Entry #8: The Secret History of Women in Coding

"The Secret History of Women in Coding” is an article written by Clive Thompson and published in The New York Times Magazine in February, 2019. In the article, the writer talks about women that have contributed to the advancement of Computer Science.

In this article, the story of Mary Allen Wilkes is told. When she was young, she had no idea that she wanted to be a programmer as she preferred to be an attorney. However her teachers told her to give it a try, so she went to MIT where she was hired in a programmer job. This event has shown me how welcoming a company is to anyone who is looking for a place in it.

Mary Allen Wilkes operated in a completely different environment from ours, where they had to write the programs on paper and then transcribe the instructions into holes on a card. In addition to the complexity of the programs, managing limited memory was another challenge. Every command on every line of code had to be totally relevant.

Even though she was not an expert in the field, she tested her lines of code whenever an error happened to deduce it, checking each line in her mind to understand how the machine would execute it. Not many people have the ability to check the code, analyze it and rewrite it again completely.

Women have been an important key in the Computer Science field, for example, during World War II, women operated some of the first computational machines used for code-breaking. Women have shown that they are interested in Computer Science, but, it has not always been this way. In 1960, at the MIT, the ratio of women in computing was 27%. It reached 35% in 1990, but in 2013, the ratio went down to 26%, which is less than the 1960 percent.

Nowadays, there have been many instances of discrimination against women in many companies, sometimes they are dismissed and men echo their thoughts as if they were from them. Gender is not important if we think about a person's success; everyone is great at something, maybe not everyone is good at coding, but we are all better at something and we are all worth it.

Article: Thompson, C. (2019). The Secret History of Women in Coding. Recovered from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html