Tracy Chou is a 31-year-old programmer — and “an
absolute rock star,” as her former boss Ben Silbermann, the CEO
and co-founder of Pinterest, once said. Yet for all her street cred,
Chou still finds herself grappling with one of the biggest
problems in the industry: Female programmers are regarded
skeptically, and sometimes even treated with flat-out hostility.
She’s seen the same pattern of behavior personally during her
decade in coding: colleagues who muse openly about whether
women are biologically less wired to be great programmers.
There’s a deep irony here — because women were in
computing from its earliest days. Indeed, they were considered
essential back when “computers” were not even yet machines.
Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans.
And for a time, a large portion of them were women.
Soon, the human computers faced an even more
existential threat: digital computers, which promised to work
with far greater speed and to handle complex math.
Women, though, were among the original coders of these
strange new digital brains, because in the early days
programming was seen as dull work. The earliest programmers
for the Eniac — the military-funded first programmable
general-purpose computer — were entirely women. And though
they wound up inventing brilliant coding techniques, they
received none of the glory: When the Army showed off the Eniac
to the press, it did not introduce the women who had written
the code.
Internet: <smithsonianmag.com>(adapted).