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WITI WOMEN
Nearly Sixty Years Later the World's First Programmers Are Still Doing Gender Battle
Smack dab in the thick of the spotlight on women, the New York Network of WITI heard from Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli and Jean Jennings Bartik, two of the original programmers on the ENIAC team. For these women, recipients of the WITI Hall of Fame Award in 1997, gender bias is the stuff they were raised on. It's not a stretch to say they've become the poster children for women who've endured bias as they were kept from achieving full recognition for their contributions to the field of technology.
When Kathleen, Jean and 4 other women were tapped for the ENIAC program, it was not because of their amazing mathematical prowess (which they clearly demonstrated) but because the men were off at War. Their role in the future of computing was almost accidental. Though they were talented they were often treated and even classified as subprofessionals. They did the laborious manual calculations of differentials that few others would have had the patience to do. They did the clean up work; they packed ENIAC for moving and reassembly. Initially they were not even authorized to enter the ENIAC room and had to envision their programming by creating flowcharts and diagrams. Despite their status of second class citizens on the project, these women did the lions share of the heavy lifting. Programming the ENIAC was a much more physical endeavor than today's programming. There were over 3,000 switches that had to be flipped and unflipped, vacuum tubes that had to be tested and reassembled, and miles of cables to connect and reconnect. For a decade Kathleen, Jean and 4 others made history as they developed the techniques that would ultimately track the trajectory of every weapon from a bullet to the hydrogen bomb.
Jean and Kathleen's story is alternately inspiring and infuriating. Inspiring because these women were given a bunch of schematics and told to make ENIAC work. And so they did, in the face of many, many obstacles. Infuriating because their contribution to programming is often relegated to a Jeopardy question, an anomaly in the annals of technology. Finally their experiences echo modern day frustrations as they were forced to make the difficult choice on how to balance career and family, a choice few of their male counterparts made, and a choice many of us make today. The lessons learned from listening to Jean and Kathleen are subtle. It may be that because women are collaborative that ENIAC came to be; their stories all involve a sense of team problem solving. It may be that because they had "hands on" experience they were able to migrate to new positions, Jean as a manager and businessperson and Kathleen as her husband's touchstone for theoretical programming challenges. It may be that because they were forced to visualize the operations of ENIAC before touching it, they established the importance of that exercise.
The bottom line is that we're still counting women's contribution to high tech on our fingers. There were six women programmers on the ENIAC team in 1946. Today we count 8 women who run high tech businesses. Yet we know that technology will suffer if it only addresses 50% of the population, and only uses 50% of the population's talents. As long as we're counting women we're still fighting an uphill battle for women and technology.
What is your point of view? Please post your thoughts on the discussion board.
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The events of recent weeks have puts the issue of women in the workplace top of mind once again. First Harvard's President Lawrence Summers made some unfortunate and inappropriate remarks attributing the small number of women in the sciences to innate biological difference between the sexes. At almost the same moment, Carly Fiorina was ousted at Hewlett-Packard. A misfit between her marketing background and HP's engineering culture was the partial culprit. And now, we've seen the transformative experience of a woman who's paid her dues, as Martha Stewart morphs from piranha to muse. The good news? As these events transpire women's place and unique challenges in the workplace are once again being debated and discussed. The bad news? Like all diversity conversations, as long you're discussing it, it's still an issue.
If Jean and Kathleen's story were a movie it might be called "Rosy the Riveter Meets the Computer". When they were in their early twenties, they were recruited as "Computers" by the US Army to work on the ENIAC project, the creation of the first electronic computer. The ENIAC project, headed by two brilliant men, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, created a machine to calculate trajectories. It laid the groundwork for all that would become modern day computing. Initially, "'Computers' as we were called," says Kathleen, "did calculations on what were relatively primitive hand-held calculating machines."
While they were programmers and pioneers, it's their personal decisions that make their life stories so riveting. Jean is quick to point out that she was just a farm girl in Missouri but rose to master business and management as well as programming computers. She continued to work in the field and raise children, a difficult juggling act for women of any generation. Kathleen worked for the man she would eventually marry, John Mauchly. She became his confident and fellow explorer and, with her help, Mauchly became of the greatest computer thinkers ever.
Well into their 80's, but filled with vitality, the women of ENIAC are still doing battle. Jean is not shy about calling for Lawrence Summer's immediate removal from Harvard. Kathleen is outspoken about the early days of computing and determined to set history right as it retells the story of her husband, Mauchly and the bristling encounters with Von Neuman over their contributions to the creation of stored programming.