Abstract
Women have always played an important role in Computer Science findings, but their importance has always been overshadowed by men. Nowadays, men outnumber women by 3 times on computing occupations in the US, but still women prove to be essential on the development of technological fields. This work intends to place women at the forefront of computer science’s history. In order to demonstrate that their work was essential for the development of current technologies, a broad historical overview is given. This overview is chronologically and thematically structured in several periods, from the early computer machines (before 1900) to our current digital society (after 2010). Finally, an outlook on the role of women in computing is given. A detailed discussion of individual contributions by women would go beyond the scope of this work. Nor can a sociological analysis of the reasons for the gender gap be provided. Nevertheless, the work wants to be more than a mere quantitative enumeration of women’s contributions to computer sciences. The essay wants to plea for the integration of these women in the literature, i.e., in the historiography of computer sciences, which requires to reconsider the self-image of this discipline.
Highlights
The role of women in computing starts long before the Second World War (Margolis and Fisher 2003)
In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be tested on a computing machine that existed only on paper
Women were essential to the development of computing and their role was outshined by men, leading to the alarming number of women occupying less than one quarter of all computing occupations in the US (Ashcraft, McLain and Eger 2016). This underrepresentation leads to a male dominant environment, hostile to women, as can be seen in recent issues with big companies such as Google (Wakabayashi 2017) and Facebook (Conger and Frenkel 2018), affecting their development, since diversity is important in any field (Hicks 2017)
Summary
The role of women in computing starts long before the Second World War (Margolis and Fisher 2003). Through the years, women and their main contributions to the field were slowly decreasing, with the big gender gap appearing only on the 1980s. By this time, concern and follow research about this issue grew (Frenkel 1990), gathering the attention of the community. A great number of projects and groups were created in an effort to reverse this issue and encourage woman to engage on computer related fields (Gürer and Camp 2002)
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More From: Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science
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