The first programmers were women, hired because the work was considered clerical.
During World War II, the United States Army needed human computers to calculate firing tables for artillery. Six women, later known as the ENIAC programmers, were selected to program the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, one of the first general-purpose electronic computers, completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania.1 Their names were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. The work was classified as clerical because it involved following instructions, even though the women had to invent the instructions themselves.
Programming in its earliest form meant physically rewiring the machine or setting switches. Grace Hopper, a mathematician working on the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, was among the first to describe the work of instructing a machine as programming in the modern sense.2 Hopper later developed the first compiler in 1952, a program that translated human-readable instructions into machine code, and championed the idea that programming languages should resemble English rather than mathematical notation.3
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the field was remarkably gender-balanced. A 1967 article in Cosmopolitan profiled women programmers under the headline "The Computer Girls," noting that the work suited women because it was like planning a dinner party.4
The gender composition shifted in the 1980s. The percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women in the United States peaked at approximately 37 percent in 1984 and then declined steadily, reaching around 18 percent by 2012.5 Historians have attributed the shift to the marketing of personal computers as toys for boys, the rise of a hacker culture that was coded as male, and university admissions practices that favored applicants with prior computing experience at a time when home computers were disproportionately given to sons.
By 2023, software development had become one of the largest and highest-paid professional categories in the global economy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted more than 1.8 million software developers in the United States alone.6 The profession that began as women's clerical work in a wartime laboratory had become, within less than a century, a field associated primarily with men.