When the American army searched for personnel to operate the revolutionary ENIAC computer in 1945, no one expected that working with data would turn out to be more important than building the machine itself. The men designing the hardware considered programming a tedious clerical task. This opinion opened the door for six female mathematicians, who became pioneers of the entire industry—almost by accident.
Programming Without Programming Languages
Jean Bartik graduated in mathematics from Northwest Missouri State University the year the war ended. The daughter of a teacher and a farmer from Missouri, she had no idea she would join a project that would change the world. ENIAC weighed thirty tons and occupied an entire room, but there was no programming language or instruction manual. Bartik and five other women had to learn the machine from scratch, configuring thousands of switches and cables by hand.
Imagine the scale of the challenge. Every mathematical operation required physically rearranging elements of this giant machine. A single mistake meant hours spent searching for one incorrectly connected cable among thousands of others.
The women had to understand not only abstract mathematics but also the mechanics of the device itself. Ironically, because men considered this work unprestigious, the world’s first team of women programmers emerged.
Marriage at the Computer
It was while working on ENIAC that Bartik met her future husband, William, who worked on military projects at the University of Pennsylvania. They married in 1946 and divorced twenty-two years later. After the war, Jean did not immediately leave the industry. She collaborated with the creators of ENIAC on subsequent machines: BINAC and UNIVAC I. Only in 1951 did she take a career break to raise her three children.
This was a typical pattern for women of that era. First, war opened the doors to male-dominated professions, then peace closed them again. However, Bartik was luckier than many of her colleagues—she managed to leave her mark on several groundbreaking projects before social expectations forced her into the role of housewife. How many other female pioneers in computer science never even had this chance?
Half a Century Forgotten
The most bitter part of this story unfolds after 1945. John Eckert and John Mauchly, ENIAC’s engineers, became legends. For decades, no one mentioned the six programmers. This phenomenon even has a name: the Matilda Effect—the systematic attribution of women’s accomplishments to men or their complete omission. The term was coined in the 19th century, but it perfectly describes the situation of the programming mothers.
It wasn’t until 1997, over half a century after ENIAC was launched, that Jean Bartik and her colleagues received official recognition for their contributions. Bartik lived to see this moment and died in 2011 at the age of eighty-six. Can fifty years of neglect be compensated by a single ceremony?
The history of computer science long resembled a men’s club, while women did the fundamental work considered by others to be unworthy of attention.
The Invisible Revolution
There’s something ironic about how computer programming was born. Men so despised working with data that they gave it over to women. Those women created the foundations of the entire discipline—and were then erased from its history. If engineers in the 1940s had realized the importance of software, they probably never would have entrusted it to the mathematicians from Missouri or Pennsylvania.
Jean Bartik represents a generation of women who entered the tech world through the back door and built its foundations. Today, the IT industry still struggles with issues of gender representation, and stories like this show that the roots of the problem go back to its very beginnings.
Margot Cleverly
Margot's journey into women's history began with a box of forgotten letters in a Cambridge archive – suffragettes whose voices had been silenced for over a century. Since then, she's been on a mission to uncover the stories history overlooked.
What she writes about: Queens who ruled from the shadows. Scientists whose male colleagues took credit. Revolutionaries who risked everything. But also ordinary women – those who survived wars, raised families through upheaval, and shaped their communities in ways no one bothered to record.
Margot turns historical figures into real people. She writes with warmth and detail, making centuries-old stories feel surprisingly relevant. Rigorous research meets accessible storytelling – no dusty academic jargon, just compelling narratives backed by solid facts.
When she's not writing, you'll find her in regional archives, collecting oral histories, or visiting sites connected to the women she writes about.