Female wartime ‘computers’ would be aghast at pay gap

In 1999, two historic "computers" arrived in Ireland. Not the chips-and-wires kind. This pair had big hearts, sharp minds and real guts. Kathleen (Kay) McNulty Mauchly Antonelli and Jean Bartik were two of six of the world's first computer programmers – all women – who worked with the world's first electronic computer, a legendary Goliath called Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).

The other four were Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman and Frances Bilas.

Filling a job description denoted as “computers”, the women programmed the 80ft-long Eniac – central to the Allies’ war effort in the 1940s – at first from an adjacent room until they received the appropriate security clearances.

Eniac was used to calculate precise firing trajectories for artillery, work that required large tables of differential equations that until then had been calculated by hand by the women, all mathematicians. Some 2,000 calculations and 40 hours’ work were needed to create a weapons firing table.

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They just gave us the blueprints of the machine and we had to study what it could do

Eniac, the first stored programme computer, eventually enabled the same work to be done in minutes.

“There were no manuals or anything like that. They just gave us the blueprints of the machine and we had to study what it could do,” Antonelli said during her Irish visit, where the two spoke at several universities.

She was born in 1921 in Donegal to a family that later emigrated to the US. She noted that Eniac had 18,000 tubes (valves), and they had to learn “what each tube could do, how it would do it and so on.”

Bartik noted: “We learned how to programme by studying the logical block diagrams. What a blessing. From the beginning, I knew how computers worked. We gained the respect of the engineers from the beginning because we really knew what we were doing and we could debug better than they could because we had our test programmes as well as our knowledge of the computer.”

The female “computers” eventually lost their job titles when Eniac and other new, large-scale machines became known as the computers and the women became “operators”. The six women also lost historical visibility when, after the war, they were shamefully written out of computing’s past.

Not until a mid-1990s campaign by the organisation Women in Technology International (WITI) did the six get the profile and recognition they had long deserved.

All six are memorialised in the award-winning documentary The Computers (see eniacprogrammers.org for more information).

Women at war

When Bartik and Antonelli visited Ireland in 1999, I was lucky enough to go along to meet them. Both were funny, astute, and overflowing with stories that gave fabulous insight into computing history.

They had plenty to say too about the working environment for women both during the war – when, unlike male colleagues, they were refused “professional” status and were paid less – and after, when their contributions to computing were ignored and then forgotten for so long.

Memories of these computing heroes came back to me in recent weeks. First, because sadly, Bartik passed away in late March, aged 86. Her dear friend Antonelli died back in 2006, aged 85.

Google – accused of underpaying its female employees – refused to provide salary records to the US Department of Labor, which is investigating the charges

Second, because a spring cleaning caused me to stumble upon a folder of my research on Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli. Several years ago, the late, great Irish science journalist and broadcaster Mary Mulvihill asked me to contribute a chapter on Antonelli for her 2009 book Lab Coats and Lace: The Lives and Legacies of Inspiring Irish Women Scientists and Pioneers, which was a pleasure to do.

They also came to mind this past week as Google – accused of underpaying its female employees – refused to provide salary records to the US Department of Labor, which is investigating the charges.

Google, one of the world’s wealthiest companies with $28 billion in annual income, said it would be too costly (at a self-estimated $100,000) and time-consuming to produce the records.

A Department of Labor lawyer retorted, “Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water.”

It's not just Google. Studies consistently highlight an alarming gender pay gap in the technology industry. One November study indicated female programmers earn nearly 30 per cent less than their male counterparts.

That made me think of Eniac “computer” Betty Snyder’s comment about surviving in their 1940s wartime work environment: “Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.” For less pay.

Seventy years on, how ironic – no, appalling – that a global technology industry so indebted to the groundbreaking work of these women, is ensuring that too little has changed.