, and a woman’s place is truly in the revolution.

Ruby on Ales 2013