It is vital today to recognise & celebrate women in tech, taking note of their accomplishments that began over a century ago and continuing today. Observing the pivotal role that women played in tech history is just one way to help safeguard their place in its future.

1. A History of Our
Leading Ladies in
Technology
THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF WOMEN IN SHAPING THE TECHNICAL AGE

2. It is vital today
to recognise & celebrate women in tech, taking
note of their accomplishments that began over
a century ago and continuing today.
Observing the pivotal role that women played
in tech history is just one way to help safeguard
their place in its future.

3. “Our young people are the future. We must provide for
them. We must give them the positive leadership they’re
looking for…You manage things; you lead people.”
“In tech, girls don’t code because girls don’t code.
One way of changing this is carefully documenting the
role women played in tech dawn of technology.”
SHERYL SANDBERG
GRACE HOPPER

4. ADA LOVELACE
“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as
the jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”
• Lovelace published guidelines for THE WORLD’S FIRST ALGORITHM envisioned to be processed by a
computer in 1843 before computers even existed!
• While the first computer wasn’t built until the 21st century, Ada’s work has granted her the title of the
FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMER IN HISTORY
• Lovelace was a visionary who had the foresight to understand the potential uses of the machine, including
the manipulation of symbols and creation of music

5. GRACE HOPPER
“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are
for. Sail out to sea and do new things.”
• Grace Hopper INVENTED THE FIRST COMPUTER IN 1951, the platform for modern computing.
• Hopper led the team that invented COBOL (COMMON BUSINESS-ORIENTED LANGUAGE), the first user-
friendly business software program
• She was the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale & the first woman to be
promoted to the rank of Admiral in the U.S. Navy

6. THE ENIAC SIX
“Not only did they program the ENIAC, during WWII without manuals
or programming languages, but they dedicated years after the war to
making programming easier and more accessible for all of us who
followed”
• The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the FIRST GENERAL-PURPOSE
ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTER.
• It was programmed manually using 3000 switches and dozens of cables and digit trays to physically route
data. The ENIAC SIX used complex differential equations, written by hand, to calculate ballistics
trajectories. They are;
Jean Bartik
Betty” Snyder
Kay McNulty
Marilyn Meltzer
Ruth Teitelbaum
Francis Bilas

7. ERNA HOOVER
“I designed the executive program for handling situations when
there are too many calls, to keep it operating efficiently without
hanging up on itself. Basically it was designed to keep the machine
from throwing up its hands and going berserk.”
• Erna Hoover created a COMPUTERISED TELEPHONE SWITCHING SYSTEM to quickly process calls
revolutionising the art of modern communication
• She was the recipient of one of the FIRST SOFTWARE PATENTS EVER AWARDED for the “Feedback
Control Monitor for Stored Program Data Processing System.”
• Hoover worked on high-level applications: radar control programs of the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile
System, artificial intelligence methods, large databases and transactional software.

8. MARGARET HAMILTON
“We still do other things out of ignorance
today, such as continuing to pay women lower
salaries than men.”
• Remember the moon landing in 1969? IT IS LIKELY THAT THE 1969 NASA MISSION TO THE MOON
WOULD HAVE FAILED WITHOUT THE LIKES OF MARGARET HAMILTON
• Margaret was the inventor of software on Apollo 11 that enabled computers to rank the highest
priority job. Without Hamilton, the Apollo astronauts would not have come home due to coding errors
encountered during the flight.
• She wrote code for the WORLD’S FIRST PORTABLE COMPUTER

9. RADIA PERLMAN
“The world would be a better place if more engineers, like
me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I’m successful,
nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and be self-
managing.”
• Radia Perlman is known by many as the “Mother of the Internet”, but don’t call her that - a network
engineer, she helped make Ethernet technology a household name
• She developed the SPANNING TREE PROTOCOL, enabling the scalability of network traffic using
Ethernet.
• Dr. Perlman’s work has had a profound impact on how networks self-organize and move data. Her
innovations enable today’s link state routing protocols to be robust, scalable, and easy to manage.

10. SOPHIE WILSON
“Most engineers like to proceed from A to B to C in a series of
logical steps. I'm the rare engineer who says the answer is
obviously Z and we will get on with that while you guys work out
how to do all the intermediate steps. It makes me a dangerous
person to employ in IT but a useful one."
• Sophie Wilson is a computer scientist who designed the architecture behind the Acorn Micro-Computer —
the first computer sold by British technology company, Acorn Computers
• She CREATED THE ORIGINAL ARM COMPUTER PROCESSOR, which would later become one of the most
successful IP cores
• By 2012, her design could be found in most of the world’s mobile computers & smartphones

11. LYNN CONWAY
“It’s like building bridges…people can say the
design stinks, your ideas aren’t any good. But if the
bridge stands, it stands. What works, works.”
• While at IBM, Conway facilitated the creation of the first superscalar design
• Her innovations during the 1970's at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have impacted chip design
worldwide. Many high-tech companies and computing methods have foundations in her work.
• Conway had been ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICANS TO UNDERGO A MODERN GENDER TRANSITION, which cost
her a job and her family. Once she established herself as a woman, she kept the past a secret. Conway stayed behind
the scenes as much as she could. As a result so did many of her achievements.

12. MAVIS BATEY
“To test the day's settings, the Germans sometimes used their
girlfriends' names and dirty words; it was a great shame when they
were stopped, as we enjoyed the dirty words.”
• Batey was one of the leading female code-breakers at Bletchley Park cracking the Enigma ciphers that led to
the Royal Navy’s victory at Matapan in 1941.
• Her most important role was her role in BREAKING OF THE ENIGMA CIPHER USED BY THE GERMAN
SECRET SERVICE, THE ABWEHR.
• Mavis broke a second Abwehr machine, the GGG, allowing British intelligence to read high-level Abwehr
messages and confirming that the Germans did, in fact, believe fake intelligence that they were given by SS
double agents.

13. YVONNE BRILL
“I think my biggest contribution now can be to ensure that women
who deserve to be nominated for awards get nominated.”
• Brill invented a propulsion system in the 1960s to save communications satellites from going out of orbit.
This system is called the ELECTROTHERMAL HYDRAZINE THRUSTER (EHT).
• With her device now fitted as standard in modern communications satellites, she greatly contributed to
our use of the Internet today, enabling digital communications on a global level.
• “There are still companies all over the place where they have just one woman engineer. And that individual
needs to have someone — others to relate to, to maintain their equilibrium sometimes in that job that they
hold, you know, to help them realize that they’re on the right path.”

14. KAREN SPÄRCK JONES
‘I think it's very important to get more women into
computing. My slogan is: “Computing is too important to be
left to men.”’
• She introduced INVERSE DOCUMENT FREQUENCY (IDF) term weighting, which has been adopted as
standard in modern systems, including web search engines; AKA the capacity of ranking algorithms to
automatically recover text from an catalogue of documents.
• Karen was instrumental in providing a huge boost to AI and language work in the 1980s & has been a vocal
advocate for Women in Tech
• “I think women bring a different perspective to computing, they are more thoughtful and less inclined to go
straight for technical fixes. My belief is that, intellectually, computer science is fascinating - you're trying to make
things that don't exist.”

15. EVELYN GRANVILLE
“We accepted education as the means to rise above
the limitations that a prejudiced society
endeavoured to place upon us.”
• The second African American woman to earn a Ph.D in mathematics
• After joining IBM in 1956, she created COMPUTER SOFTWARE THAT ANALYSED SATELLITE ORBITS
FOR NASA'S PROJECT VANGUARD AND PROJECT MERCURY SPACE PROGRAMS.
• Granville was a champion of education believing that regardless of race and gender, everyone deserved
access to knowledge.

16. SISTER MARY KENNETH KELLER
"We're having an information explosion, among others,
and it's certainly obvious that information is of no use
unless it's available."
• Keller was a Catholic nun, mathematician and a pioneer of computer science
• She was THE FIRST WOMAN TO RECEIVE A PH.D IN COMPUTER SCIENCE IN 1965
• While at Dartmouth, where she briefly broke the “men-only” rule, Keller played a significant role
developing a key computer language:
BASIC (BEGINNER’S ALL-PUPROSE SYMBOLIC INSTRUCTION CODE)

17. HEDY LAMARR
“Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is
stand still and look stupid.”
• The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, DEVELOPED A "SECRET
COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM" TO HELP COMBAT THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR II.
• HER "SPREAD SPECTRUM" TECHNOLOGY STIMULATED THE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS BOOM,
creating the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations
possible.
• The first female recipient of the BULBIE™ GNASS SPIRIT OF ACHIEVEMENT AWARD, a prestigious
lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors (AKA "The Oscar™ of Inventing“).

18. JUDY MALLOY
“Nevertheless, opportunities for many kind of public literature will emerge
and evolve as web users become accustomed to wandering interactively …
where many kinds of writing that take advantage of the computer's ability to
manipulate narrative data, continue to thrive."
• In 1986 Malloy wrote and programmed the first hypertext novel, “Uncle Roger” and has been writing
hypernarratives since 1986
• However, history remembers the first hypertext novel to be programmed by Michael Joyce
• “When I began publicly writing Uncle Roger in 1986 on the WELL, it was in a conferencing system similar to what
is now called "threads" on some web systems. Like any audience, the audience reacted. I was aware of their
presence and the telling of the story was in itself interactive because audience members made comments and
sometimes even contributed to the story."

19. JANESE SWANSON
“[we women] earned far less than their male colleagues…
had to raise hands to get a word in [at meetings] … and
always had a hard time getting men to focus on what we
were saying rather than our legs and breasts.”
• Swanson founded GIRL TECH, WHICH CREATES PRODUCTS AIMED AT MAKING TECHNOLOGY MORE
INTERESTING FOR GIRLS, after finding that so many wonderful technology products were developed for
and marketed solely to boys.
• Swanson co-developed the first of the “Carmen Sandiego” educational games.

20. CAROL SHAW
‘When I was in junior high and high school, I was good at math. I
entered a bunch of math contests and won awards. Of course,
people would say, “Gee, you’re good at math – for a girl.” That
was kind of annoying. Why shouldn’t girls be good at math?’
• Shaw programmed one of the Atari’s best-known shooter games, River Raid
• River Raid is universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design for the Atari 2600 console, allowing
gamers for the first time to experience an extravagant amount of non-random, repeating territory in spite
of constrictive memory limits.
• Shaw’s work as a pioneer game designer has made her a legend to two generations of tech pros and
gamers – some even say she was THE FIRST FEMALE VIDEO GAME DESIGNER

21. Bibliography Empowered by:
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Leading
Ladies
Bateman, Jessica. "'She's Been Life Changing': Why Female Mentors Matter in Tech." Women in Technology.
Guardian News and Media, 16 Jan. 2017. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/jan/16/shes-been-life-changing-why-female-mentors-matter-in-tech
Bedford, Tori. "ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons on the 'Significant Problems' Women In Tech Still Face."
Chicago Inno. Chicago Inno, 21 Oct. 2016. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2016/10/21/top-company-for-women-in-techs-cto-says-theres-a-ways-to-go/
Bilton, Nick. "'The Innovators' by Walter Isaacson: How Women Shaped Technology." The New York Times.
The New York Times, 01 Oct. 2014. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson-how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0
Crezo, Adrienne. "Inspiring Quotes from 10 Influential Women in Tech." Mental Floss. Mental Floss, 14 Oct. 2013.
Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/53181/inspiring-quotes-10-influential-women-tech
Herold, Rebecca. "Overlooked Women in Tech Innovation History." Tech Page One. Dell Technologies, 30 Mar.
2015. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
http://www.techpageone.co.uk/business-uk-en/overlooked-women-tech-innovation-history/
Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster
Paperbacks, 2015. Print.
Moreno, Katherine. "Forgotten Women in Tech History. | Domo Blog." Domo.com. Domo, 1 Feb. 2016. Web. 08
Mar. 2017.
https://www.domo.com/blog/forgotten-women-in-tech-history/
Morris, David Z. "Tech’s Gender Pay Gap Hits Younger Women Hardest." Fortune. Fortune, 22 Jan. 2017. Web. 22 Feb. 2017.
http://fortune.com/2017/01/22/techs-gender-pay-gap-young-women/
Nemchonok, Sasha. "10 Famous Women in Tech History." Dice Insights. N.p., 17 Mar. 2016. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.
http://insights.dice.com/2016/03/14/10-famous-women-in-tech-history/

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