How is it like to be a female in computer science? ~ Geek Infosystem [Apply Geek]

Pretty awesome actually. Not just about a Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer or a few famous top executives, see the history here!

Timeline of women in computing worldwide.

Ada Lovelace, considered to be the first computer programmer.

1842: Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an analyst of Charles Babbage'sanalytical engine and considered the "first computer programmer."
1893: Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined the Harvard "computers", a group of women engaged in the production of astronomical data at Harvard. She was instrumental in discovery of the cepheid variable stars, which are evidence for the expansion of the universe.
1926: Grete Hermann published the foundational paper for computerized algebra. It was her doctoral thesis, titled "The Question of Finitely Many Steps in Polynomial Ideal Theory", and published in Mathematische Annalen
1940s: American women were recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers during WWII. Around 1943-1945, these women "computers" used a Differential Analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to speed up their calculations, though the machine required a mechanic to be totally accurate and the women often rechecked the calculations by hand.
1942: Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000), was an actress and the co-inventor of an early form of spread-spectrum broadcasting.
1943: Women worked as WREN Colossus operators during WW2 atBletchley Park.
1943: The wives of scientists at Los Alamos were first organized as "computers" on the Manhattan Project.
1943: Gertrude Blanch led the Mathematical Tables Project group throughout the war. It operated as a major computing office for the US government and did calculations for the Office for Scientific Research and Development, the Army, the Navy, the Manhattan Project and other institutions.
1946: Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Frances Spence, Kay McNulty,Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman were the original programmers of the ENIAC. Adele Goldstine, also involved in the programming, wrote the program manual for the ENIAC.
1948: Kathleen Booth writes the assembly language for the ARC2 computer.
1949: Grace Hopper (1906–1992), was a United States Navy officer and the first programmer of the Harvard Mark I, known as the "Mother ofCOBOL". She developed the first-ever compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0. She also popularized the term "debugging" – a reference to a moth extracted from a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer.[49]
1949: Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman in the U.S. to receive a PhD in mathematics. From 1956 to 1960, she worked for IBM on the Project Vanguard and Project Mercury space programs, analyzing orbits and developing computer procedures.
1950: Ida Rhodes was a pioneer in the analysis of systems of programming. She designed the C-10 language in the early 1950s for the UNIVAC I – a computer system that was used to calculate the census. She also designed the original computer used for the Social Security Administration.
1958: Orbital calculations for the United States' Explorer 1 satellite were solved by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's all-female "computers", many of whom were recruited out of high school.
Mechanical calculators were supplemented with logarithmic calculations performed by hand.[50][51]
1961: Dana Ulery (1938–), was the first female engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit word size computer.
1962: Jean E. Sammet (1928–), developed the FORMAC programming language. She was also the first to write extensively about the history and categorization of programming languages in 1969,
and became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1974.
1962: Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley (1933–), founded the UK software company F.I. She was concerned with creating work opportunities for women with dependents, and predominantly employed women, only 3 out of 300-odd programmers were male, until that became illegal. She adopted the name "Steve" to help her in the male-dominated business world. From 1989 to 1990, she was President of the British Computer Society. In 1985, she was awarded a Recognition of Information Technology Award.
1965: Mary Allen Wilkes was the first person to use a computer in a private home (in 1965) and the first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer(LINC).
1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller (1914?–1985) became the first American woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science in 1965.[52] Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns."[53]
1966: Margaret R. Fox was appointed Chief of the Office of Computer Information in 1966, part of the Institute for Computer Science and Technology of NBS. She held the post until 1975. She was also actively involved in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and served as the first Secretary for the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS).
1971: Erna Schneider Hoover is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which "revolutionized modern communication" according to several reports. At Bell Laboratories, where she worked for over 32 years, Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology. She was awarded one of the first patents for computer software.
1972: Adele Goldberg (1945–), was one of the designers and developers of the Smalltalk language.
1972: Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), was a pioneer of information retrieval and natural language processing.
1972: Sandra Kurtzig founded ASK Computer Systems, an early Silicon Valley startup.
1973: Susan Nycum co-authored Computer Abuse, a minor classic that was one of the first studies to define and document computer-related crime.[54][55]
1973: Lynn Conway (1938–), led the "LSI Systems" group, and co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems.
1975?: Phyllis Fox worked on the PORT portable mathematical/numerical library.
1975: Irene Greif became the first woman to get a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[56]
1978: Sophie Wilson (?), designed the Acorn Microcomputer.
1979: Carol Shaw (?), was a game designer and programmer for Atari Corp. and Activision.
1980: Carla Meninsky (?), was the game designer and programmer for Atari 2600 games Dodge 'Em and Warlords.
1982?: Lorinda Cherry worked on the Writer's Workbench (wwb) for Bell Labs.
1983: Janese Swanson (with others) developed the first of the Carmen Sandiego games. She went on to found Girl Tech.
1984: Roberta Williams (1953–), did pioneering work in graphical adventure games for personal computers, particularly the King's Quest series.
1984: Susan Kare (1954–), created the icons and many of the interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, and was an original employee of NeXT, working as the Creative Director.
1985: Radia Perlman (1951–), invented the Spanning Tree Protocol. She has done extensive and innovative research, particularly on encryption and networking. She received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, among numerous others.
1985: Irma Wyman (~1927–), was the first Honeywell CIO.
1987: Monica S. Lam receives a Ph.D. for her work on optimising compilers. She has since then performed influential research in many areas of computer science as well as co-authored a famous textbook on compilers.
1988: Éva Tardos (1957–), was the recipient of the Fulkerson Prize for her research on design and analysis of algorithms.
1989: Frances E. Allen (1932–), became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989. In 2006, she became the first female recipient of the ACM's Turing Award.
1989: Frances Brazier, professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, is one of the founder of NLnet, the first Internet service provider in the Netherlands.
1992–: Donna Dubinsky (1955–), CEO and co-founder of Palm, Inc., co-founder of Handspring, co-founder of Numenta, Harvard Business School's Alumni Achievement Award winner for “introducing the first successful personal digital assistant (PDA) and who is now developing a computer memory system modeled after the human brain.”
1993: Shafi Goldwasser (1958–), a theoretical computer scientist, is a two-time recipient of the Gödel Prize for research on complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory, and the invention of zero-knowledge proofs.
1993: Barbara Liskov, together with Jeannette Wing, developed the Liskov substitution principle. Liskov was also the winner of the Turing Prize in 2008.
1993: Chris Wellens founded InterWorking Labs, the first company devoted to testing networks and building network testing equipment .
1994: Sally Floyd (~1953–), is most renowned for her work on Transmission Control Protocol.
1996: Xiaoyuan Tu (1967–), was the first female recipient of ACM's Doctoral Dissertation Award.[57]
1997: Anita Borg (1949–2003), was the founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT).
1998: LinuxChix an international organization for women who use Linux and women and men who want to support women in computing was founded byDeb Richardson.
1999: Marissa Mayer (1975–), was the first female engineer hired at Google, and was later named Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. She is currently the CEO of Yahoo!.
2003: Ellen Spertus earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1998 with the notable thesis "ParaSite: Mining the structural information on the World-Wide Web."
2004: Jeri Ellsworth (1974–), was a self-taught computer chip designer and creator of the C64 Direct-to-TV.
2005: Audrey Tang (1981–), was the initiator and leader of the Pugsproject.
2005: Mary Lou Jepsen (1965–), was the founder and chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and the founder of Pixel Qi.
2005: Ruchi Sanghvi became the first female engineer at Facebook.[58]
2006: Maria Klawe (1951–), was the first woman to become President of the Harvey Mudd College since its founding in 1955 and was ACM president from 2002 until 2004.
2006: Melanie Rieback's research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, she is well-known to have program the first virus to infect RFID devices.[59]
2006: Joanna Rutkowska presented Blue Pill, a rootkit based on x86 virtualization, at the Black Hat Briefings computer security conference.
2008: Elektra is a member of the Chaos Computer Club and she developedMesh Potato, a device for providing low-cost telephony and internet in areas where alternative access either didn’t exist or is too expensive.
2010: Stephanie Wehner is known for introducing the noisy-storage model in quantum cryptography.
2012: Eleanor Saitta is the principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP) and she specializes in complex system failures, security, risk analysis and cryptography.

Source:

wikipedia.org

Women in computing