Reading

Women are excellent Programmers - Reading list

To inspire you and make you think about this statement, I am gathering a few online and freely accessible reads.

Individual stories

Fully recommend reading Oral histories from Engineering and Technology History wiki https://ethw.org/Oral-History:List_of_all_Oral_Histories. Have a look a the "Individual Oral Histories" and look for female names in there <3, here some highlights ordered by surname.

• Oral-History: Frances "Fran" Allen. Jan 29, 2019 Engineering and Technology History https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Frances_%22Fran%22_Allen{:target="_blank"}.

• Jean Bartik. By Steve Lohr. Apr 7, 2011. The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/business/08bartik.html{:target="_blank"}.

• News about Katie Bouman, the woman who develop an algorithm capable to take the first picture of a blackhole.

  • Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough by Hannah Devlin. April 11, 2019. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough{:target="_blank"}.
  • How to take a picture of a black hole - Katie Bouman. Apr 28, 2017. TED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs{:target="_blank"}.
  • A method to image black holes by Larry Hardesty. Jun 6, 2016. MIT News Office http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606{:target="_blank"}.

• Anita Borg https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Anita_Borg{:target="_blank"}.

• Rosemary Candlin https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Rosemary_Candlin{:target="_blank"}.

• Margaret Hamilton, née Margaret Heafield, computer scientist who was one of the first computer software programmers; she created the term software engineer to describe her work. She helped write the computer code for the command and lunar modules used on the Apollo missions to the Moon https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Hamilton-American-computer-scientist{:target="_blank"}.

• Frances E. Holberton. By Steve Lohr. Dec 17, 2001. The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/business/frances-e-holberton-84-early-computer-programmer.html{:target="_blank"}.

• Katherine Johnson. by Jim Hodges. Aug. 27, 2008 (Last Updated: Feb. 25, 2020). NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_kjohnson.html{:target="_blank"} Katherine Johnson's work at NASA's Langley Research Center spanned 1953 to 1986 and included calculating the trajectory of the early space launches.

• Grace Murray Hopper. The Compiler, MIT. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/grace-murray-hopper{:target="_blank"}. Notes: She is so clever and witty.

• Jean Sammet. By Steve Lohr. Jun 5, 2017. The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?module=inline{:target="_blank"}. Notes: The mother of COBOL. Download audio file{:target="_blank"}.

• Jean Sammet: Programming Language Contributor and Historian, and ACM President. By Thomas J. (Tim) Bergin, American University and Editor: Thomas Haig. in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 76-85, Jan.-March 2009. doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2009.14 URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4802436{:target="_blank"}. Notes: "Jean was con-tacted by someone at Prentice Hall who suggested she write a book on Fortran. When Jean told him that she wasn’t interested in writing about Fortran, she was asked what she would like to write about. When she said she’d like to write about all program-ming languages, she was told: ‘‘Go ahead!’".

• Stephanie Shirley. By Mary Deelsnyder. Nov 26, 2015. Women Entrepeneurs. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253252 Founded Freelance Programmers in 1962 in the UK. Many, if not all, of her employees worked from home. One of her first job advertisements read, in part, “many opportunities for retired programmers (female) to work part-time at home,” and described the jobs as a “wonderful chance, but hopeless for anti-feminists.”

• Elsie Shutt. Oral-History: Jan 12, 2015. Engineering and Technology History https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Elsie_Shutt{:target="_blank"}.

• Kateryna Yushchenko. Wikipedia. last edited on 25 May 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateryna_Yushchenko_(scientist){:target="_blank"}. She developed one of the world's first high-level languages with indirect address in programming, called the Address programming language.

More stories

Disclaimer, NY times changed to a subscription method, so some of the news are not easily accessible :( without a subcription.

• Female code breakers: The hidden figures of the greatest generation. By Jane Carr, CNN. Updated October 11, 2017 https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/11/opinions/code-girls-iiza-mundy-opinion/index.html{:target="_blank"}. Refers to the book "Code Girls"

• The Secret history of Women in Coding. By Clive Thompson. Feb. 13, 2019. The New York Times Magazine https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html{:target="_blank"}. Notes: This reading links to many other awesome reads, it moved to many preconceived ideas in me.

• A Woman's Story, Mar. 29, 2012. http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.html{:target="_blank"} Notes: My favourite line: "The computer didn't care that I was a woman or that I was black".

• Mothers of Invention, Inventive Mothers. By Eileen McGinnis. Oct 26, 2017. Eileen McGinnis Blog https://www.eileenmcginnis.com/blog/2017/10/26/software-entrepreneurs-elsie-shutt-stephanie-shirley-mothers-of-invention-inventive-mothers{:target="_blank"}