The Gendered History of Human Computers

It’s ironic that women today must fight for equality in Silicon Valley. After all, their math skills helped launch the digital age

published : 25 March 2024

Tracy Chou is a 31-year-old programmer—and “an absolute rock star,” as her former boss Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, once gushed to me.

She’s a veteran of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. She interned at Google and Facebook, then was an early hire at the question-answering site Quora, where she coded key early features, like its ranking algorithm and its weekly emailer software. At Pinterest, she helped overhaul the entire code base, making the service speedier and more reliable. These days, she’s the founder of Block Party, a start-up making tools to help social-media users deal with harassment.

Yet for all her street cred, Chou still finds herself grappling with one of the biggest problems in the industry: Female programmers are regarded skeptically, and sometimes even treated with flat-out hostility.

She’s seen the same patterns of behavior personally during her decade in coding: colleagues who doubt women’s technical chops, or who muse openly about whether women are biologically less wired to be great programmers. She has watched as women linger in jobs while men of equal or lesser ability get promoted; at other firms, she’s heard of tales of flat-out harassment, including on-site propositions for sex. Chou’s even subject to skepticism herself: Recently she was trying to hire a coder for her new start-up, when the guy accidentally sent her a diary in which he’d meticulously written complaints about her skills.

“He felt I was immature and awkward and very sensitive, and not good with people—in over my head,” she says. And this from a guy trying to get her to hire him.

Not everyone in the field is antagonistic to women, of course. But the treatment’s bad enough, often enough, that the number of women coders has, remarkably, regressed over time, from about 35 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2013, according to the American Association of University Women.

Chou and others are working hard to change things. She has co-founded groups like Project Include that encourage diversity in computer science, while another initiative lobbies venture capital firms to set up anti-harassment policies. “I think we’re getting better, but very slowly,” Chou tells me.

There’s a deep irony here—because women were in computing from its earliest days. Indeed, they were considered essential back when “computers” weren’t even yet machines. Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women.

Few expected that computing would lead to a career, though. The idea was, mostly, to use the women before they married. Astronomer L. J. Comrie wrote a 1944 Mathematical Gazette article entitled “Careers for Girls,” in which he declared that female computers were useful “in the years before they (or many of them) graduate to married life and become experts with the housekeeping accounts!”