Browse Items (52 total)

Growth in the computing workforce in the United States

Proportion of women in a sample from the computing workforce

Percentage of women in the computing workforce in the United States 1971-2006

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…

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.

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.

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."

Digital Equipment Corporation's smart terminal in 1972 featured BASIC programming and tape storage as well as "character string manipulation" for data editing.

Computer system by Geodatic, Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, prepares "personalized replies to prospective customers" responding to Playboy magazine advertisements.

In 1971, Honeywell's Keyplex Data Entry System seemed to promise tidy masculine management over female clerical workers.

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.

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.

A 1971 vision of the future includes "a solid-state keyboard and cathode ray tube (CRT) display," with up to four lines of 32 characters.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Mary Lozier Traudt (left) and programmer Alma Smiddy discuss writing of inventory control program at Lozier Corporation in 1971.

NCR's model 299 accounting computer, designed for multipurpose data processing, offered "automatic features and simplicity of programming" for small businesses.

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."

Bar-coding systems, such as NCR's model 280 at Montgomery Ward, launched "point of sale" retailing.

NCR tag printers as "integral part" of information systems. While "unit automatically produces a wide variety" of labels, women's labor remained.

Percentage of women with doctoral degrees in computer science relative to other fields, United States 1966-2006

Total number of computer science bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees awarded in the United States

Proportions of BS degrees awarded to women in the United States for various disciplines

Proportions of women receiving BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in computer science in the United States

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).

"Size is decisive" advises the model-gymnast

Women get the order to "print it"

Grace Gentry at her home office (kitchen table) at Gentry, Inc. (1974-1977)

Argonaut Information Systems' Chair Luanne Johnson

Percentage of women computer science faculty in American colleges and universities, 1995-2005

Women students and faculty in various disciplines at American colleges and universities, 2002; sorted from highest to lowest percentage of women undergraduates

Fluctuations in bachelors degrees earned across many fields

Herb Grosch as "computer wizard" using General Electric computer to compute lunar orbits, with female assistant identified only as "Ann."

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…

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.…

Perhaps one, or two, male nonusers of computers pictured here at Argonne National Laboratory.

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.

At Tulane University, systems analyst William Cahill and computer programmer Dorothy J. King provided time-sharing services for computer-assisted menu planning.

Data entry on punch cards was gendered as female labor. In 1971, Univac's verifying punch combined keypunching and verifying of data.

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."

One unidentified woman is in the back row at far left.

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…

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.

Computer data punched on paper tape scrutinized by the masculine gaze.

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.