Networks of Women Building Networks: The Communities of Female Computers

Women formed the backbone of computing technology during World War II. They were recruited for low pay to perform calculations, then to enter codes into early computers, then to program the computers to run. While we now recognize these women as pioneers of computing, this wasn’t always the case—at the time, they received little to no credit for their work. 

I write this reflection with a twofold goal. First, I seek to shed some light on some of the incredible women who made modern computing possible. Second, I aim to show how these women were in community with one another as they worked side by side. 

To start, the network below shows some of the women who worked in the early days of computing: the women behind the ENIAC, the MANIAC, the UNIVAC, and the invention of COBOL. Click the large, purple dots to learn about the technologies or the small, green dots to learn about the women involved. You can also click and drag the dots to other parts of the screen. (This visualization is best viewed on a desktop computer rather than a mobile device.)

Looking at this network, the connections between these women become apparent. The original six programmers of the ENIAC—Kay McNulty, Frances Spence, Marlyn Metlzer, Jean Bartik, Ruth Lichterman, and Betty Holberton—share common ties to the machine they worked on together. An additional bond connects Kay and Frances, who were fellow mathematics majors at Chestnut Hill College; they applied for the same job together after graduation. Fritz (1996) quotes Kay McNulty’s account of her hire:

Just after graduation, I happened to see an ad in the daily paper. The Army was looking for women with a degree in mathematics-right here in Philadelphia. I called Frances [Spence] and Josephine Benson—my fellow math majors. For some now-forgotten reason, Josephine Benson couldn’t meet with us. In any event Fran and I went in together for the interview and were both accepted one week later as computers…

Rounding out the ENIAC’s connections are Adele Goldstine, who wrote the program manual for the machine and taught mathematics classes to the original six programmers (Fritz 1996), and Klara Dan von Neumann, who worked on the computer after World War II ended. Adele and Klara are also connected to one another, as they shared an office at Princeton University before working together as computers (Hafner 2022). And Klara also knew Augusta H. Teller from their time working on the MANIAC—both women were wives of Manhattan Project scientists.

One of the original six ENIAC programmers, Betty Holberton, also worked on the UNIVAC with Ida Rhodes. Further, she knew Grace Hopper, who referred to Betty as “the best computer programmer she had known during her long career” (Fritz 1996). That’s high praise from one of the pioneers of computing. Grace Hopper is known for her work on COBOL, a programming language that’s used in business applications to this day. (She’s also known for inventing “debugging” when she removed a pesky moth from the relays of the Mark I computer (Dewan 2021).) COBOL was initially proposed by Mary K. Hawes, who realized the need for a business-centric programming language. Mary approached Grace Hopper with this proposal, and they convened a meeting to discuss its creation.

A sidebar, quickly: gossip. As noted in Pierson and Hughes (2013): 

…the word “gossip” referred to companions in childbirth, not limited to the midwife. Giving birth used to be a social (women only) event, for which a pregnant woman’s female relatives and neighbours would gather. As at any social gathering there was chattering, and this is where the term gossip came to mean talk of others. Gossip also became a term for women friends generally, with no derogatory connotations.

My point in bringing up gossip is that these women worked and talked and socialized together. The original six programmers of the ENIAC shared a sisterhood in secrecy—the ENIAC wasn’t unveiled to the public until 1946, and their work was highly classified. The only people these women could talk to about their work was each other, but it’s doubtful that work was all they talked about. The gossip these women shared must have been incredible. 

Linked by work and by friendship, these computer programmers relied on each other at a time when the world mostly ignored women in computing. Of course, the world has changed a lot since the 1940s, which brings me to our second network: women in computing by field. 

This network pulls from a dataset of 144 women on the Wikipedia timeline of women in computing (“Timeline,” 2023). The large, colorful dots represent fields of work, and the small, pink dots represent the women who work(ed) in those fields. Clicking on a person’s dot will reveal the time they live(d), as of December 2023, if that information was available. Again, you can click and drag the dots to other parts of the screen.

This network spans from the first known human computer and astronomer, Nicole-Reine Etable de la Brière Lepaute, to the present-day algorithm justice activist Joy Buolamwini. (Find them on the network!) Clustering these women by field is not meant to imply that they all worked together or knew one another, but that they shared the experience of being a woman in STEM in that field. Perhaps they learned from one another’s experiences or work. 

The largest cluster here is around the green dot for programming, which most of these women did (or do) in their careers in computing. Most fields are connected to programing, with the exception of corporate milestones (large orange cluster) and digital arts (small blue cluster). Women who attained corporate milestones, such as becoming CEO of a tech company, were often businesswomen, not programmers. Similarly, female digital artists who experimented with computer art saw themselves as artists, not programmers. 

Every woman on this network has significantly interfaced with computing history. I invite you to look some of them up, to learn about them—as programming pioneers, but also as people. 

Do not reduce the women of the early days of computing to just their work accomplishments, and do not think that they only thought and talked about their daily menial tasks. Remember the conversations, the connections, the gossip. Remember this quip from UNIVAC programmer Ida Rhodes, as quoted in Rapp (2016): “‘The more we work with electronic machines… the more awe we feel about the marvelous workings of the human mind. We call it ADAM—absolutely divine automatic machine.’”