International Women's Day is not a day to drag out the familiar (and all-too-true) lament about the dearth of women in technology or debate the merits of computer scientist Barbie.
At PCMag, we're celebrating women who have improved the world through technology. Some of the first technological achievements are directly attributable to women. The title of world's first computer programmer goes to Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, whose notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine are recognized as the first algorithm for processing on a machine.
The computers that descended from the analytical engine advanced during World War II. The Allies owed a large part of their victory to the decryption of the German's Enigma ciphers, an effort carried out with the revolutionary aid of women at the Bletchley Park research center tucked away in rural England and at Arlington Hall in Virginia. The first "computors" were also women. At the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman, Marilyn Wescoff, Adele Goldstine, Betty Snyder, and Kay McNulty each claimed that title in their work programming ENIAC, the first electronic computer and the one that calculated artillery firing for the United States in World War II.
Even Siri, who is appropriately voiced by a female, is a product of the voice technology first employed by teams of female telephone operators manipulating voders and vocoders to synthesize human speech. The male voice that issues from a vocoder has even been manipulated by performance artist Laurie Anderson in pieces like "O Superman," a commentary on technology's effect on communication and war.
In honor of these pioneers, here are some of the women that run the tech world.
