![]() ![]() After arduous weeks of cranking away, the trio predicted that the comet’s closest approach to the sun would be between March 15 and May 15 the next year. At the time, women had little opportunity in science, but Lalande “loved women, especially brilliant women, and promoted them in both word and deed,” the historian Ken Alder has written. In 1757, he sat down with two friends, the young astronomer Jérôme-Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, a clockmaker’s wife with a penchant for numbers. So the French mathematician Alexis-Claude Clairaut decided to break the work up-by dividing the calculations among several people. But those calculations would be too complex and brutal a task for any single astronomer. The astronomer Edmond Halley had predicted that the celestial body would return and that the laws of gravity could predict precisely when. ![]() The rise of human computers began in the early hunt for Halley’s comet. And for a time, a large portion of them were women. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. ![]() ![]() Indeed, they were considered essential back when “computers” weren’t even yet machines. There’s a deep irony here-because women were in computing from its earliest days. “I think we’re getting better, but very slowly,” Chou tells me. She has co-founded groups like Project Include that encourage diversity in computer science, while another initiative lobbies venture capital firms to set up anti-harassment policies. Women working as "computers" at NACA in 1949 gather air pressure readings.Ĭhou and others are working hard to change things. This article is a selection from the June issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 But the treatment’s bad enough, often enough, that the number of women coders has, remarkably, regressed over time, from about 35 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2013, according to the American Association of University Women. Not everyone in the field is antagonistic to women, of course. And this from a guy trying to get her to hire him. “He felt I was immature and awkward and very sensitive, and not good with people-in over my head,” she says. Chou’s even subject to skepticism herself: Recently she was trying to hire a coder for her new start-up, when the guy accidentally sent her a diary in which he’d meticulously written complaints about her skills. She has watched as women linger in jobs while men of equal or lesser ability get promoted at other firms, she’s heard of tales of flat-out harassment, including on-site propositions for sex. She’s seen the same patterns of behavior personally during her decade in coding: colleagues who doubt women’s technical chops, or who muse openly about whether women are biologically less wired to be great programmers. Yet for all her street cred, Chou still finds herself grappling with one of the biggest problems in the industry: Female programmers are regarded skeptically, and sometimes even treated with flat-out hostility. These days, she’s the founder of Block Party, a start-up making tools to help social-media users deal with harassment. At Pinterest, she helped overhaul the entire code base, making the service speedier and more reliable. She interned at Google and Facebook, then was an early hire at the question-answering site Quora, where she coded key early features, like its ranking algorithm and its weekly emailer software. She’s a veteran of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. Tracy Chou is a 31-year-old programmer-and “an absolute rock star,” as her former boss Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, once gushed to me. ![]()
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