In 1967, the April issue of Cosmopolitan ran an article, “The Computer Girls,” about programming. “The Computer Girls,” the magazine reported, were doing “a whole new kind of work for women” in the age of “big, dazzling computers,” teaching the “miracle machines what to do and how to do it.” Just as a woman twenty years previous might have chosen a career in education, nursing, or secretarial work, today, its author implied, she might consider computer programming. In the photographs accompanying the article, an IBM Systems Engineer named Ann Richardson is pictured handling punch cards, flipping switches, and “feeding facts” into the computer. Looking chic in a striped, sleeveless blouse and a neat beehive, she’s surrounded by faceless men in identical suits, who look down at her as she smiles brightly, a miniskirt among the mainframes.
Grace Hopper, by then in her early sixties, was back in active navy service, heading a programming languages group in the navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning. Quoted in the Cosmopolitan article, she used one of her favorite analogies about women and programming, comparing writing programs to planning a dinner party: “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it.” It may seem like a reductive statement from someone who would eventually develop a fleet-wide tactical system for nuclear submarines, but that was Grace’s style. Practical applications were the most important thing, and she always connected computers to living, breathing, everyday life. But the last word in the Cosmopolitan article comes from a male programmer. “‘Of course we like having the girls around,’ he declares, ‘they’re prettier than the rest of us.’”
Something happened to the generation of programmers after Grace Hopper and her peers. Although the Cosmo article suggests that women were being encouraged to pursue programming as an alternative to secretarial work, the field was quickly becoming far less welcoming to women than it had been even a decade before. Some estimates peg female programmers as between 30 and 50 percent of the workforce throughout the 1960s, but instead of running departments and advancing the art, they were starting to cluster “at the lower end of the occupational pool,” in lower-status jobs like keypunch operator, the 1960s equivalent of data entry, punching little holes in paper cards all day long.
At the same time, technology pundits wrote often and lustily about a “software crisis” plaguing the computing industry. Due to a massive shortage in skilled programmers, software projects were coming in late, under specifications, and riddled with bugs. Many of these were dramatic, public failures: in the early 1960s, IBM delivered the OS/360 operating system a year late and four times over budget, and NASA was forced to destroy the Mariner I spacecraft, intended to probe the mysteries of Venus, because of a simple programming error.
Writing programs may be like planning a dinner party, but it also demands perfection on a level unlike any previous human undertaking; a single misplaced comma can send a rocket tumbling back to Earth. “If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work,” wrote Frederick Brooks, who managed the disastrous OS/360 operating system at IBM. This can make programming difficult to learn. In the early decades of the field, it’s also what made it resistant to the industrial production that would drive the growth of the computer hardware business: writing software is like writing poetry with the unforgiving precision of equations, and it has a practical capacity to impact human lives on an unprecedented scale.
Some historians have attributed the “software crisis” to the disproportionate development of hardware and software: as faster, brawnier computers came into use, programmers were helpless to catch up. Others have cited a personality clash between programmers—if not women, then uniquely creative, difficult, and occasionally arrogant men—and their straitlaced industrial and governmental managers. But there’s a third view, one that reflects how the software crisis coincided with the long, slow decline of women in senior programming positions throughout the industry.
By the late 1960s, even as Cosmo was pushing programming as a neat alternative to answering office phones, women in computing were being paid significantly less than their male counterparts. In a tradition dating all the way back to those nineteenth-century human computing offices that hired women to save money, female programmers were paid about $7,763 a year compared with a median $11,193 yearly salary for men doing the same job. This wage discrimination, combined with a structural unwillingness on the behalf of computer companies to make space for childcare obligations, drove women from the industry. Meanwhile, the software crisis grew so severe that NATO called an international conference in 1968 to address the problem. No women were invited.
It was held in the Bavarian ski resort town of Garmisch. Between runs down the Zugspitze, the men attending banged out a new approach to programming, one they hoped would rein in some of the problems plaguing the computing industry. The most significant change they made, arguably, was semantic: programming, they decided, would heretofore be known as software engineering. As such, it would be treated like a branch of engineering rather than a rogue, wild-blooming field roamed by fiercely independent, self-directed misfits and women. Engineering is a job with clear credentials, not a shadowy priesthood. This change signaled a larger renegotiation of computing’s professional status that would unfold through professional journals and societies, hiring practices, and certification programs throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The more the discipline professionalized, the more it grew implicitly masculine. The introduction of formal educational prerequisites for programming jobs, for example, made it harder for self-taught programmers to find employment—a change that penalized female candidates, particularly those who might have taken time off from school to raise children, above all. If computer programming “began as women’s work,” writes historian Nathan Ensmenger, “it had to be made masculine.”
The shift from programmer to software engineer was an easy enough signal for female programmers to interpret. The new paradigm, subtle as it may seem, “brought with it unspoken ideas about which gender could best elevate the practice and status of programming,” Janet Abbate writes. She argues that this symbolic exclusion, in concert with the more concrete factors at play—wage discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of adequate mentoring and support—signaled to women to avoid computing just as it was suffering from an industry-wide shortage of talent. Salt in the wound: the skills female programmers brought to the table were precisely those “software engineering” desperately needed.
The software crisis, after all, was one of deliverables. The reason projects were routinely coming in late and over budget was because they were built on rickety expectations. Getting the initial requirements right for a piece of software requires being able to listen to the client, to parse messy real-world problems into executable programs, and to anticipate the needs of nontechnical users. Despite its reputation as a discipline for introverted perfectionists, social skills are valuable in programming—even essential. Grace Hopper understood this, and it’s her early self-education in a wide range of nontechnical fields that made her such a profoundly competent programmer. As she told a historian in 1968, to make the link between “the computer people” and the outside world of clients, problems, and possible applications, “you needed people with more vocabularies.”
Those vocabularies aren’t innately feminine, but soft skills of communication are certainly socialized as women’s values. During the software crisis, aspects of software design that rely on “stereotypically feminine skills of communication and personal interaction” were “devalued and neglected,” ignored by male programmers and skipped over in software engineering curricula. As a result, the industry suffered, and perhaps suffers still.
The first computers became obsolete before they became operational. The Mark I led to the Mark II, then III; no sooner was the design for the ENIAC frozen and construction begun than John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were inventing its successor. Those early computers had a shelf life of only a few years before something smaller, faster, and smarter came along, a pattern that has continued, breakneck, into the present day. The same can be said for programming, which leapfrogged from a tedious afterthought to an art form in less than a decade. In 1950, when the most competent adding machines on Earth required entire office floors of real estate, IBM predicted the global market for computers would be five—total. But two thousand computers were in use globally by 1960. In the 1990s, when I finally came online, IBM was selling forty thousand systems a week. Punched cards became magnetic tape as code became language, while transistors ceded to integrated circuits, and then microprocessors, miniaturizing in exponential leaps as the boxes housing them sprouted screens and keyboards, becoming household objects, and portals for work, play, and connection.
When I think of the first female computers, poring over tables of numbers in organized groups, I sense a hidden catalyst, something that seems to have ignited a sequence of events leading to our current, intractably technological condition. The women who invented programming, working as mediators between metal and mind, grew into the women who wrote the elegant abstractions of language that allowed us to talk to computers like we talk to people. Their innovations are a little harder to grasp than those that miniaturized and refined computer hardware. The ENIAC is in pieces, forty units scattered in museums across the country, but it’s still a thing, proof of its own existence. The ENIAC programs, however, were operations conducted in time. They existed only in those brief moments when electricity pulsed through the daisy chain of patch cables strung together for the task before being unplugged and rearranged again and again.
The architects of those fleeting arrangements—the kilogirls, computer girls, operators, programmers, whatever you want to call them—changed the world. As the cultural theorist Sadie Plant writes so elegantly, “When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them . . . when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.”
With our twenty-first-century brains, we all have a shot at being as clever as Ada Lovelace, the Harvard computers, or a wartime ballistics calculator at Penn. But there’s only so far we can reach before we hit the ultimate threshold—the glass ceiling over all humanity. My current machine, a top-of-the-line slice of MacBook Pro, will be obsolete by the time these words make it to ink. The machine code that Grace Hopper dreamed would someday write itself is now the engine that powers the world. It has allowed me to find the women we’ll meet in this book, to e-mail them out of the blue, to wave hello to their ever-less-pixelated faces, and to make plans ending with me in their living rooms, looking at manuals, looking at photos, drinking green tea. Such is the case with world-changing technologies.
It’s never easy to anticipate what they will become, or just where they will take you.