The Gendered History of Human Computers

By Clive Thompson, Smithsonian Magazine

It’s ironic that women today must fight for equality in Silicon Valley. After all, their math skills helped launch the digital age

Image: Kotryna Zukauskaite

Women were involved with the computing field from its earliest days.

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.

She’s a veteran of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. 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. At Pinterest, she helped overhaul the entire code base, making the service speedier and more reliable. These days, she’s the founder of Block Party, a start-up making tools to help social-media users deal with harassment.

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.

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