🚀 go-pugleaf

(Since the thread about female computer pioneers has evolved
into a debate about programming languages, I felt the need to
start a new thread about the actual subject.)

To be honest, perhaps the most pioneering issues about women early
in the computing field were not technical, but social. I have two
examples:

My mom worked her way through college in the 1930's, getting her degree
in statisitics. On graduation, the only good jobs were in the insurance
field - computing actuarial statistics. And at that time, the
"computers" were humans sitting at desk with pencil and paper, doing
the math by hand. Prejudice was extreme - none of the companies
would hire women. Period, end of discussion. So she went to work
in an analytical chemistry lab, met my dad, had us.

And then ran into the glass ceiling. The only job she could find
then, with a family, was teaching math at the local high school.
During the 1960's things started to loosen up a bit, and she was
given a grant from the Ford Motor Company to study computer
programming. In those days, that meant of course Fortran and
assembly on IBM mainframes. Because childcare was pretty much
non-existent in those days, I was dragged around as a young child
to classes and must have learned some of it by osmosis...

After we were in school, she went to work for NASA, near the end
of the Apollo program. She was a lab technician again, but measuring
radioactive decay of materials that had beed irradiated in a test
nuclear reactor, using an early Wang desktop computer. After being
laid off at the end of the space program, she went to work for the FAA
at the Oberlin, Ohio facility, which at the time was 3 floors of
mainframe computers that controlled much of the air traffic between
the east coast and Chicago and point westward.

My points in the above (admittedly longwinded diatribe) are that
1) gender bias kept many skilled and qualified women from entering
the computer field
2) the "glass ceiling" also kept (and still keeps) women with
families from advancing (though there are admittedly practical
reasons too)

My second example supports statement (1) - a family friend that
wanted to learn progrmming in the days when it was still a matter
of installing wire jumpers on circuit boards. She somehow forced
them to accept her at the programming school, and was the only
woman - which led to all sorts of problems with lodging, etc
which "they" had not planned on.

I would consider her a pioneer for sticking with it, and opening
the way for other women to learn the skills, and for opening a
previously closed profession to women.

Stephen