Honoring Women Computers

[MrRING]

History being recovered about some early women scientists:

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07...ng-forgotten-legacy-harvard-s-women-computers

More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, women labored in the Harvard College Observatory as “computers” — astronomy’s version of NASA’s “Hidden Figures” mathematicians.

Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars, many of whom made major discoveries. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. In the late 1800s, they were famous: newspapers wrote about them and they published scientific papers under their own names, only to be virtually forgotten during the next century. But a recent discovery of thousands of pages of their calculations by a modern group of women working in the very same space has spurred new interest in their legacy.

Surrounded by steel cabinets stuffed with hundreds of thousands of plate glass photographs of the sky, curator Lindsay Smith Zrull shows off the best of the collection.

“I have initials but I have not yet identified whose initials these are,” Smith Zrull says, pointing at a paper-sized glass plate crowded with notes taken in four different colors. “One of these days, I’m going to figure out who M.E.M. is.”

 

[UnknownUnknown]

Apologies if someone has already linked to this somewher. It's a really interesting piece about black women working at Nasa in the 1940s.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...can-americans-margot-lee-shetterly-space-race

[from the article]
"A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.”

 

[Shady]

There is a film about them, Hidden Figures

 

[Cochise]

People forget their recent history. When I started learning about computers, the only available one in town belonged to the council. The Civil Service had five, and MOD probably had a whole collection of them out at the R&D installation, but we didn't know about those.

In the absence of computers people did their calculations on things called, IIRC, comptometers - like complicated fruit machines - and they were usually worked by ... women.

Also, when I started, there was a roughly even split of male and female programmers, analysts etc. My first team leader was female, and my current 80+ year old female neighbour was a programmer back in the 50's at Manchester University.

I don't know what social change has driven women away from the IT industry, but it has occurred at the very same time that women have been pressing for equality.

 

[Swifty]

There is a film about them, Hidden Figures

Thanks, I'll look out for that .. I've found a featurette about it ..

 

[Mythopoeika]

I don't know what social change has driven women away from the IT industry, but it has occurred at the very same time that women have been pressing for equality.

I think women have just made a calculation that the amount of training and work required versus the rewards are just not good enough. Technology salaries have slipped a bit over the years. Back in the days when I started out in computing, there were loads of women doing programming and they were earning shed-loads of money.

 

[IamSundog]

Also, when I started, there was a roughly even split of male and female programmers, analysts etc. My first team leader was female, and my current 80+ year old female neighbour was a programmer back in the 50's at Manchester University.

That's true of me as well. As a programmer n the 80's I reported to a woman more often than not. By the late 90's women were getting scarce in IT. Wonder why?

Rewards not good enough? It's still a pretty well paid field...and plenty of women work in plenty of less well paid fields!

 

[Frideswide]

I started in the early 1980s. I agree with the decline in numbers......

 

[Mythopoeika]

Rewards not good enough? It's still a pretty well paid field...and plenty of women work in plenty of less well paid fields!

I think women are looking at the work-life balance and deciding heavily in favour of the 'life' bit.
They do have more life choices available to them than men, and they're using that to their advantage.

 

[EnolaGaia]

When I went back to university to train up for a vocational shift into IT (early 1980's) it was common for there to be 2 tracks in the curricular structure: information processing (end use; business applications; etc.) and hard-core comp sci.

The information processing track had more females and a high proportion of successful female graduates. Almost all the females I know who've had successful IT careers and moved up into IT management positions started out in this track (or its equivalent).

The hard-core comp sci track had fewer females, produced fewer successful graduates, and it was within this track that I encountered, collaborated with, and counseled the only students so hopelessly out of their depth that I advised them to either switch to the info processing track or leave the field entirely. These were all females, all had (mis-?)spent years trying to learn and develop IT skills, and all were demonstrably inept at analyzing a target problem and configuring program logic in response.

(Yes - I said 'inept', and I meant 'inept'.)

As I moved on into mathematical programming, computation linguistics, and AI (my specialty at the time) I encountered very few females who even pursued study and / or work in those sub-fields. During my AI days there was another round of working with, and counseling, struggling students / workers who were hopelessly lost to the point I had to give up and advise them to bail out. These, too, were unanimously females, and the key problem was essentially the same - a deficiency in dealing with the abstract logical aspects of analyzing a target problem and crafting a solution.

Why should there be even the appearance of a gender-correlated factor in IT success?

IMHO a lot of it has to do with the fact these experiences pertain to past decades and my own (baby boomer) generation - a generation that included a large proportion of pre-womens-lib ladies who'd been enculturated under the old traditional ways. These traditional ways tended to emphasize deep troubleshooting and tinkering skills (e.g., with mechanical gizmos) for boys rather than girls. As a result, boys had an easier time translating skills developed on (e.g.) car engines to software construction, while most girls were at a disadvantage from the get-go.

SIDE NOTE: I noticed the very same effect back in the 1970's when I was chief draftsman at a metals fabrication plant. I was assigned to tutor multiple females toward becoming custom design draftspersons. They were excellent at drafting (i.e., drawing up the blueprints), but uniformly deficient at figuring out what needed to be drawn in the first place. All such female trainees (3 or 4, as I recall) were eventually re-assigned to more formulaic 'pipe sketching' work, at which they performed quite well.

Back in the Olde Daze you needed to know how things worked 'all the way down to the substrate' (i.e., down to the assembly language / hardware level) to troubleshoot problems. This is no longer the case. Most production programming nowadays is done with pre-packaged toolkits that distance the 'programmer' from most of the pesky deep background intricacies that plagued software developers decades ago.

I noticed a shift starting around 20 years ago, as such programming toolkits became the norm. Now that a 'programmer' is frequently doing little more than Lego-fitting on-screen, a good deal of the whatever-it-is abstract logical analysis and visualization burden has been alleviated, and I've seen an increase in the proportion of effective female programmers on staff.

Unfortunately, by the time this shift occurred I believe software development had gotten a bad rep as a career choice for young women, and that impression has persisted.

 

[eburacum]

The lady 'computers' at Harvard included Williamina Fleming, who discovered the Horsehead Nebula; it seems that the computers did a lot more than just computing, and were examining photographic plates for objects of interest. The sort of grunt work that male astronomers couldn't be bothered with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamina_Fleming

"Pickering's Harem," so-called, for the group of women computers at the Harvard College Observatory, who worked for the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering. The group included Harvard computer and astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, Williamina Fleming, and Antonia Maury.

 

[ramonmercado]

Apologies if someone has already linked to this somewher. It's a really interesting piece about black women working at Nasa in the 1940s.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...can-americans-margot-lee-shetterly-space-race

[from the article]
"A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.”

Proper recognition at last.

The four Black women depicted in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” will receive Congressional Gold Medals for their important contributions to NASA during the Space Race.

President Donald Trump signed the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act into law on Friday, which honors mathematician Katherine Johnson, computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan, and engineers Christine Darden and Mary Jackson. Vaughan, who died in 2008, and Jackson, who died in 2005, will receive the medals posthumously.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-...0927b23722d8?ri18n=true&ncid=newsltushpmgnews