{"id":4239,"date":"2026-02-26T15:34:47","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T18:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextage.com.br\/blog\/?p=4239"},"modified":"2026-02-26T15:34:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T18:34:47","slug":"women-in-tech-history-and-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextage.com.br\/blog\/en\/women-in-tech-history-and-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in tech: history and challenges in the industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you ask most people who the pioneers of programming were, the odds are high you’ll hear a man’s name. Alan Turing, maybe. Or some vague reference to “Silicon Valley engineers.” What almost no one says is: women. And that omission says a lot about how this field took shape over the decades, and why there is still so much to change.<\/span><\/p>\n

Women’s participation in technology has grown, but it is still far from equal. Understanding where we came from, what has already been built, and what is still holding progress back is the starting point for any serious conversation on the subject. Let’s get into it.<\/span><\/p>\n

When programming was women’s work<\/b><\/h2>\n

Few people know this, but in the 1940s and 1950s, programming was viewed predominantly as women’s work. Hardware engineering was considered a man’s domain, mechanical, physical, hands-on. Writing instructions for machines, on the other hand, seemed at the time like an extension of the administrative and computational work women were already doing in offices and laboratories.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Picture<\/p>\n

The most well-known example is the ENIAC, the first electronic computer in history, developed at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II. Before the machine existed, a team of 80 women manually calculated missile trajectories. Once the ENIAC was ready, six of those women were chosen to program it, with no manual, no documentation, only the machine’s logical diagrams. The result: calculations that used to take around 30 hours were now processed in 15 seconds.<\/span><\/p>\n

They became known as the <\/span>ENIAC Girls<\/span><\/a>. For decades, their contributions were ignored or erased from the official historical record.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pioneers who shaped modern computing<\/b><\/h2>\n

Before talking about where we are today, it’s worth getting to know who built the foundations of this field, because many of those foundations have women’s names attached to them.<\/span><\/p>\n