The Secret History of Women in Coding

This article was written by Clive Thompson and published on the NY Times magazine on this past February, it is about hoy women have contributed to the computer science history, specifically about one woman whose name is Mary Allen Wilkes.

Mary Allen had no idea what a computer programmer was, she didn’t even knew what programming was, she had just hear about those things, but never really put much attention to it, she wanted to be a lawyer, an attorney, and she wanted to be a good one, unfortunately she was always told that she would be doomed to be only a secretary, a legal assistant or something related, however, she went one day to the MIT (where computers where just arriving) and asked for a job as programmer, even though she didn’t have any experience she was hired (mainly because by that time experience in programming was non-existent).

By the time Mary Allen was a programmer, she had to write code in paper and translate the code into holes in a card, and she had to put special emphasis on making optimal code, because the nowadays abundant memory was nonexistent by that time, therefore, every piece of code was important.

Mary Allen is just one of the many women that have contributed to not only CS history, but to human history itself, only a few months ago the person who designed the code that gave us access to the first black hole picture was a woman, and thanks to a woman, we were able to get to the moon.

I personally believe that woman and men have equal capacities and abilities, although the industry has been marked as ‘mostly men’ I believe the gap will reduce once the taboos about computer science are ended, allowing women to show their true potential, and helping human race to become better.