The Women Who Built the Tech World

I was sitting in a café in Prague last month, halfway through my second espresso, when I overheard a conversation at the next table. A group of computer science students were talking about tech pioneers. Steve Jobs came up. Bill Gates. Elon Musk. The usual suspects. When one student asked if anyone could name a woman who shaped technology, the table went quiet. That silence stuck with me for days.

Here’s the thing that gets me. The first programmer in history was a woman. The person who invented the compiler? Woman. The code that landed humans on the moon? Written by a woman. These aren’t minor contributions or footnotes. These women built the foundation of everything we do in IT today. Yet most people couldn’t name a single one if their laptop depended on it.

Let me take you back to 1843, a hundred years before anyone built an electronic computer. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, the famous poet, though she barely knew him. Her mother pushed her toward mathematics, probably hoping logic would counteract any inherited dramatic tendencies. Ada became fascinated with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, this incredible mechanical calculator that existed mostly on paper and in Babbage’s imagination.

While Babbage saw his machine as a glorified calculator, Ada saw something nobody else could. She understood that anything you could represent with numbers, a machine could manipulate: music, images, text, anything. She wrote what we now recognize as the first computer algorithm, complete with the concept of looping. She invented programming a century before computers existed. When I’m troubleshooting code at 2am in some hotel room, I sometimes think about Ada working by candlelight, imagining a future none of her contemporaries could see. She died at 36. The Defense Department eventually named a programming language after her, which is nice, but it’s not enough.

Jump forward to World War II. Grace Hopper had a math PhD from Yale, already unusual for a woman in 1934, and joined the Navy when the war started. She got assigned to program the Harvard Mark I, this massive computer that filled a room. She didn’t just program it. She wrote a 500 page manual for it, though her name didn’t appear on the cover. That happened a lot back then.

What Grace really changed was how we think about code. Early programming meant writing in machine language, ones and zeros corresponding directly to circuit operations. It was tedious and error prone. Grace thought that was absurd. She built the first compiler in 1952, translating human readable instructions into machine code. When she proposed it, people told her computers couldn’t do that. She proved them wrong. Her work led to COBOL, which used actual English words instead of cryptic symbols. COBOL still runs critical systems today, over 60 years later. Grace became a Rear Admiral and kept working until she was 79. The famous “bug” story? That was her, finding an actual moth in the Mark II computer.

Here’s what makes me angry. During WWII and the early computing days, programming was considered clerical work, basically typing. That meant it was women’s work, beneath the men doing the “real” engineering of building hardware. So women programmed the most important computers of the era. Six women figured out how to program ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, using patch cables and inventing modern programming techniques from scratch. Betty Snyder, Betty Jean Jennings, Kathleen McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Bilas. They got almost no recognition.

Then, when everyone realized programming required serious intellectual work, suddenly it became men’s work. Women got pushed out of the field they’d pioneered. By the 1980s, computers were marketed as toys for boys, computer science programs skewed male, and we’ve been fighting for equity ever since. The gender ratio in computer science today is actually worse than it was in the 1960s. Think about that for a minute.

Katherine Johnson’s story shows what women accomplished even when the system was stacked against them in every possible way. She was an African American mathematician who started at NASA (then NACA) in 1953, during segregation. She was assigned to the “colored computers,” a group of Black women performing complex calculations by hand. Critical calculations for flight trajectories and space missions, done by women who were segregated, underpaid, and rarely acknowledged.

Katherine’s work was so accurate that John Glenn specifically requested she verify the computer calculations for his orbital flight. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he said. If Katherine said they were good, he’d fly. Her calculations were essential to Mercury, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. She didn’t get widespread recognition until the movie Hidden Figures in 2016, when she was 98. She finally received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Better late than never, but the delay is infuriating.

Then there’s Margaret Hamilton, who led the software team for Apollo. That code had to work perfectly because there was no patching bugs once astronauts left Earth. The stakes were life and death. Margaret pioneered software engineering as a discipline. She insisted that writing code deserved the same respect as any other engineering work. There’s this famous photo of her standing next to a stack of printouts taller than she is, all the code she and her team wrote for Apollo. During the Apollo 11 landing, when the computer started throwing alarms minutes before touchdown, Margaret’s code prioritized essential tasks and kept running. Neil Armstrong landed safely. Without her work, that moon landing probably doesn’t happen. She got a Lego figure in 2017. Great, but again, recognition came decades late.

Moving into recent history, the pattern continues. Susan Wojcicki became Google’s 16th employee in 1999. She literally rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. She went on to build AdSense and Google Analytics, then became YouTube’s CEO in 2014. Under her leadership, YouTube became one of the most influential platforms on the internet. She stepped down in 2023 and passed away in 2024 from lung cancer at 56. I never met her, but everyone I know who worked with her said she was brilliant and kind.

Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as COO in 2008 when they were still figuring out monetization. She transformed it into a profitable business, growing revenue from $153 million to over $39 billion during her tenure. Her book “Lean In” started important conversations about women in leadership, even if people disagreed with some conclusions. She stepped down in 2022. Ginni Rometty became IBM’s first female CEO in 2012, leading their shift into cloud computing and AI.

Here’s the depressing part. As these high profile women stepped away, they were mostly replaced by men. None of the Big Five tech companies has ever had a woman CEO. Women make up about 28% of tech workers but only 8% to 9% of senior leaders like CTOs. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 87 women get promoted, and only 82 women of color. The math doesn’t work. Women can’t catch up at those rates.

This isn’t ancient history. This is now. And we’re still having conversations about whether women are “technical enough” or can handle leadership. From where I sit, working with security teams across Europe, I see talented women every day who are more than technical enough. The question isn’t capability. It’s opportunity and bias.

When women have actual support, they excel. Organizations like Girls Who Code, founded by Reshma Saujani, teach young women programming and show them tech careers are possible. Women Who Code provides community and mentorship. These efforts matter because representation matters. Young women need to see women in technical roles to envision themselves there. I didn’t have many role models when I started in security. I want the next generation to have more options than I did.

Research shows diverse teams make better decisions, create more innovative products, and generate higher revenue. This isn’t about fairness, though that would be reason enough. It’s about building better technology. When your team includes people from different backgrounds, they catch problems others miss, design for wider audiences, and ask different questions. The tech industry benefits enormously from women at every level.

So why aren’t these women household names? Why do we celebrate male founders who built on women’s work while those women remain footnotes? Historical bias plays a part. Women’s contributions were minimized at the time, and that erasure compounds across generations. But ongoing bias matters too. Women in tech still face skepticism and barriers men don’t encounter at the same rates. I’ve experienced it. Most women in tech have stories.

Here’s what gives me hope, though. Every time I mention Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper or Katherine Johnson in a training session, people lean forward. They’re hungry for these stories. Young women especially need to know they’re not pioneers in an unwelcoming field. They’re continuing a tradition from the very beginning of computing. Women built this industry. Women belong here. That’s not controversial. It’s historical fact.

Last week I was running a phishing simulation workshop in Berlin, and afterward a young woman asked me how I got into cybersecurity. I told her about stumbling into it, about the challenges, about the amazing work. Then I told her about Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton. Her face lit up. “I didn’t know,” she said. That’s the problem. Too many people don’t know.

The tech industry has a long way to go. But knowing where we came from helps us understand where we need to go. Ada saw computers as more than calculators. Grace made programming accessible. Katherine’s calculations put people in space. Margaret’s code landed them on the moon. These women didn’t just participate. They made it possible. Remember their names. Share their stories. And if you’re hiring or building teams, remember that women have always been essential to technology. The future needs women just as much as the past depended on them. For anyone pursuing cybersecurity certifications or building a career in tech, understanding this history isn’t optional. It reminds us that excellence has never been about gender, just opportunity.