The Computer was Created in Her Image
The Computer was Created in Her Image
For most of its history, "computer" was a job title. For a crucial stretch of the twentieth century, it was a woman's job title.
When Richard Brathwait published The Yong Mans Gleanings in 1613, he used the word “computer” to describe a person: someone skilled at arithmetic. It is the earliest recorded use of the word in English, and for the next three centuries it kept that meaning. A computer was not a box on a desk. A computer was someone sitting at the desk.
What the etymology hides is who that someone tended to be. By the Second World War, the people doing much of the world’s calculating were young women. They charted stars, computed artillery tables, ran codebreaking machines and checked the orbits of astronauts. Then, as the machines inherited their name, the women were largely written out of the story. This piece tries to tell it from their side of the desk.
Threads before transistors
One way into this history starts not with mathematics but with textiles. In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard built a loom controlled by chains of punched cards, each hole deciding whether a thread was lifted or left. Charles Babbage borrowed the idea for his Analytical Engine, and in 1843 Ada Lovelace, translating and heavily annotating a paper on the engine, wrote that it “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Her notes contain what is often described as the first published algorithm intended for a machine, a method for computing Bernoulli numbers.
The philosopher Sadie Plant built a whole argument on that image. In Zeros + Ones (1997), one of the founding texts of cyberfeminism, she traced the lineage of software back through the loom, a technology long tied to women’s work, and read Lovelace as the point where the histories of computing and women’s liberation first become entangled. You do not have to accept every turn of Plant’s argument to see the pattern she identified: the patient, detailed, repetitive labour that computing depends on had long been coded as feminine, and therefore as lesser.
Pickering’s computers
That coding became explicit at the Harvard College Observatory. From the late 1870s, director Edward Pickering hired women to examine glass photographic plates of the night sky, measuring and classifying stars. One of the first was Williamina Fleming, a Scottish immigrant who had been working in his household as a maid. Women were cheaper: the base wage was 25 cents an hour, well below what entry-level men earned. Sceptics called the group “Pickering’s Harem”. The astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin later wrote that the computers had been chosen “to work, not to think.”
They thought anyway. Fleming classified more than ten thousand stars for the first Draper Catalogue, argued with Pickering (unsuccessfully) over women’s pay, and in 1899 became the first woman to receive a Harvard Corporation appointment. Annie Jump Cannon refined the stellar classification sequence, O, B, A, F, G, K, M, that astronomy students still memorise. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, measuring variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, showed in 1912 that a Cepheid’s pulsation period tracks its intrinsic brightness. That relationship gave astronomers their first standard candle, and Edwin Hubble later used it to show that Andromeda lies far beyond the Milky Way. The known universe grew enormously because a woman paid by the hour noticed a straight line on a logarithmic plot.
The kilogirl
By the 1940s the arrangement had been industrialised. A member of the US Applied Mathematics Panel reportedly proposed the “kilogirl” as a unit of computing effort, roughly a thousand hours of human calculation. It is a revealing joke. Before anyone measured machines in kilobytes, the field measured women by the thousand.
War multiplied the demand. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School, nearly a hundred women were hired as computers for the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, working out the firing tables that told gunners how to aim. When the Army funded ENIAC to speed this work up, six of them were chosen to program it: Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. There were no manuals and no programming languages. At first they lacked the security clearance even to enter the room with the machine, so they learned it from wiring diagrams.
On 15 February 1946, ENIAC was unveiled to the press running their ballistic trajectory program. Officers, deans and inventors were introduced. The programmers were not. Photographs showed them beside the machine, unnamed. McNulty later recalled that none of them were ever introduced as part of it. Their story stayed largely buried until the 1980s, when Kathy Kleiman came across uncaptioned photographs of the women and began tracking them down.
Britain has its own version. By January 1945 close to ten thousand people worked for Bletchley Park and its outstations, and roughly three-quarters of them were women, many from the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Wrens ran the Bombes around the clock in eight-hour shifts and operated Colossus, widely regarded as the first programmable electronic digital computer. Women also wired and soldered parts of the machines. Bound by official secrecy, most could not tell even their families what they had done for decades.
Hidden figures
In Virginia, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics began with five women computers at its Langley laboratory in 1935. By 1946 there were about four hundred. Black women among them were assigned to the West Area Computing unit, segregated under Virginia’s Jim Crow laws with separate work areas, cafeterias and bathrooms. Dorothy Vaughan took charge of the unit in 1949, becoming the agency’s first Black supervisor, and later became an expert FORTRAN programmer as electronic machines arrived. The unit was dissolved in 1958, when NACA became NASA.
The best-known story from Langley captures the handover between human and machine in a single line. Before his 1962 flight as the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn asked that Katherine Johnson verify the trajectory the new IBM machines had produced: “Get the girl to check the numbers.” The electronic computer had done the calculation. The astronaut wanted a human computer to confirm it.
When programming was women’s work
It is tempting to assume women were swept aside the moment real machines appeared. In fact, for its first couple of decades, programming was widely treated as a natural extension of clerical and calculating work. In April 1967 Cosmopolitan ran a feature called “The Computer Girls”, quoting Grace Hopper, a pioneer of compilers and of the COBOL language, likening programming to planning a dinner. The framing was patronising, but the message was clear: this was a job for women.
In Britain, Stephanie Shirley had already built a company on that premise. In 1962, with £6 of capital and a dining table, she founded Freelance Programmers, staffed almost entirely by women working from home, many of whom had left employment on marriage or motherhood. When letters signed “Stephanie” went unanswered, she began signing them “Steve”. Of her first three hundred staff, 297 were women.
Even the Moon landing was women’s work twice over. Margaret Hamilton led the MIT team that wrote the Apollo guidance software, and she is often credited with popularising the term “software engineering”. That code was then physically woven into core rope memory at a Raytheon plant near Boston, largely by women recruited from New England’s textile mills, who threaded copper wire through or around tiny magnetic cores to encode ones and zeros. Engineers nicknamed it “LOL memory”, for “little old ladies”. Lovelace’s metaphor had come true: the program was a fabric.
The reversal
So what happened? The historian Mar Hicks offers a detailed answer for Britain in Programmed Inequality (2017). The civil service, then the country’s largest computer user, created “machine grades” for its office machine operators. Because those grades were almost entirely female, equal pay reforms barely touched them; there were no men in the grade to be paid equally with. As computing came to look strategically important in the 1960s, new and better-paid professional roles were created for men, who were often trained by the women they displaced. Hicks argues that discarding its most experienced technical workforce helped sink the British computer industry, which had led the world in 1944 and was all but extinct by 1974.
In the United States the turn came later and showed up in lecture halls. Women’s share of computer science bachelor’s degrees rose from the early 1970s to a peak of about 37 percent in 1984, then fell, even as women’s share of other science and engineering degrees kept climbing. Researchers have pointed to the arrival of home computers, marketed overwhelmingly to boys and bought for sons more readily than daughters. Young men began arriving at university with years of practice, introductory courses started to assume it, and a pop-culture image of the male geek filled in the rest. In recent years women have earned only around a fifth of US computer science degrees.
The thread running through both countries is status. When computing looked routine, it was given to women. When it was recognised as powerful, it was reassigned.
The femininity that stayed
There is a strange coda. The labour moved to men, but the feminine coding of the computer as helper never left. It came back as a voice. Siri, Alexa and Cortana all arrived with female names or female default voices, and in 2019 UNESCO published a report titled I’d Blush If I Could, after Siri’s former reply to a sexist insult. The report argued that deferential, female-voiced assistants reinforce the idea of women as obliging helpers, and urged companies to stop making assistants female by default.
Seen against the longer history, the pattern is hard to miss. The machine was built to do her job, took her name, and decades later borrowed her voice. The human computers were women expected to calculate without being credited. The voice assistant is a computer expected to sound like a woman without being a person. In both cases, femininity marks the role that serves rather than the role that decides.
As we build the next generation of thinking machines, the question of who gets named and who gets cast as the helper is not a footnote. It has been part of the architecture from the start.
References
Brathwait, R. (1613). The Yong Mans Gleanings. London. First recorded English use of “computer” per the Oxford English Dictionary.
Lovelace, A. A. (1843). Notes by the translator, in L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage”. Scientific Memoirs, 3.
Plant, S. (1997). Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate.
Friedrich, B. and McEachern, M. “The labor and status of the women computers”. Harvard College Observatory history guide, American Institute of Physics. https://www.aip.org/history/harvard-observatory/williamina-fleming-labor-status
Hirshfeld, A. (2017). “Williamina Fleming: Brief life of a spectrographic pioneer”. Harvard Magazine. https://harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/williamina-fleming
Sobel, D. (2016). The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. New York: Viking.
Leavitt, H. S. and Pickering, E. C. (1912). “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud”. Harvard College Observatory Circular, 173.
Evans, C. L. (2018). Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
Kleiman, K. (2022). Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer. New York: Grand Central.
American Physical Society (2022). “December 1945: The ENIAC Computer Runs Its First, Top-Secret Program”. APS News. https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2022/11/eniac-first-top-secret-program
Smith, M. (2015). The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories. London: Aurum Press.
Shetterly, M. L. (2016). Hidden Figures. New York: William Morrow.
NASA. “Dorothy J. Vaughan” biography. https://www.nasa.gov/people/dorothy-vaughan/
National Archives at Philadelphia. Memo regarding the dissolution of the West Area Computers unit, 5 May 1958. https://www.archives.gov/philadelphia/highlights/west-area-computers-unit
Mandel, L. (1967). “The Computer Girls”. Cosmopolitan, April 1967.
Ensmenger, N. (2010). The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shirley, S. with Askwith, R. (2012). Let IT Go: The Story of the Entrepreneur Turned Ardent Philanthropist. Luton: Andrews UK.
Ceruzzi, P. (2016). “The Rope Mother: Margaret Hamilton”. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/rope-mother-margaret-hamilton
Mindell, D. A. (2008). Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hicks, M. (2017). Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Abbate, J. (2012). Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Henn, S. (2014). “When Women Stopped Coding”. Planet Money, NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
Margolis, J. and Fisher, A. (2002). Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H. E. (2019). I’d Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education. Paris: UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition.
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