5 Pioneer Women in Tech

The underrepresentation of women in tech contributes in large part to many people’s perception that female engineers, developers, tech leaders are unusual or rare, or that they’re a recent trend. When in fact, women have a long history as engineers, programmers, tech leaders, and innovators. In celebration of Women’s History Month, we present you five women who made pioneering innovations in the computing world.

Ada Lovelace is considered by many to be the world’s first programmer despite living a century before the invention of the modern computer.

The only legitimate daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was brought up as a mathematician and scientist by her mother. At 17, she was introduced to Charles Babbage, an inventor whose ideas captivated her early on and who became her lifelong friend and intellectual collaborator.

Her notes include a full set of instructions for the Analytical Engine to sequentially compute the Bernoulli numbers. But beyond the machine’s number-crunching capability, she grasped its full potential: <em>a machine that could be made to manipulate numbers could also be made to manipulate any data represented by the numbers</em>. A full century before the first modern computer, she mused that the engine can be used to compose music, create graphics, and much more. She was right.

With a career that spanned six decades across industries, including academia, the computing business, and the US Navy, Grace Hopper is a pioneer in computer programming in its earliest years. Hopper is best known for her invention of the compiler.

Her work was crucial in the standardization of compilers, computer languages, and validation procedures. Throughout her long career, she received multiple recognition for her pioneering work. In 1992, she was the first woman to receive the National Medal of Technology and was posthumously elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994.

Credited as the software engineer who took Apollo to the moon, Margaret Hamilton’s work enormously contributed to NASA’s efforts to land on the moon in the 1960s and 70s.

Coming from a diverse background which includes degrees in mathematics and meteorology, Hamilton worked on her first software projects for a professor in MIT, learning several languages and systems. Before her work in Apollo, she was part of the project in MIT Lincoln Lab’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System (SAGE), an early air defence system for the country. It was one of the first projects where she became interested in software reliability. When NASA picked MIT to design spacecraft guidance and navigation systems, Hamilton jumped at the opportunity.

As the lead in the software engineering division of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, she and her team were responsible for the onboard flight software. The software governed the flight dynamics of the Apollo spacecraft, which were used for six landing missions between 1969 and 1972. Impressed with the Apollo software, NASA adapted it for its subsequent projects including Skylab, the space shuttle, and the first digital fly-by-wire systems in aircraft.

Upper-left: Countess Ada Lovelace, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
Bottom-left: Radia Perlman, Barbara Liskov, Margaret Hamilton

A trailblazer in the design of programming languages, software methodology, and distributed computing, Barbara Liskov shaped many of the ideas in modern computer science.

After getting her BA in mathematics at UC Berkeley in 1961, she worked at the Mitre Corporation where she discovered her talent for programming. After a year, she moved to Harvard where she began her work on computer translation of human languages and then later to Stanford where she earned her PhD in computer science, among the first women to do so in the US. Her thesis was on a program to play chess endgames and was supervised by John McCarthy, one of the founders of the artificial intelligence discipline.

Best known for writing the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and key contributions in network security, Radia Perlman has been called as the “mother of the internet”.

Raised by parents who were both engineers working for the US government, Perlman grew up with a knack for math and science. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics from MIT, she landed a job in Bolt, Beranek and Newman Technologies, a government contractor where she was involved in designing network protocols.

Perlman is also known for writing Interconnections, which became a classic textbook on network protocols. In 1997, she also co-authored another popular textbook, Network Security. For the profound impact of her work on computer networks, she was inducted in 2014 into the Internet Hall of Fame and in 2016, to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

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