Five Women Who Revolutionised The IT Industry
Shaan Randhawa • March 8th, 2024
Take a look at some of these phenomenal women and their achievements!
For this International Women’s Day, we are composing a list of five women in IT who have revolutionised the IT industry. Show this to your daughters, sisters and other women who you think will be inspired by this list, and the power that they could bring into the IT industry.
1. Ada Lovelace
Computing was unheard of in the 1840’s, to all but the revolutionary Ada Lovelace. A woman in IT before IT was even a thing, Ada Lovelace designed the very first computing programme to ever exist in the world, in a research paper she produced at the age of 28. Ada described how a machine could perform basic functions – the computer, which didn’t even exist at the time!
2. Katherine Johnson
Katherine Jonson helped calculate the maths that enabled the flight path for NASA’s first manned spaceflight. An essential part of the team, Katherine Johnson was a black woman who persevered to make her impact, in spite of the turbulent time she was living through. Johnson was an essential part of NASA’s first space mission, and is a woman in tech who truly deserves to be celebrated. In recent years, Netflix has even created a series based around her life at NASA, (as well as two other revolutionary black women, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson), and shows the struggles she faced as a black woman in a white male dominated industry.
3. Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper is a woman in IT who made significant contributions to the development of software and computer programming. Throughout her career, Grace Hopper notably created the first computer language written in English (as opposed to a mathematical format), and contributed to the development of the first electric computer. She’s a name that’ll go down in history, and should be remembered this International Women’s Day.
4. Raida Perlman
Radia Perlman, also know as “Mother of The Internet”, invented the algorithm responsible for the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). This algorithm was essential in the development in today’s internet – without Radia Perlman, you wouldn’t be able to do so much as look up a restaurant online!
Raida won an array of awards over the course of her career, including the SGCOMM award, and inductions to both the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016, and the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014.
5. The ENIAC Programmers
This group of ladies are responsible for programming the first all-electric programmable computer. A milestone in technology, these women were unfortunately overlooked in the history of tech and were never credited for their work. The group was composed of six women: Betty Snyder, Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings Bartik, Ruth Licherman, Frances Bilas, and Marlyn Wescoff. These women in tech made significant advancements in the computing industry and deserve the credit they were denied this International Women’s Day.
We feel that this list showcases a minute amount of the competence and talent women in IT have displayed in the history of technology. From Ada Lovelace creating computing programmes before the computer even existed, to Katherine Johnson, who fought through both racial and gender biases in order to contribute to NASA’s first manned launch, women in tech can do anything they set their minds to. This International Women’s Day, it’s important to remember their contributions, and learn from the creations they’ve put out into the world of IT. Happy International Women’s Day, and we hope you find the ladies in this list as impressive as we do!
