Human calculators
Do you know the film Hidden Figures - Unknown Heroines? <>This is about three African-American women mathematicians who made a decisive contribution to the American space program. The film not only sheds light on the unfortunate racial segregation in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. It also makes clear who was sitting at the calculating machines for aeronautical calculations at that time: women. Women with the job title human computer.
Pioneering women in astronomy
We remember: A computer is an electronic computing device, in short: a calculator. Or, as we will soon see, a female or male computer. Early calculating machines were quite large and required a lot of human assistance. In addition to specialist knowledge and brainpower, complicated calculations for space travel, for example, always involved a great deal of hard work - which was often left to women because they had to be paid less for their work. Mind you, it was not women's computing potential that was lower, but the pay for their work. A still familiar pattern that was already visible in the 19th century. The Little History of the Women Who Sorted the Stars by Richard Hemmer and Daniel Messner takes a revealing look at one particular group of these women computationalists: the so-called Harvard Computers, a team of women whose job it was to help classify the stars with computations, and who did pioneering work that was far too little recognized.
Women programming
The development of the digital world of our day is also inconceivable without the achievements of pioneering women in computing, as a look at developments in the USA shows. When data entry was still largely a laborious task, as already mentioned above, hardly anyone disputed the women's jobs at the calculating machines. But of course, their work often went beyond data entry: it was not uncommon for women to do programming. The progression of the work history is well known, as this article shows: From the mid-1980s onward, it is the male computer nerd who is perceived by the public to be programming and driving digital development. When Women Stopped Coding refers to the development in the USA and is not easily transferable to the development in Europe. Nevertheless, the perception that it is primarily men who program and play a major role in determining digitization is likely to be similar. This makes it all the more important to remember that facts speak their own language.
