Ivory Coast stamp from 1972 surrounds a woman with computer images, including an IBM mainframe, punch cards, and core memory. In French, informatique can be either computing or the discipline of computer science.
For recruiting, Honeywell created a positive image of women programmers in 1969. Women, such as Christine Johnson, composed one-third of the opening class of 40 at Honeywell's Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, education center.
Publicity images often used attractive women models to sell computer systems. But many women actually worked as computer operators, here on an OCR data-entry system, a decided step up from data-entry work.
Burroughs recruiting in 1980 pictured Toni Sternal, a project manager based in Pasadena, California. After 10 years in field engineering, Sternal directed a team of hardware support specialists in the "center of activity for medium computer systems."
Men and women often worked side-by-side (here at a Honeywell computer center in the late 1960s) but typically did different jobs. Women often tended data storage units.
This "powerful data entry and editing system" from Inforex (1975), while promising to minimize programming effort and save thousands of dollars annually, left this woman precious little room for movement.
Grace Hopper received the DPMA's inaugural Computer Sciences Man of the Year award at its 1970 annual meeting in Seattle. She is hugged by Cal Elliot, its executive director.
Computerization with Inforex data-entry system: "Data is displayed progressively as it is keyed to build full records for visual inspection." Screen reads "ERROR," but "operators easily make on-the-spot correction."
In 1971 Sperry-Rand Univac publicized keypunching by cloistered Carmelite nuns in the Bronx, New York. "The nuns, whose life is devoted to silence and isolation from the world, enter data on punched cards during their periods allotted to manual labor…
At a Houston insurance company, computerized data entry (background) replaced conventional keypunching (foreground), resulting in a reported 20% cost saving- but little change in women's work.
Digital Equipment Corporation's smart terminal in 1972 featured BASIC programming and tape storage as well as "character string manipulation" for data editing.
At a Day, Inc., sportswear factory in 1972, man with computer-output microfilm equipment (above) controls women production workers (below) "on a projected-requirement basis."
At Tulane University, systems analyst William Cahill and computer programmer Dorothy J. King provided time-sharing services for computer-assisted menu planning.
Punch card keypunching and verifying was "hardly outmoded" in 1971, Sperry-Rand insisted, since its new equipment could verify the stack of 20,000 cards (left) in "an eight hour day" compared to earlier throughput on right.
Achievement test evaluation "prescribed by computer" was developed in 1971 by Gary Pleger (left) and Karsten Engh-Kittlesen (right), who "developed the sophisticated evaluation system."
NCR's model 299 accounting computer, designed for multipurpose data processing, offered "automatic features and simplicity of programming" for small businesses.
Burroughs recruitment in 1978 profiled Libby Ryan, a B.S. mathematics major working at the Burroughs engineering center in Tredyffrin, Pennsylvania, who directed software development for large general-purpose computers.
In 1980 Burroughs profiled Diane Chikoski, another mathematics major, who was director of programming for small computer systems. "Tasks are assigned according to talents, interests, and career goals," she noted positively.
Heather Gilbert, a Stanford mathematics major who also gained a Master's in computer science, started at Burroughs as a system analyst in 1969. After several assignments at company headquarters in Detroit, she transferred to Pasadena, Calif., where…
Women working on ENIAC at the Moore School (full view) were cropped out for a 1946 U.S. Army recruiting advertisement (inset), in which only Corporal Irwin Goldstine remained (airbrushing took out the second man at back).
A key software pioneer, Frances Holberton (1917-2001) programmed the ENIAC (1942-1946) and created software for the UNIVAC at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and Remington Rand (1947-1953). At the Applied Math Laboratory (1953-1966) of the U.S.…
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) programmed Harvard's Mark I computer (1944-1949) and helped develop the UNIVAC (1949-1966), for which she wrote the world's first compiler in 1952. Her ideas of higher-level programming inspired COBOL. She directed the Navy…
Computer system by Geodatic, Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, prepares "personalized replies to prospective customers" responding to Playboy magazine advertisements.
Stylized publicity images, such as this one for NCR's Century 100 computer, often portrayed male managers- this one wearing an unrealistically expensive suit- directing female support staff.
Women students and faculty in various disciplines at American colleges and universities, 2002; sorted from highest to lowest percentage of women undergraduates