When Computers Were Women

Text Exploration

In this factual historical account, Light describes the material role women played in the development of computing, and the way their contributions and leadership have been essentially eliminated from historical descriptions. The emphasis of this investigation is on the creation of the first electronic computer (the ENIAC), developed during and for World War II, but little has changed since. Women are still largely excluded from fields of computer science and engineering, and while some of the dismissive and abusive language used to describe the role women play in computing has been tempered—it’s less common now than in 1944 to see phrases in management training literature like “a women is a substitute—like plastic instead of metal”—the attitudes persist. Light’s exploration is grounded in the role of women in computing for the war effort, but she indicates that the core goal of the text is to examine “how the job of programmer, perceived in recent years as masculine work, originated as feminized clerical labor.”

During World War II, all “able-bodied” men were conscripted for war, leaving gaps in the workforce for roles that had both implicitly and explicitly excluded participation from women. The government and media recognized this gap, and documents like Wartime Opportunities for Women actively recruited women into science and engineering roles. Some of these roles became focused on the development of a ballistics machine, a technology that could calculate (or “compute”) the solutions to various mathematical problems.

A computer was first a title given to the person doing the computing; this was a women (often described as a “girl”, although some overt sexism seemed to be slightly more crammed into a positive/negative sandwiching, such as describing women’s ability to focus as grounded not in their attention but in their “nimble fingers and tireless wrists.”) Eventually, the computing girl and the scanning girl became the ENIAC girls. These were the two hundred women who designed and implemented the world’s first computing device, in order to simplify and speed up the calculation of firing tables for artillery shells. This device, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was a computer unlike those of present day, as its input was cards, its mechanisms were exposed circuitry and vacuum tubes, and its output was not graphical. It was a complex tool, more like a bespoke engineering machine than a modern device, and required “a high level of mathematical skills” as well as a hands-on approach to problem solving in real-time. Arguably, the women who worked on the transition from hand-calculation to machine-computation were the only people intellectually and physically competent to operate the machine, and Light mentions six leaders of that project, all women; one of those leaders, Kathleen McNulty, described that they were handed a wiring diagram and told to just figure it out, which they did.

But when the war ended, their leadership was not only tempered in popular media; it was commonly removed entirely, with the development of the ENIAC and the role it played in ending the war attributed only to men. This, Light indicates, is a “curious paradox.” The War Department urged women into computing, but “its press releases about a critical project like the ENIAC do not mention the women who helped to make the machine run.” Curiosity is a generous word. Light argues that the accounts that attribute the innovations to men are factually incorrect, and one reason is the expendable view the military still holds of women. Of course, the military is historically equitable in this view of people as expendable, as male soldiers are considered disposable game pieces too, but Light notes that this recasting is particularly difficult to rationalize because of the obvious strategic role of the development of the ENIAC. It was not, ultimately, just a tool; it’s largely considered to be the source of ignition calculations for the atomic bomb, which changed the course of history dramatically.

Light indicates that it is “critical to write women back into the history they were always a part of.” This text does this. But practitioners are often ignorant of and uninterested in history, and so the scholarly value of this text may be overshadowed by the stubborn, and perhaps immutable, reality of the workplace—which, as Light notes, still overwhelmingly considers computing and engineering to be masculine activities.