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Mainframe Coven: Conjuring a Safe Space in Tech

By | March 31, 2026

In this episode of Mainframe Coven, Jessielaine Punongbayan (Product Manager, Dynatrace) and Richelle Anne Craw (Software Engineer, Beta Systems Software) reflect on the experiences of women in computing, from ‘Kilogirls’ to mentorship, early career challenges, and leadership gaps. They examine how systemic barriers shape the tech industry and why safe, supportive spaces are essential for the future.

Watch the Full Episode here: 

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 often unseen minds behind the machines. We are your hosts. My name is Jessielaine Punongbayan and I’m a Product Manager for Dynatrace. 

Richelle: My name is Richelle Anne Craw and I’m a Software Engineer for Beta Systems Software. Welcome to a brand-new episode.  

Jelly: Welcome! Today we’re going to talk about conjuring a safe space in tech. Richelle, can you give us a brief overview of this topic?

Richelle: Sure. I think we’re at that point now in this podcast series that we have looked at stories from the past and also talked, and have had a lot of conversations with women who are currently still in the profession and women in mainframe still. So I think this episode is about us trying to synthesize those conversations, what we’ve learned so far and what we can carry forward.

Jelly: Well, let’s start off with one of our favorite quotes, which is,

“Without women’s voices, the story is incomplete.”

And I think this quote we have, you’ve actually first seen it, right?

Richelle: Yeah, I saw it on a post by the UN: United Nations Women Organization. And I think it really hits what we are trying to achieve here in Mainframe Coven. We’re saying that women’s voices are important to be heard because they’re part of the story. We’re part of the story. And so we want to highlight women’s voices.

Jelly: Yeah. And without women’s voices, the story is incomplete. So let’s look back to our first episode where we talked about Kilogirls. And let’s discuss why we decided to create Mainframe Coven, the very beginning, and why is it important for us to create a safe space for women in tech? Why did we decide to create Mainframe Coven? This is because of our first episode, the Kilogirls. So I remember when we were visiting Vienna, there was this exhibition in Wien Kunsthalle, and it’s called Radical Software, Women in Computing. And while we’re exploring the exhibition, we stumbled upon the word Kilogirls. And this is a terminology that we never really heard of at school or ever. This is the first time I’ve heard of it and when I saw it, it made me feel things. And Kilogirls, if you haven’t heard or if you haven’t watched our first episode, it means it’s a thousand, it’s a thousand hours of female labor, female computing labor. And this is kind of mind-blowing for me because we do have a narrative that says that women do not belong in tech. But if we look at the history of computing, we have a terminology for women doing computational labor. And Kilogirls means a thousand hours. And it gives me that impression that throughout our history, throughout the history of computing, women are the foundational members of computing. They started tech, right?

Richelle: Yeah, we talked about it in terms of, it’s a paradox, right? Because women’s computational work was significant enough that they invented a term, a unit of measurement term for it, that significant contribution of women. Yet the women themselves, their identities were abstracted into that unit and they’re not even called women, you know, it’s Kilogirl. So it already diminished them. So that’s the paradox that we talked about. So these women, they didn’t really have a safe space in tech. I remember ending that episode with a reclaiming of that term, and we specify that for us personally, Kilogirls mean now to us a symbol of the legacy of the thousands of women who came before us and their resilience, right? Instead of thinking of it as exploitation, it’s a metaphor of their endurance. And so with that, we build a sense of belongingness not just for them, but for us as well, and also for future women in tech who will come into the ecosystem.

Jelly: So let me read that quote that we added here. So it says,

“Normalization of inequality is the most dangerous form of exclusion.”

Richelle: The feminization of computation happened. That’s the norm. But then inequality and gatekeeping was normalized. There was systemic gatekeeping that happened and that’s what we discussed in our second episode.

Jelly: Yeah. And during our talks, we realized that, you know, every major phase of computing, whether it’s mechanical, it’s electrical or digital, there was a dependence on women’s labor, basically, both physical and intellectual. So I really like this what we added here like “when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers the bodies which composed them were female” And I like the fact that we realized that you know this narrative that’s ongoing that women are not supposed to be in Tech and are not supposed to be in the engineering field. It’s not true, because originally the workers, the initial workers that they have here are women, whether it’s physical or intellectual. They are dependent on women’s labor.

Richelle: Yeah, exactly. We went through the decades from the code breakers and the women who worked on ENIAC and UNIVAC. And so for each of those phases, we saw that, you know, some of them, they even went back and saw their work assignments and they were called Computers. That’s their literal job description. And the work was dependent upon women’s labor, women’s intellectual capacity. So during this time, it was definitely feminized.

Jelly: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I really love the word that we use during one of our podcasts, which is to enrich human life, because that was the focus of the women during those times, right? It’s focused on user experience. It’s focused on what actually they could do to help human beings, basically. And what we wrote here, “Women were at the origin of the software humanistic dimension, its capacity to enrich human life.” And that was the priority even before. And the women in computing were the ones who initially thought about this, including Ada Lovelace. During her time, she was thinking of enriching human life, actually.

Richelle: The women were translating not just the code, but the meaning behind it as well, not just the hardware to software signals, mechanical signals, but the meaning behind that. How can we use this?

Jelly: And it’s just that throughout this time, after the post-world war, post-world wars, there has become a broken model you know like of this exclusion and it was normalized like what you said there’s a normalized gatekeeping of a gender bias basically that transformed software engineering into what it is today.

Richelle: But we also talked about that it wasn’t supposed to be that way, that the attributes that would make a good software engineer, specifically, it’s not gendered. It’s not supposed to be gendered, but there became a self reinforcing cycle that created the myth of who or what a software engineer should look like. And that erased the decades of examples of women who actually worked in computing. Because nobody was testing those assumptions that this is who should belong in Tech, then that model kept on reinforcing itself and it became a cycle that now became what we have currently.

Jelly: Yeah and I like what we have done actually how we started the podcast because what we said is that, “When you explain history clearly, you reclaim it.” And you don’t let history repeat itself. And so us, me personally, us knowing about the history of computing, learning about the terminology, Kilogirls, it really gave me this compassion, this insight, this different perspective as to what and who should belong in computing.

Richelle: Yeah, I think in technology, we’re always talking about recursion or iteration, of getting better and better. Once you know better, you do better. And I think we’ve seen that with the women we discussed and we had conversations with, that technological progress, you know, it’s recursive. And what we see through them is that they have empathy, they have persistence, resilience. And so we carry that forward with us as well. And we were claiming that since they belong, we also belong.

Jelly: Let’s move forward from our past and now we’re going to talk about our present. I mean, where did all these women go and why are there so many still leaving our industry?

Richelle: Why do so many women leave the industry or why are women not really interested in joining?

Jelly: They’re not pursuing. We came from the Philippines and what we have both experienced in the Philippines is that we have women mentors, we have women colleagues, we have women leaders and we, well, we’re part of the mainframe department in a local bank in the Philippines and that was our normal. We moved to Singapore and still we’ve seen that there’s a fairly equal amount of men and women in our department.

Richelle: Even in leadership.

Jelly: Yeah, even in leadership. But when we moved to Europe, when we started moving to Europe, we started noticing that difference. And it’s a big difference because before it’s like 50/50, now it’s like one woman into 20 men, you know, in our own team. And it’s a very significant difference that you really notice it. And so those are the things that we start to question like, is Asia actually different from Europe? Or is it an exception? Or is IT really a male dominated industry? But what I learned, or at least what we have researched is that what which we quoted here that

“Women and underrepresented groups enter STEM but leave at a higher rate than their peers creating a leak at every stage of the journey.”

So based on their research is that it started off great but then there’s a leak somehow in the in the pipeline.” Yeah it goes from many women to less women. Why do you think that is? Why is there a cultural gap happening?

Richelle: First and foremost, I think in Asia, we talked about this, that STEM is highly, highly encouraged and it’s non-gendered. There’s no, “you’re a woman, you cannot enter into STEM.” It’s actually encouraged that everybody will be in STEM. So even before anybody enters that pipeline into a job or a career in tech, there’s already encouragement, and that encouragement is not gendered. Everybody’s encouraged to go into STEM. And the leaky pipeline problem is saying that possibly in other places, that’s not the case. Even for early interest, for children who are in elementary school, there’s a lack of encouragement for STEM especially for girls, right?

Jelly: Yeah agree I mean some of the things that we’ve noticed is that you know let’s say in the early interest it was just like their children the toys that you give for girls versus boys are very different. With boys it is mostly technical. You know, robots, Lego. You know it’s very technical but then with girls it’s like, I don’t know, taking care of babies, I guess, dolls.

Richelle: Perfume making and service oriented things like a doctor.

Jelly: Yeah basically like taking care of somebody taking care of your doll taking care of your pet. And this is an unconscious bias that basically what we’re doing is that we unconsciously are training our children that this is an interest for girls and this is an interest for boys, you know. We don’t notice it that much, but they carry this. Children carry this up to their adulthood. And so when they are choosing a path, some of them don’t really choose STEM, because well, that’s not what they’re not encouraged.

Richelle: Yeah, they’re not encouraged.

Jelly: At least that’s not what I grew up like. I didn’t see that being suggested when I was young.

Richelle: In that pipeline, there’s already some leaks that maybe girls who may be interested, you know, they fall out of that pipeline because they were not encouraged or they were even discouraged to go into STEM. And then they go into higher education. So for some women, like for me, my experience in university was that the majority of us were ladies, were women.

Jelly: So I think for me, it’s more than that.

Richelle: Oh really?

Jelly: There were more ladies than men.

Richelle: Oh, so again, that’s a very different norm than maybe the rest of the world, right? Because in higher education, there’s usually not a lot of role models or even teachers in STEM who are women. And so, again, women who are in STEM programs in universities or in colleges. They’re not, again, encouraged into pursuing that.

Jelly: And then we continue to early careers wherein, you know, of course, when you enter the IT industry, it’s a cutthroat industry, I’m going to tell you. I mean, it’s not really easy for me as well to start off with that industry. I mean, I’m really grateful that we have a lot of female colleagues during that time. It was much easier in comparison to what I could imagine young engineers going into the IT industry today if I studied in Austria or if I studied in Czech Republic or wherever I am in Europe. When I started off in the Philippines, it was much easier because it was fun hanging out with a lot of women and they’re mentoring me, you know, throughout my foundational days as an engineer.

Richelle: Yeah, I think that that mentorship was very much a key aspect of why I stayed in tech. Yeah, because I can see my career progression as well that, “Okay, I can be a tech lead, I can be the director and so on”. So to me that was very encouraging as a person in my early career, that, okay, I can see myself in this career.

Jelly: And so if you don’t have that kind of foundation, it’s kind of discouraging as well. And the only reason that you’re going to push through this IT career is that it’s because you really like it. And then mid-career up to the leadership, there’s also a gap. Since you are, let’s say you are discouraged early in your career, there’s a little bit, little amount of women going into a senior position, most especially into a leadership position, you know?

Richelle: And I think we also talked about a statistic that more and more women leave mid-career because they have family care to deal with, and they choose that over their career. Mostly that falls on women, the responsibility falls on women. And so there’s not a lot of support. There’s not a lot of safe space for women to pursue a career, but also to care for people in their life, for their family, right?

Jelly: Yeah.

Richelle: According to my research as well, what we call the gender pay gap, it’s not really that in my same position, women in the same position, women and men earn vastly different salaries that it’s that is not usually the case. And in most countries it’s actually even illegal to do that, to pay somebody less because of their gender, right? But the gender pay gap is because the gap is that more and more women are being excluded from leadership. And so the pay scale of leadership is not being given to women. And so the pay gap is described as the it’s a funnel, right, that people are being excluded from those high paying positions rather than in the same position you earn less. It’s just that we are not, there’s still a ceiling, a glass ceiling.

But I think the good thing is we also spoke with women in mainframe who are part of leadership. And so we spoke with basically cycle breakers, right?

Jelly: Yes.

Richelle: People who break this glass ceiling and are in leadership positions and are holding the doors open for other women and creating that safe space from where they are. And so to me, that was very encouraging to be able to speak with Pam Taylor, Meredith Stowell, you know, Sudharsana (Srinivasan) and Lezlie (Browder), who are really great examples of cycle breakers.

Jelly: I think this is one of the reason why we wanted this podcast right because there are a lot of let’s say people who don’t have visibility of where women are and if you know what is what’s happening with them what what are their push what position are they holding so with this podcast you would be able to see that hey this women are part of the leadership position they are senior developers they are you know, they are making the difference. They’re giving, they’re contributing, basically. They are cycle breakers. And so they’re inspiring stories serve as an inspiration for you to also, you know, push through and be great in this industry.

Richelle: I actually like that there’s a callback as well to when we spoke about the women of ENIAC, that they were the ones who pioneered the practices of modularity, documentation, Grace Hopper as well for subroutines. So women’s ingenuity is visible in tech, right? We still use those practices today. And then when we spoke with these women who are leaders in their own space, we saw those practices as well, like that they are continuing that legacy of women in computing who do more than contribute code or contribute their skills to the technology, but to shape it as well. So it is really inspiring to see that.

Jelly: Yeah. And what I like about what we also mentioned here in our presentation is that the commonality between these women is that they always say yes to challenges. There’s no roadmap existing, but whatever challenge you throw at them, they say yes. Like for example, the ENIAC 6, there’s no documentation. The machine is broken. They have to reverse engineer it. They have to manually break it so that they can debug it. And they have documented it so that we, in our modern technology today, we have actually the basis for, you know, for what they did, how they did debugging, how they did the breakpoint. And we are using, we’re benefiting from what they have done. And these are the women who broke that cycle and just said yes. And so if you, you know, if you want to be a cycle breaker, that’s one of the greatest, let’s say, quality that you could have is just like, just say yes to whatever challenge that comes in your way.

Richelle: Yeah, even if your path is nonlinear, if you came from a totally different field, maybe you didn’t study STEM in education, right? Like there are nonlinear paths and we spoke about this, that you can defy that and also still pursue a career in tech.

Jelly: Yeah, we know somebody who’s like a, who talks sociology and now she’s one of the good Python developers that we know.

Richelle: Yeah, exactly.

Jelly: Yeah. And what I like about this, again, this wonderful quote that we’ve added here is that if gatekeeping was designed, it can be redesigned. You know, as we’ve talked about in our past episodes, that we realized that since women are the foundational members of computing, they were gatekept. It was a design gatekeeping. So the narrative today is that women do not belong in tech. Since gatekeeping was designed, we can redesign it today and have that narrative that women belong in tech.

Richelle: Yeah, and the counterpoint to that is that inclusion should be conscious as well. Inclusion doesn’t just happen. It’s a conscious act that we choose to do. So in the power of intentional community, right, we’ve spoken about that as well. If we have to be intentional in including others, we have to be intentional in overcoming our own biases. And in every step of that pipeline, we have to reassess whether we are choosing inclusion over exclusion.

Jelly: I agree. And diversity and inclusion, especially today, is so very, very much important because while we’re researching and writing about this, somebody’s erasing it at the same time.

Richelle: Yeah, definitely. That was a surprise to me when I was researching. Some of the links are broken, you know, that’s just physical concrete example that if you go to our show notes, you would see we would link our resources and our research. And some of those are archived, you know, from archive already because they do not exist nowadays. And the sad part is, some of these pages include the voices of women telling their stories. And so to me, that was disappointing. And so to me, that also means still that we still have to talk about creating safe spaces for women, that women’s voices are not protected, and it can be erased just as easily as we build them up. And so as we are researching and writing, we have to continue telling these stories because somebody is erasing it after us.

Jelly: Yeah, and just sharing my experience, and I do believe this is also your experience, being part of the Open Mainframe Project, we do have experienced a lot of diversity. It’s not just about gender. Diversity is not just about gender for sure, but we also experience different kinds of experiences, work experiences in general, like from super senior to junior, we have shared a lot of different knowledge from all of our expertise, different technologies, different ages. And what I love about the Open Mainframe Project is that this project allows us to come together and just think of innovation, think of ways on how we could…

“What more can we do with mainframe?”

You know, we could actually think of different ways on what we could innovate in mainframe. And for the longest time, the word innovation in mainframe, it’s not really, doesn’t come hand in hand, you know. And so because of the Open Mainframe Project, it allowed us to have that innovation time again and think of different ways to improve the mainframe.

Richelle: Yeah, definitely. I do think that the community in the Open Mainframe Project like we experienced with Zowe, there’s an intentional community that we include voices, right? As you said, not just gender, but technology where people are coming from, you know, from coming from open source, coming from Linux or Unix and coming from mainframe silos. There is a perspective that we can all contribute and we have a certain goal. The diversity also happens with different companies coming together, right? So it’s not just one company benefiting from it. It’s really, it was such a good experience to be part of that such a diverse team for sure.

Jelly: No, I agree. I agree. Totally agree. 

So now we’re going to the future part of this topic, and especially now that AI is a big topic, you know, in every, every industry, in every technology, including mainframe. We do have now a AI Bob, I think. Or Bob AI. And so we want to talk about the future, which is also part of AI is an AI coded bias. And how could we imagine systems and leadership for our future? AI is a very… How do I say it, very interesting for me. I mean, I am also an artist and AI started with stealing artworks from different artists. And so in the artist world, AI is a bad thing. AI really is really, really bad. But as an engineer, I also see AI as a tool. However, AI as a tool can be a double-edged sword, especially if it’s gender bias. So there’s an AI coded bias nowadays simply because software or computing today is basically male dominated.

So some example is that in Filipino language, we don’t have gender in our in our language. We are gender neutral. However, when you translate it, you know, when we use the word, I don’t know, “maglalaba”, which is washing your clothes, the pronoun is immediately she. Or when you say, I’m going to invest, the pronoun is immediately he. And for the Filipino, there’s no he or she. It’s just “siya” or “ako”. But in translation, there’s he/she. And that’s a coded– basically, that’s a bias.

And that is the same that’s what’s happening in AI because the data that was given to AI is already biased. And so it’s very important and there’s an urgent need for women to be in tech or just in general, minority or not, maybe not minority, underrepresented individuals to be part of this project because we need to have our voice. We need to have representation so that AI bias, AI coded bias will be lessened and lessened and it will not just cater to the majority.

Richelle: Right. Can you imagine that if AI will be used, for example, in mainframe code or in automation, for example, for RACF and the bias is there, then some groups will have more privilege than others. I can imagine that there’s some use cases where we want to prevent bias creeping into our automation using AI.

Jelly: Well, one use case that I could think of is, for example, applying for loans. I mean, we wanted to have, let’s say, if you use AI in profiling people, in giving out loans, there should be unbiased data in providing loans and bias should not be part of that. It should be just like, you know, gender bias or race bias should not be part of the criteria in providing services if you use AI in the profiling part.

Richelle: The decisions that the AI does depends on the data that we provided as well. And I think it goes back to women usually are the ones that humanize the data, right?

Jelly:  Yeah, they think about user experience, you know, enriching human life.

Richelle: Enriching human life. I think those decisions should also come from top down, right? As developers, as engineers, yes, we provide the code or we provide the architecture, but those decisions of hiring, of providing programs for mentorship, I think should come from leadership.

Jelly: Yeah, of course. What you said, like the initiative, the initiative should always come from higher ups because we could always suggest things, but if the higher ups would disagree then there’s nothing nothing’s going to happen and so some of the systemic changes that you know we need leadership to be part of is like what you said hiring inclusive hiring for sure and there’s this career progression transparency there’s equality or in compensation and recognition like when you discuss about a big gap.

Richelle: Not just equality but equity right we need to equip women to be able to be recognized and compensated and not be punished if they speak up. I mean, this is not just in tech, but the encouragement and interest for children, right? That there should be encouragement as well. And that falls to the leadership of who creates products for children. And so, yeah, all of those are systemic changes.

Jelly: Yeah, exactly.

Richelle: And this is where the intention also comes in, that this should be intentional programs that we are intentional about hiring, about finding mentors and finding people to mentor, right? That we build that community intentionally.

Jelly: Yeah, exactly. Like what you said. I like that.

Richelle: I think in every stage of that leaky pipeline, we have to be conscious of who or what we are excluding?

Jelly: So I like what you said about this intentional thing. And I agree with you. We should be very, very intentional in providing support, in providing, you know, providing all of this for women in other underrepresented groups. And, you know, that’s why in Mainframe Coven, we do want to create a safe space. And that is the intention that we wanted to do. And, you know, what we want to contribute, at least something that we could contribute is to just provide a safe space for women in tech, talk about their contributions, talk about their accomplishments, provide visibility so that others could see, be encouraged and be inspired to do the same thing. Because, you know,

“Without women’s voices, the story is incomplete.”

Thank you so much for listening to our episode today. You will find all the links and resources that we mentioned in today’s show in our show notes.

Richelle: Follow, rate, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Outro Voice]: Thank you for tuning in to the Mainframe Connect Podcast. This episode is part of the Mainframe Coven 10-part miniseries, 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: 

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