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Mainframe Coven: When Computers Wore Skirts

By | July 31, 2025August 14th, 2025

In this episode of the Mainframe Connect podcast’s Mainframe Coven, Jessielaine Punongbayan (Product Manager, Dynatrace) and Richelle Anne Craw (Software Engineer, Beta Systems Software) look back at a time when women were central to computing and examine how and why that changed, even though the work didn’t.

Together they reflect on software engineering, cultural bias, institutional gatekeeping, and the motivation to rewrite the narrative.

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Transcript:

[Intro Voice]: This is the Mainframe Connect podcast brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, sponsored by Phoenix Software International and Vicom Infinity, a Converge Company. Mainframe Connect includes the “I am a Mainframer” series, the riveting “Mainframe Voices” series, and other content exploring relevant topics with mainframe professionals and offering insights into the industry and technology. Today’s episode is from the 10-part “Mainframe Coven” mini-series honoring the past, present, and future women of IT.

Jessielaine (Jelly): Hello and welcome to Mainframe Coven, a podcast about real stories from the essential yet unseen minds behind the machines. We are your hosts: my name is Jessielaine Punongbayan, and I’m a Product Manager for Dynatrace.

Richelle: I’m Richelle Anne Craw, a Software Engineer for Beta Systems Software. Welcome to our second episode. 

Jelly: Welcome everybody! In this podcast, we want to celebrate the women who shaped technology in the past, highlight those transforming its present, and amplify voices building its future. Because visibility isn’t just recognition: it’s power!

Richelle: In today’s episode, we are going to talk about the phrase “When Computers Wore Skirts”.

Jelly: I’m super excited about this episode. Richelle, tell me, please, what does the phrase mean “When Computers Wore Skirts”? 

Richelle: So this phrase is commonly attributed to Katherine Johnson and she was directly quoted in a 2008 NASA article saying, 

“I was a computer when the computer wore a skirt.”

And before it was published, it was a common saying in NASA that human computers, mostly women, were doing vital math. They were the foundations of computing before the digital age and that’s what we are going to talk about today. 

Jelly: So I have a quote here and it’s a quote from Sadie Plant and her book is titled Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture.

“When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them … when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.”

Oh, I love this quote. It’s really poetic. 

Richelle: Yeah, exactly. And today we’re going to break down that quote per decade. Let’s go through each decade and go through the contributions, tangible contributions of women throughout the decades.

Let’s start with the 1840s with Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace was a child of a year-long marriage between the well-known poet Lord Byron and mathematically inclined aristocrat Annabella Milbanke whom Byron nicknamed the “Princess of Parallelograms”. So the contrasting personalities of her mother and her father really shaped Ada’s unusual upbringing. 

So after they separated, Annabella was strict in keeping and preventing Ada from inheriting her father’s wildness and poetic tendencies. So she enforced strict mathematical training from the age of four. Because Ada couldn’t go to university as a woman, she arranged private tutors to further her education. Annabella believes that math would counteract the poetic tendencies that Ada could inherit from her father. But it didn’t work. Ada in her own way managed to combine both, you know? She still has this mathematical inclination, but she also inherited her father’s poetic tendencies. 

Jelly: Of course. Of course. 

Richelle: Ada met Charles Babbage in 1833 when he hosted a party for aristocrats and leading scientists of the day to display his Difference Engine. And Ada was immediately hooked. So she and Charles began sending letters to each other to talk about the machines.

And so when Babbage moved on to the Analytical Engine, he actually never published any scientific paper on it. But he did give a seminar in 1840 to Italian scientists in Turin. And in this seminar a report was written up by Luigi Menabrea who later became a General in the Italian army and then Prime Minister of Italy. So he wrote this report on the seminar in Italian. 

Ada then wanted to translate this paper to English for publication in England. So it’s a report on the Analytical Engine that was demonstrated by Charles Babbage. So because they were writing to each other, Babbage suggested and encouraged her to add some of her notes to the paper and he also gave her further material and examples from the talk that wasn’t included in the talk in Turin. 

This is the basis of Ada’s legacy. So in this translation of the report, she gave her notes in addition to what was already there. She provided more explanation. And in these 1843 notes, she gave a clear explanation of how the Analytical Engine operated in the abstract where Babbage never published anything. 

Also in these notes, she described a method of using the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers and this is often called the first published computer program. So this is where it was first published. Many, many letters were going around with some sort of algorithm but Ada’s notes was the first one where it was published. 

And because she was a woman and it’s unusual during the time to publish a scientific paper as a woman, she signed the notes only with her initials A.A.L. 

Jelly: So that they wouldn’t know that she’s a woman? 

Richelle: Just to not to be discredited that it’s something that is frivolous but for the notes to be taken as is and not to be judged based on who wrote that note. 

Jelly: Okay. So, can I just ask some questions? So, when Ada met Charles Babbage and she did all of this note taking. She’s like a colleague, really, of Charles Babbage. She’s not like a secretary or something like that. 

Richelle: No. So during this time, the leading scientists and aristocrats always gather in these parties. And some of her tutors are there as well. So they are colleagues and some of them are her mentors, but they see her as a peer as well. And they see her as a brilliant mind. 

Jelly: Yeah. And it makes sense because Charles asked her to put her notes. So it means that she has a lot of ideas, really good ideas and Charles wants to read it or be part of those notes. Oh, that’s really cool. 

Richelle: Yeah, because Babbage couldn’t articulate as well as she can, how the machine operates in an abstract way. He knows how the machine works. Of course, he built the machine. But how it can be used? I think that was Ada’s perspective.

Jelly: The significance of that note is summarized in this quote from Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 ‘notes’. 

“It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to general-purpose computation. That transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper.”

Richelle: Yeah. So before Ada gave this note, the machine was fundamentally just a number cruncher. But Ada looked at it and said, “We can use this for general purpose computation.”

And I think that it’s Ada’s legacy. She was able to show that her mindset is of poetical science. She was able to see a vision of how this technology can be used by individuals, by society, and we can collaborate on it. And it’s not just a number cruncher, it’s not just calculation. It’s general purpose computation.

Jelly: And do you think she has that kind of mindset simply because of Lord Byron’s flamboyant poetic thing that she got from her father? 

Richelle: Yes. I think she didn’t forget that part. But also the reason why she has that kind of mentality as well is because her foundation is mathematics. So she didn’t forget both parts  of her upbringing. 

Jelly: We have another quote from Claire Evans um from the book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

“Ada didn’t only explain the technical workings of the Analytical Engine. She imagined the impact it could have on the world, teasing out the implications of general-purpose computing to anticipate the transformative power of software. She understood that if the Analytical Engine manipulated symbols, then anything that could be represented symbolically—numbers, logic, even music—could pass through the machine and do wondrous things. The possibilities were limitless, and hers was just the mind to articulate them: mathematically brilliant and poetically incisive in equal measure.”

Yeah, I love it. I mean, this really shows that technology and art could combine together, you know, because you’re being creative. You have two different sides that you see. And it works well together. 

Richelle: And we see that this is the foundation of what we now call variables. So anything could be represented symbolically, numbers, logic, the output of a mathematical equation, they can all be represented symbolically. And Ada in 1840 was able to visualize that. 

And you’re right. I think that what we can see from Ada’s legacy is that math can be a form of poetry and that computing can be a fusion between logic and imagination, innovation. Your foundation is mathematics but it shouldn’t limit you from imagining what it could do. 

Now we zoom past a hundred years to 1940, to the ENIAC 6. 

So in the 1940s, this was during World War II and the ENIAC 6 are the six women that programmed the first general purpose electric computer. 

I’m going to say their names: Kathleen McNulty later Mauchly, Betty Jean Jennings later Bartik, Marlyn Wescoff later Meltzer, Betty Snyder later Holberton, Ruth Lichterman later Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas later Spence. 

All six of these women were hired as part of the US Army’s efforts to support wartime ballistics calculations. So the army sought out women with strong math backgrounds from women’s colleges and they were graduates in mathematics or physics and they were recruited as computers. The women actually looked at their hiring papers and they were recruited as computers: that’s the term that they were hired as. 

They were assigned to work on the ENIAC, which is the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was still under development. The engineers who built this machine didn’t give them any manuals or training courses. They only were able to study blueprints and wiring diagrams. So the army viewed the ENIAC as the hardware and the programming as secondary. 

Jelly: Right. Similar to what happened to Ada. She doesn’t have anything, no manual whatsoever. 

Richelle: Okay. So, there’s a quote that Jean Jennings gave. Would you like to read it? 

Jelly: Of course. 

“Occasionally, the six of us programmers all got together to discuss how we thought the machine worked. If this sounds haphazard, it was. The biggest advantage of learning the ENIAC from the diagrams was that we began to understand what it could and what it could not do. As a result we could diagnose troubles almost down to the individual vacuum tube. Since we knew both the application and the machine, we learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than, the engineer.” – Jean Jennings

Richelle: Yes. So we see here that the ENIAC 6, particularly when what Jean was mentioning, was that the machines during this time were in one big room, right? It was not  just a computer that we can carry now, but it was in a big room. The ENIAC 6 women, they had to go in and program it, reverse engineer the machine, document it. And so they formed the basis and laid the foundation of our modern software engineering. The approach that we have for understanding programming, how to debug, how to troubleshoot, it came from them. 

Jelly: There’s a quote here from Betty Snyder. 

“The thing is we did develop the one word that’s in the language today, which is ‘breakpoint,’ at that time. Because we actually did pull the wire to stop the programs so we could read the accumulators off. This was, I mean, we actually broke the point, and that was where the word came from.”

Like brute force, literally brute force. 

Richelle:  Literally breaking the point and we still use that term today. So these women, they were inside of the room with the ENIAC. They were plugging in the problem. They were switching units together. There were hundreds of cables and 3,000 switches. So they were knowledgeable, if not more knowledgeable, than the engineer because they were the ones troubleshooting it and they were the ones also created the manual after the women had reverse engineered the machine. 

The main story around the ENIAC 6 for me was on February 14, 1946. It was the night before the public unveiling of the ENIAC machine. So they were almost ready, but the machine was printing out numbers in just 0.8 in intervals and they didn’t know why. So they were tempted to just say, “Oh, it’s always printing it like that.” But during the night, Betty dreamt of a solution. So the morning of Feb 15, she knew exactly which switch to reset and which dial to turn. 

During the demonstration, the staff dimmed the lights in the room. The only lights were the blinking ports of the ENIAC. And the demonstration was that the ENIAC will calculate the trajectory of a bullet. And so the program ran and was faster than a speeding bullet. It was faster than if you would actually manually track where the bullet landed. The women they hustled over to the tabulator, they made the printouts and that was the souvenir of the demonstration. So it was the women who did the demonstration. They were the ones troubleshooting it the night before. They were the ones who also prepared the reports. 

The event made headlines. They were photographed during this demonstration. But later the photographs showed only the men in the suits with military decorations posing with the machine. And the women who made it work were kept out of sight. And the press reinforced the notion and misconception that the machine did it. The machine was the one who programmed itself. 

So this was from Jean Jennings’ autobiography. 

Jelly: I’ll read the quote. 

“It felt like history had been made that day and then it had run over us and left us in its tracks.”

Richelle: And even in the anniversary celebrations of the ENIAC, it wasn’t until very recently that the women were part of that story. So even in retellings, they seem to have vanished. 

Jelly: So there’s a quote here from Jennifer S. Light. 

“Women seem to have vanished from the ENIAC story, both in text and in photographs. One photograph accompanying the New York Times story foregrounds a man in uniform plugging wires into a machine. While the caption describes the “attendants preparing the machine to solve a hydrodynamical problem,” the figures of two women in the background can be seen only by close scrutiny. Thus, the press conference and follow up coverage rendered invisible both the skilled labor required to set up the demonstration and the gender of the skilled workers who did it.”

Richelle: I think that summarizes it. They made invisible the weeks of skilled labor that the ENIAC 6 did in order to set up that demonstration, to figure out the machine, how it works, and how to solve the ballistics computation. And also often they’re tagged as genderless group of experts responsible for the machine’s operation and only the names of Mauchly, Eckert, and Goldstine, the men who built the hardware, were mentioned in the press. 

I think what I want to highlight in these 1940s women was that they really laid the foundation for modern software engineering. So we understand how programming works through them, because they know how to transpose from a hardware signal to software. They know a way to talk to the machine, because they know fundamentally what machine switch does which.

Their story didn’t end in the 1940s because in the 1950s they worked with Grace Hopper.

In the 1950s, actually before that, Grace Hopper was a mathematics professor who joined the US Navy during World War II. So this was before 1950 as well. She was assigned to the Harvard Mark I which is one of the first electromechanical computers. She was programming the machine for complex calculations. She wanted to join the Navy but she was underweight so she was assigned to work on the Mark I because of her background in mathematics. 

After the war she was not allowed to be a professor at Harvard and she was not allowed to continue as a naval officer because she’s a woman. At this time she was an expert in a field that did not exist yet. 

It was around this time as well that there was a proliferation of companies that wanted to commercialize computing and so Grace Hopper then became the head of a software division for one of these companies who were developing the UNIVAC. And this is where their histories intersected with the ENIAC 6, because several members of the ENIAC 6 also transitioned to work on the UNIVAC. Their combined works helped transition the computers from military use to business and commercial use. 

Focusing now on Grace, Grace Hopper believed that programming should be intuitive, accessible. She wanted to use English language, English commands rather than machine code which is what was previously done because it was just mechanical and machine switches, right?

So we have a direct quote here from Grace.

Jelly: So she said: 

“What I felt was there were a large number of people in the country that did not like symbols. They were not mathematicians and they hated symbols, so let them write their programs in English. It was common sense.”

Agree.

Richelle: Yeah. It was her mindset to let them write their programs in English.

This was the basis of one of her most significant contributions which was the development of the first compiler that translates human readable code to machine language.

And then she became part of the committee that led to the creation of COBOL which was one of the first high-level programming languages. Again, this was due to the fact that many vendors were building computers but they wanted a standardized programming practice across the different machines and across the different industries. So the reason why they built this committee and also created COBOL was that it helped standardize programming practices. 

Jelly: Oh okay. 

Richelle: And the reason why it was so prevalent even until today, it’s because it was adopted and also sanctioned by the US government. So during this time, if you want to work with the US government, then you had to write in COBOL and to be able to use their machines and so on. 

Jelly: All right. So I have a quote here from Clare Evans. 

“As early as 1944, Grace realized she could save herself from rewriting code from scratch for each problem by holding onto reusable scraps, which came to be known as subroutines. In wartime, this was done informally: coders on the crew would share their notebooks with one another, copying over relevant bits  and pieces longhand. Eventually, this practice was formalized, and future computers were built with libraries of subroutines already in place, enabling even novice coders to call on tidily packaged sequences of program instructions. When Grace’s code got thorny, she made a habit of annotating the master code sheets with comments, context, and equations, making it easier for colleagues to unravel her handiwork later. This system of documentation became standard practice for programmers, and it still is: good code is always documented.”

Ah wow. If Grace is alive today, she would know that a lot of the programming languages now use packages and libraries just like what she did here. That’s amazing. 

Richelle: Yeah, she’s all about usability, efficiency, and standardization. 

Jelly: Standardization. I like that. 

Richelle: Because these sub routines, we already proved that they are efficient. So then let’s have them as built in and so we can reuse them. 

Jelly: Yeah, that makes sense.

Richelle: And there’s also a thinking of future coders, right? Novice coders. They don’t have to rethink everything from scratch. 

In one of the documentaries that I watched about Grace, she has been described as disruptive. She’s ahead of her time. She has humor. She has sarcasm. She’s charming. She can be friendly to get her own way. In one of the first instances of a bug being found, one moth was able to go into an open window in the room where UNIVAC was. The week after that, she bought plastic moths and put them in many places and there was a panic because they thought the moths were coming to the machine. So she was very humorous and, you know, people love that about her. 

She’s a trailblazer but she never admitted that a trail needed to be blazed. She was named Man of the Year and it didn’t bother her. Her boss said that “Grace was a good man” and it didn’t bother her. So she had a very different mindset during this time in the 1950s. She also had a backwards clock in her office because she said there’s no reason it has to go one way. 

I think what I get from her mindset is that she was challenging conventions. She was challenging norms. She’s saying we don’t have to do it this way or we don’t have to always do it this way. She’s not being stubborn. She’s not being rebellious. But she knows that, hey, maybe we can find a better way. You know, we cannot be stuck doing things one way. I think that’s one thing we can learn from Grace. 

And that brings us to the 1960s with Katherine Johnson’s NASA article which we read earlier. 

Jelly: So the quote says, 

“My dad taught us ‘you are as good as anybody in this town, but you’re no better.’ I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.

We wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space,” she says. “We just started from what we knew. We had to go back to geometry and figure all of this stuff out. Inasmuch as I was in at the beginning, I was one of those lucky people.”

Richelle: I think that mindset of I am as good as anybody but no better. That sense of: it’s not in my mentality to say I’m not equal. I think these women were forging ahead because they know that their skill is as needed. Their skill is as valued as their peers and their colleagues and they don’t have a feeling of inferiority but they also don’t have a feeling of superiority.

Jelly: And this is what we always say as well, each and every one of us has our own expertise and we can share something, we can contribute something because we know something that other people don’t. 

Richelle: Right. Yeah. So in the 1960s, during Katherine Johnson’s time, women were essential to computing at NASA, IBM, the US Census Bureau. So as we talked about in Hidden Figures, Dorothy Vaughan trained herself and her staff in FORTRAN, Mary Jackson became NASA’s first black female engineer and Katherine Johnson helped in the calculations that helped land Apollo 11 on the moon. 

During this time, there was a swell of women. Up until that time from the 1940s to the 1960s, more and more women were joining computing. The mainframe era was booming and women were there. 

Jelly: Well, that’s pretty cool. I mean, they have been hiring a lot of women. And women have been programmers around this time. But what happened? I mean nowadays there’s a scarcity of women in programming. Where are they now? 

Richelle: Yeah, I’m glad you asked. So in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the computers, and computers who are women, were gaining prestige, because their computing power was being used in defense, aerospace, military and even commercial applications, right? 

Then there came a software crisis because systems were unreliable and there were bugs. So in 1968, experts convened in the 1968 NATO science committee to address the software crisis. So the conference aimed to rebrand software programming, software engineering, as a rigorous scientific discipline. So they coined the term software engineering in that conference and its aim is to instill order and respectability. 

During this conference they did say what software engineering should be or should look like. It’s not just a metaphor, but they want to establish the identity for the field. So previously it was in relation to the hardware, but they want here to establish software engineering as its own discipline, as its own profession. They want to assert social authority, a shift towards a more masculine elite image. So I like the quote from Nathan Ensmenger here in “Making Programming Masculine”. 

Jelly: I can read it.

“Computer programming began as women’ s work. It had to be made masculine.”

Why?

Richelle: It didn’t need to be. But it means that it wasn’t natural. It began as women’s work. Women were the foundation as we’ve established in the decades, right? So what we have now, it wasn’t masculine. It was made to be masculine. It was designed to be that way. 

And the shift started in the 1968 NATO science committee. There’s a revaluation of the job and they made it masculine. It’s a deliberate gatekeeping mechanism. 

Jelly: What happened in that conference? 

Richelle: So prior to the conference, the historical pattern was that low status occupations with the exception of those with those that require physical strength are feminized, right? Clerical and so on. So for example in the ENIAC 6, the telephone switchboard-like appearance of the ENIAC with plug panels and switches, it says to people who are watching that these are machine operators and programming is handicraft. It’s not science. It’s feminine. It’s not masculine. It’s mechanical. It’s not intellectual. 

And it goes back to the notion that computer programming was being seen as too artistic. And there’s a backward sensibility to it. Maybe you can read the quote. Maybe that’s better. 

Jelly: So this quote is from Nathan Ensmenger from the book The Computer Boys Take Over. 

“When participants at the NATO Conference on Software Engineering in 1968 portrayed computer programming as being ‘too artistic,’ they were using the word …, as a rhetorical device for contrasting its ‘backward’ craft sensibilities with ‘the types of theoretical foundations and practical disciplines’ that they believed characterized ‘the established branches of engineering.’ Note that the appeal here is to the tradition of the artisan or craftsperson, which is a masculine identity, rather than to the potentially effeminate artsy type.”

Richelle: Yeah. So they were seeing that programming is becoming a black art. It’s art. It’s not science, that it’s backward, you know? In contrast to what we said about Ada Lovelace, she was able to combine math and poetry and art. 

Jelly: Yeah, even with Grace Hopper, that creativity and discipline basically. 

Richelle: So they believe that there should be a practical discipline to establish branches of engineering because they want to establish software engineering as another engineering.

They want to fit it into what they think of as when they were doing hardware engineering, right? So they want to do away with the artistic craft sensibilities and focus on an established masculine identity, or not really masculine identity, but some theoretical practical discipline that is not artsy. 

Jelly: Why do they want that? 

Richelle: I think it came with reimagining of who belonged in software. So they think that to solve the software crisis, they want to introduce a routinized, factory-like process to remove the creativity so that we will have less bugs. So we will have less mistakes and so we will be more reliable. So they think that if they will instill this rigorous discipline and order, that it will solve the software crisis. 

Jelly: Yeah. Because they are from the military, so they probably think this way. 

Richelle: By the way, in this 1968 conference, when the women of ENIAC 6 and Grace Hopper were still active, they were not invited to this conference. So it goes to show how they view what a software engineer is. That’s the point of that book from Nathan Ensmenger who said that “the computer boys took over”. They reimagined what a software engineer looks like, right? 

It didn’t stop with just reimagining what the term software engineering is or who belongs in that term. There began a shift. It didn’t stop, like, in 1968, after that no women were hired. That’s not what happened at all. But what happened was that employers began using aptitude tests and personality profiling that reflected these assumptions of who makes a good programmer based on this software engineering definition, right? 

There began the myth of the antisocial nerd or the computer boy as the problem solving male genius that we know now. When we say, “Who’s a programmer?”, you would immediately think you know Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and all of these male genius types, right? But then it forgot that women were the foundation of computing. Women were pushed out and it became male-coded. It became masculinized.

Jelly: So what you’re saying is that they didn’t literally say that no women are allowed to be a computer engineer. But when they were hiring engineers or computer engineers, you had this test, right? That’s what you said. And in this test, it was really biased to have this image of a computer boy, which if we stereotype a computer boy, it’s normally that that glass thin pale guy, you know, who was really good at math. And that’s what they did. They have this test. They have this profiling, basically, the profiling did the stereotyping.

Richelle: Yeah it became an infinite loop, right? The primary selection used for what qualifies as a programmer selected for programmers with stereotypically masculine characteristics and so who they hired are stereotypically masculine programmers, right? And so that became the reinforced notion that this is the population that we want to hire. So it became an infinite loop. 

Because of their bias in the hiring, using those rules and aptitude tests and personality profiles, those are the ones that were hired. And women were discouraged because oftentimes the wordings are geared more towards masculine characteristics.

So then the population became overly masculine and so it reinforced the notion that we should hire only this male population. 

Jelly: Well it’s gatekeeping like what you said. It’s gatekeeping, it’s stereotyping basically. 

Richelle: Yeah, but I think we mentioned the term normalized. So it became normalized that this is what a computer programmer looks like. 

Jelly: “The widespread adoption of aptitude testing by corporate employers, for example, was not deliberately aimed at excluding women and, in fact, might in other circumstances have served to expand opportunities for female participation. But the particular ways in which aptitude tests and personality profiles were developed, and the ways in which these tests and profiles were used in the context of other efforts to define what computer programming was and who should be doing it, had unintended consequences. These consequences became embodied in the structures of the industry. The gender identity and culture of computing became fixed, and ultimately self-perpetuating, as these structures became normalized.”

Richelle: Exactly. So I like what he said about that it might have served as an opportunity for female participation, right? Because the things that we see about programming and so problem solving, being creative, that is genderless. These characteristics are not meant to exclude women. In fact, they could have been more diverse, right?

But it was the corporate employers and the aptitude testing profiling that was done, it became a self-perpetuating notion of who should belong in that industry. 

Yeah. And then it became normalized. So now we have this image of the computer boy. 

What I got from all of this is that there was an institutional barrier, but this exclusion is not accidental. It was by design. It was designed to be like that. 

Credentialism, the culture of having that myth of what a software engineer looks like, it has roots in a systemic gatekeeping that was done years before.

In 1968 there was the conference. But they didn’t stop hiring women until the 1980s, also when personal computers became more mainstream, right? And there are many more factors that affect that. 

But I think what I got from this research was that the system was designed to gatekeep and they were engineered to have this gap of who belongs and what gender should be doing which job. 

Jelly: Yeah. Right. 

Richelle: And the only hope is that if this was engineered then it could be re-engineered. If it was designed to be that way then it could be redesigned. 

Jelly: Richelle, so much has changed since the days when the computer wore skirts. In 2025, what feels most relatable about the stories that we’ve heard today? 

Richelle: Yeah. So the computer nowadays are machines and skirts are optional, but I do feel that there is still a bias that is with us. And what I’m holding on to is one of Grace Hopper’s most famous quotes. She says often “The most dangerous phrase in the language is: ‘We’ve always done it this way.’” And so if the gatekeeping was designed, we can redesign it. And I’m also holding on to the fact that what Katherine Johnson said, I am not inferior and I’m also not superior. I’m equal. And I’m going to act as if I’m equal and my skills will speak for itself. 

How about you? 

Jelly: Yeah, for me one of the most relatable is like in terms of diversity. Not just through diversity in terms of you know the community including women or including the marginalized group of people, but in terms of diversity in thinking. I really relate with Ada Lovelace or with Grace Hopper as well, that art and science can blend together. And there is a benefit if you do that, because you are able to be creative in your thinking, be creative in a way that you research and develop your software. And with this kind of mindset, once you embrace creativity, it expands a lot of opportunities. It gives you a lot of choices, you know? You can think of different ways on how to solve a single problem. It’s not just like one thing. It’s not black and white. With all the stories that you’ve told me today, that’s the most relatable for me. 

Well, thank you for joining us and I hope you learned something today. 

Richelle: Join us next time. You will find all the links and resources we mentioned today in the show notes. 

Jelly: Follow, rate, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye.

[Outro Voice]: Thank you for tuning in to the Mainframe Connect Podcast and this episode in the Mainframe Coven 10-part mini-series, sponsored by Phoenix Software International and Vicom Infinity, a Converge Company. Like what you heard? Subscribe to get every episode or watch us online at openmainframeproject.org. Until next time, this is the Mainframe Connect Podcast.

Links and Resources Mentioned in the Episode: