THE WOMAN WAS ALWAYS HERE
Women who built calculation, communications, computing, networks, software, the internet, AI, Bitcoin, and freedom tech
1757–1759 — Nicole-Reine Lepaute Calculated the predicted return of Halley’s Comet. One of the earliest documented women performing large-scale scientific computation.
1773–1815 — Mary Edwards Calculated astronomical tables for Britain’s Nautical Almanac, used for navigation at sea.
early 1800s — Eliza Edwards Continued the astronomical computing work of her mother, Mary Edwards.
1843 — Ada Lovelace Published notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, including an algorithm for Bernoulli numbers and the idea that programmable machines could manipulate symbols beyond arithmetic.
1840s–1860s — Women telegraph operators Operated some of the earliest electrical communications networks.
1875 — Anna Winlock Became one of Harvard Observatory’s earliest women “computers,” reducing and calculating astronomical data.
1878 — Emma Nutt Became the first known female telephone operator.
1880s — Williamina Fleming Harvard computer who classified stars and discovered astronomical objects, including the Horsehead Nebula.
1890s — Antonia Maury Created a sophisticated system for classifying stellar spectra.
1890s–1910s — Henrietta Swan Leavitt Discovered the relationship between Cepheid variable stars’ brightness and periods, allowing astronomers to measure cosmic distances.
1896 onward — Annie Jump Cannon Developed the stellar classification system that became the basis for the modern OBAFGKM sequence.
1917–1918 — U.S. Army “Hello Girls” Women Signal Corps telephone operators ran critical military communications networks during World War I.
1919–1922 — Edith Clarke Earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT, invented the Clarke calculator, and became the first woman professionally employed as an electrical engineer at General Electric.
1930s–1940s — Women human computers at NACA Calculated aerodynamics, aircraft performance, and engineering data by hand before electronic computers took over.
1942 — Hedy Lamarr Co-invented a frequency-hopping communication system designed to resist radio jamming.
1943 onward — Dorothy Vaughan Human computer, supervisor of the West Area Computing unit, and later a FORTRAN programmer at NACA/NASA.
1944 — Grace Hopper Joined the Harvard Mark I team and later helped create compilers and machine-independent programming languages.
1945–1946 — Jean Bartik Original ENIAC programmer who helped invent practical electronic programming techniques.
1945–1946 — Betty Holberton Original ENIAC programmer who later worked on UNIVAC programming and software systems.
1945–1946 — Kay McNulty Original ENIAC programmer and mathematical computer.
1945–1946 — Frances Spence Original ENIAC programmer.
1945–1946 — Marlyn Meltzer Original ENIAC programmer.
1945–1946 — Ruth Teitelbaum Original ENIAC programmer.
1946 — Adele Goldstine Wrote the ENIAC technical manual and trained programmers to use the machine.
1949–1950s — Grace Hopper Developed early compiler systems, FLOW-MATIC, and helped shape COBOL.
1953 onward — Katherine Johnson Calculated trajectories for Mercury, Apollo, and other NASA missions.
1955 onward — Annie Easley Programmed NASA systems for energy research and the Centaur rocket.
1956 onward — Gladys West Developed geodetic models of the Earth that became foundational to GPS.
1957 onward — Frances Allen Pioneered compiler optimization and parallel computing at IBM.
1957–1960s — Erna Schneider Hoover Invented computerized telephone switching methods that prevented network overload.
1957 — Elsie Shutt Founded Computations Incorporated, one of the earliest software companies founded by a woman.
1958 — Mary Jackson Became NASA’s first Black female engineer.
1959 — Dina St Johnston Founded Vaughan Programming Services, an early independent software company.
1960s — Joan Clarke Earlier wartime cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park helped break Enigma traffic and shaped modern cryptanalytic practice.
1961–1969 — Margaret Hamilton Led Apollo flight software development and helped establish rigorous software engineering practices.
1962 — Evelyn Berezin Designed computerized airline reservation systems.
1962 — Stephanie “Steve” Shirley Founded Freelance Programmers, building software jobs specifically for women working from home.
1960s — Mary Allen Wilkes Helped develop the LINC computer and became one of the earliest people known to use a personal computer at home.
1965 — Sister Mary Kenneth Keller Earned one of the first U.S. doctorates in computer science and built computing education programs.
1960s — Jean Sammet Developed programming languages including FORMAC and documented early programming-language history.
1960s — Lois Haibt Member of IBM’s original FORTRAN development team.
1968 — Barbara Liskov Became the first woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD from a computer science department and later pioneered data abstraction and distributed systems.
1969–1970s — Evelyn Berezin Founded Redactron and commercialized computerized word processing.
1972 — Karen Spärck Jones Developed inverse document frequency, foundational to search and information retrieval.
1972–1989 — Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler Ran the ARPANET/Defense Data Network information center, overseeing WHOIS, host directories, and the domain naming structure that produced .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net.
1973 — Jude Milhon Helped build Community Memory, one of the earliest public electronic bulletin-board systems.
1970s — Adele Goldberg Led Smalltalk work at Xerox PARC and helped shape object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces.
1970s — Lynn Conway Co-developed methods that revolutionized VLSI chip design.
1970s — Ginny Strazisar Co-wrote early router software for TCP/IP networks.
1970s — Susan Nycum Early researcher in computer law and computer crime.
1972 — Sandra Kurtzig Founded ASK Computer Systems, one of Silicon Valley’s earliest major woman-founded software firms.
1978 — Carol Shaw One of the first professional female video game programmers and designers.
1979 onward — Roberta Williams Co-founded Sierra On-Line and helped define graphical adventure games.
1981 — Dona Bailey Co-created Atari’s Centipede.
1982 — Susan Kare Designed icons, fonts, and visual language for the original Macintosh.
1982 — Marsha Rhea Williams Became the first Black woman known to earn a PhD in computer science.
1983 — Liz Allen Proposed net.women.only on Usenet after women’s discussions were heavily dominated by male posters.
1983–1985 — Women of net.women.only Built one of the earliest women-centered online communities.
1984–1985 — Women in U.S. computer science Women reached roughly 36.8% of U.S. computer and information science bachelor’s degrees.
1985 — Radia Perlman Created the Spanning Tree Protocol, foundational to scalable Ethernet networking.
1985 — Sophie Wilson Co-designed the ARM architecture, eventually used in billions of devices.
1987 — Anita Borg Founded Systers, a professional support network for women in computing.
1980s–1990s — Susan Estrada Founded CERFnet and helped expand academic and commercial Internet networking.
1980s–1990s — Elise Gerich Played major roles in NSFNET and Internet routing operations.
1980s onward — Shafi Goldwasser Co-created foundational concepts in modern cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs.
1980s onward — Nancy Lynch Pioneered distributed computing and fault-tolerant consensus theory.
1990 — Stacy Horn Founded ECHO, one of the earliest influential online communities.
1990s — Susan Herring Pioneered research on gender, online communication, flaming, harassment, power, and participation.
1994 — Susan Herring Published Why Women Thank and Men Flame.
1995 — Susan Herring Published “Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Harassment?”
1996 — Kira Hall Published Cyberfeminism, documenting online gender, harassment, and women building their own digital spaces.
1990s — Amy Bruckman Built and studied early online communities, identity, education, and collaborative environments.
1990s — Judith Donath Pioneered research on online identity, signaling, trust, and social computing.
1990s — Wendy Hall Pioneered hypermedia and Web science.
1990s — Susan Landau Advanced cybersecurity, cryptography, privacy, and communications-policy research.
1990s — Diane Greene Co-founded VMware and helped make virtualization mainstream.
1990s — Judy Estrin Built networking companies and contributed to Internet infrastructure.
1990s — Kim Polese Led Java product work and later founded Marimba.
1990s — Mitchell Baker Led Mozilla and helped institutionalize open-source browser development.
1998–1999 — Megan Smith Joined Google and became a major technology executive; later U.S. Chief Technology Officer.
1999 — Marissa Mayer Joined Google as one of its earliest engineers and became a major search/product leader.
1999 — Susan Herring Published The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment On-Line, documenting men harassing women and invoking “free speech” against women who objected.
1999 — Susan Wojcicki Became one of Google’s earliest employees and later led advertising and YouTube.
2000s — Safra Catz Rose through Oracle leadership and became CEO.
2000s — Padmasree Warrior Senior technology executive at Motorola and Cisco.
2000s — Cher Wang Co-founded HTC and VIA Technologies.
2000s — Weili Dai Co-founded Marvell Technology.
2000s — Ann Winblad Early software entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
2005 — Limor Fried Founded Adafruit and helped make open-source electronics and hardware education mainstream.
2000s — Leah Buechley Created LilyPad Arduino and helped merge computing with textiles and wearable electronics.
2000s — Ruchi Sanghvi Became Facebook’s first female engineer.
2000s — Katie Moussouris Pioneered vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty programs.
2000s — Window Snyder Led major security programs at Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Intel.
2000s — Parisa Tabriz Became a major Chrome/Google security leader.
2000s — Joanna Rutkowska Pioneered virtualization security research and later created Qubes OS.
2007 — Kathy Sierra Programmer and author whose sexualized threats and harassment became a landmark case in online gendered intimidation.
2010s — Sheryl Sandberg Helped scale Facebook/Meta’s advertising and global platform operations.
2010s — Ursula Burns Engineer who became CEO of Xerox, the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
2010s — Meg Whitman Led eBay and later Hewlett-Packard.
2012 — Reshma Saujani Founded Girls Who Code.
2012 — Anita Sarkeesian Faced coordinated misogynistic harassment after proposing a series examining women in video games.
2014 — Zoë Quinn Game developer whose harassment became central to Gamergate.
2014 — Brianna Wu Game developer and entrepreneur targeted by Gamergate harassment.
2014 onward — Tracy Chou Publicly pushed tech companies to disclose gender representation data.
2010s — danah boyd Researched social networks, identity, privacy, youth, and online power.
2010s — Safiya Umoja Noble Documented discriminatory search and algorithmic systems.
2010s — Ruha Benjamin Studied technology, automation, classification, and inequality.
2010s — Cathy O’Neil Documented harmful high-impact algorithms.
2010s — Virginia Eubanks Studied automated welfare and decision systems.
2010s — Sarah T. Roberts Documented hidden human labor in content moderation.
2010s — Mary Gray Researched invisible labor supporting AI and digital platforms.
2010s — Kate Crawford Studied the political, labor, material, and environmental systems underlying AI.
2010s — Fei-Fei Li Created ImageNet and became one of the most influential modern AI researchers.
2010s — Joy Buolamwini Founded the Algorithmic Justice League and exposed racial and gender bias in facial-analysis systems.
2010s — Timnit Gebru Pioneered research on dataset bias, facial recognition, large AI models, and AI institutional power.
2010s — Meredith Whittaker Researcher and organizer focused on AI power and surveillance; later president of Signal.
2010s — Cynthia Breazeal Pioneered social robotics.
2010s — Daphne Koller Machine-learning researcher and co-founder of Coursera.
2010s — Dawn Song Researcher in computer security, privacy, AI, and blockchain.
2010s — Rana el Kaliouby Pioneered affective computing and co-founded Affectiva.
2010s — Deborah Raji Advanced algorithmic auditing and AI accountability.
2010s — Rediet Abebe Pioneered algorithmic fairness and computational social science.
2010s — Lisa Su Electrical engineer and AMD CEO who led one of the most important turnarounds in semiconductor history.
2010s — Gwynne Shotwell Engineer and president/COO of SpaceX.
2010s — Melanie Perkins Co-founded Canva and became CEO.
2010s — Whitney Wolfe Herd Founded Bumble and redesigned online dating interaction around women initiating contact.
2010s — Anne Wojcicki Co-founded 23andMe and helped commercialize consumer genomics.
2010s — Elizabeth Stark Co-founded Lightning Labs and became one of the most prominent leaders in Lightning Network development.
2010s — Alena Vranova Co-founded SatoshiLabs and helped build early Bitcoin hardware-wallet infrastructure.
2010s–2020s — Anita Posch Bitcoin educator and founder of Bitcoin for Fairness.
2010s–2020s — Lisa Neigut / niftynei Lightning protocol developer, Base58 founder, and Bitcoin developer educator.
2019 onward — Carla Kirk-Cohen Lightning engineer who became Executive Director of Chaincode Labs.
2020 onward — Gloria Zhao Bitcoin Core contributor and maintainer specializing in mempool and transaction relay policy.
2021 onward — Ava Chow Bitcoin Core developer and maintainer.
2020s — Amiti Uttarwar Bitcoin Core contributor who later created Waye to support open-source developer sustainability and retention.
2020s — Lindsey Grossman Led Bitkey product, data science, partnerships, and marketing during its development.
2020s — Lorraine Marcel Founded Bitcoin Dada and Dada Devs to train African women in Bitcoin and Lightning development.
2020s — Brianna Honkawa d’Estries Founded Evento and Hack4Freedom, creating women-focused Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, and freedom-tech development programs.
2020s — M.K. Fain Built Soapbox and Henhouse, including women-centered community infrastructure on Nostr.
2020s — Mogashni Naidoo Bitcoin design/community leader and freedom-tech mentor.
2020s — Stephanie Titcombe Worked on Bitcoin developer pipeline and education programs.
2020s — Charlene Fadirepo Founded Satoshi Sisterhood and worked on Bitcoin education and community-building.
2022 — Women at Bitcoin 2022 Publicly reported sexual harassment, unwanted photography, alleged groping, and other hostile treatment.
2024 — Henhouse ( M.K. Fain ) Women built a dedicated Nostr community explicitly banning misogyny and harassment.
2025 — Hack4Freedom Twenty women produced eight open-source freedom-tech projects involving Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr.
2026 — Hack4Freedom Lagos Thirty-eight women produced thirteen projects, including Nostr applications.
2026 — Women are still building Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, AI, cryptography, chips, networks, hardware, software, and communications infrastructure.
And the point of this list is not:
“Look, some women did technology too.”
The point is:
Women were calculating before computers were machines.
Women were routing communications before networks were digital.
Women programmed before programming was a profession.
Women built Internet infrastructure before the Web existed.
Women were online before anyone could tell us there were no women online.
And women are building decentralized technology now.
So maybe stop asking:
“Where are the women?”
Start asking:
“Why did history keep forgetting their names?”
🪞🔬📚
The woman was always here.
#TheWomanWasAlwaysHere #WomenInTech #WomenInComputing #TechHistory #InternetHistory #WomenInSTEM #OpenSource #Bitcoin #Nostr #FreedomTech #Herstory #Receipts #research
