Forgotten women in computing

[NoBinturongsHereMate]

A talk about discovering the women who programed ENAC in 1945, inventing the whole system for doing so, but were later written off as 'just models'. X (13 mins)

Tweet thread summary https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1909626044845621299.html

Thank you for posting that. 👏 I loved listening to it.

Thank you! That was really interesting. Great to see those women getting recognition for their work.

Another "Hidden Figures" type film in the offing, perhaps?

Most programming used to be done by women. They went from being ‘computers’ (the workers that did all the calculations, a bit like a typing pool) to programming the computers. Then at some point men realised it was an interesting job and took over.
When I started working in software 15+ years ago, I remember having a conversation with one of the older women who said that it had changed massively since she started working. I was one of about half a dozen women in a company of about 150 engineers. There’s a lot more women now.

edited for typo

Similar story with film editing. The first editors were women - they literally cut and then stuck together bits of celluloid. It was very fiddly, very precise work. Then the importance of editing increased and...the lads took over.

Same in astronomy:

More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, female "computers" at Harvard College Observatory were making major astronomical discoveries.
Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space.
They were famous - newspapers wrote about them, they published scientific papers under their own names. But they were virtually forgotten during the next century.

Edited to add link which then appeared above😕