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Mainframe Coven: Kilogirl

By | July 3, 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) dive into the origins of the term “Kilogirl”, explore its historical context, and discuss the importance of women’s visibility in tech.

Together they reflect on the legacy of women in computing, share personal insights, and answer the powerful question: Why is women visibility important?

Watch Full Episode here:
https://youtu.be/YNufo53wWcE

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

Jelly: Welcome! Welcome! 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 term “Kilogirl.” So, let’s define it. What is a Kilogirl? It’s a term that means 1,000 hours of female computational labor. 1,000 hours! But that’s a definition.

So, Jelly, I want to ask you: When did you first hear about this term? And how did you feel when you first encountered this term?

Jelly: I first encountered this term when we were visiting an art exhibition in Vienna. It’s the exhibition called Radical Software, and it’s held in Kunsthalle in Vienna. We were just reading the history of women in technology, and then there was this word “Kilogirl.”

I could read it. I could read how I saw it in the exhibition. So, I bought the book because it had a big impact on me. So, I had this book, Radical Software, and it says that:

“In 1944, mathematician and US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is assigned to work on the Mark 1 computer at Harvard University. Hopper writes the first computer manual, which is published in 1946 as ‘A Manual of Operation for Automatic Sequence Control Calculator’, but receives only partial credit for her work.

It is estimated that about half of the computer workforce in the United States are women. One contractor of the Applied Mathematics Panel, a division of the National Defense Research Committee, uses the term ‘kilogirl’ to refer to 1,000 hours of female computational labor.”

And I was reading this part and I said, “Wow that is both offensive and impressive.” It’s impressive because there are so many women around that time that they were able to coin a term. There are thousand compute… “thousand hours,” and it means that it’s more. It’s more than that. You can have like 10-kilogirls. It’s so much computational power from women that you have your own term.

But at the same time, it’s so offensive because women’s work are dismissed and degraded into just a terminology. It’s like just one term and even Grace Hopper received partial credit for her work and she’s like really big.

I felt sad. I felt a lot of emotions. I’m going to say, I felt… It triggered something in me. I needed to understand more.

Richelle: I think the term itself, when you split kilo and girl, so kilo is just 1,000, but the term ‘girl’ is the one that’s triggering because it’s already diminishing these women. So, they’re not really recognized for their full potential. It’s saying that… It’s diminishing the contribution as something that a child could do, you know? It’s not something that’s for a grown adult to do. So, I feel like there’s a diminished… The view of women were already diminished and the contributions of these women during this time were already minimized.

So, you mentioned 1944… 1946… so this was in World War II. So that was the history of that, as you said, from the Radical Software exhibit: It was coined by one contractor of the Applied Mathematics Panel. But around this time as well, another astronomer spoke of the term “girl years” when referring to their contributions to astronomy and when they are doing computational work during this time.

Jelly: I’ve stumbled upon an article. It was called “Computing Power Used to be Measured in Kilogirls,” and it’s an article in The Atlantic. It mentioned that this work,  and I quote

“This work is ideal for women because women work for half of what similarly skilled men would.”

Richelle: So basically, women are paid less than men.

Jelly: Exactly, they are paid less than men.
“And the war… ”
I continue the article…

Richelle: What I wanted to mention is that the article said that it’s working… The women were working in the same way as similarly skilled men. So, they’re not, it’s not… It’s a myth that it’s just something that somebody can do, anybody can do it.

Jelly: You’re right! It’s not just anybody could do it. Yeah, you need a skill, you need a brain, you need to be smart to be able to do this.

And so the article continued… and it says:
“War brought more females to the field, as it did in other technological industries. As men fought world wars, and as the wars themselves increased the demand for computing power, even more women took on roles as human computers. By the time World War II broke out, many scientists and industrialists in the U.S. were measuring computing power not in megahertz or teraflops, but in ‘kilo-girls.’ And computing time was measured, in turn, in ‘girl hours’ (with complex calculations requiring a certain amount of ‘kilo-girl-hours’).”

Richelle: The computing power is measured in kilogirls or girl hours, meaning that there are a lot of women working during this time, but it’s just that their contributions are not visible.

Jelly: Yeah…

Richelle: It’s diminished as just one unit of measurement.

Jelly: And, you know, what’s kind of disappointing in a way? Is that I didn’t learn this in college. I never heard about this. And I’m realizing that before kilobyte, there’s kilogirl.

And I kind of feel offended and sad at the same time because this is the norm, you know? This is normal before, and that’s how we see people before.

And you know, I guess we were never.. We never talked about it, right? We never talked about it, and nobody really discussed this because, yeah, it’s just normal. It’s like getting married at the age of 18.

Richelle: Exactly!

Jelly: I think it’s very normal.

Richelle: Yeah, it was normalized. I think that’s the right term there.

That in 1944, as well around this time, there were many women working, you know, doing computational work.

An astronomer wrote an article in Mathematical Gazette called “Careers for Girls.” He declared that:

“Female computers were useful in the years before they (or many of them) graduate to married life and become experts with the housekeeping accounts.”

So, their work or their contributions were easily dismissed because there’s an expectation that this is temporary employment for them, and that they would soon leave employment and then become married and that’s it! That’s the end of their career.

But we know that it’s a myth, that many women continue to work even though they’re married, have kids, etc.

And the expectation is that their expertise will only be used within their household doing housekeeping.

And the contributions that they did: it was clerical work. As you said before, it’s numerical needle work. It’s diminished in that way.

Jelly: So anyways… I continued the investigation simply because I do want to learn more. And so we were able to, or at least I was able to see this article.

It’s called “The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measures of the Stars.”

In the article, it says,
“With thousands of glass plates being generated by Harvard’s cameras, it was the daunting task of the human computers to catalogue each image and extract from it information on as many astronomical objects as possible. Pickering’s successor as director, Harlow Shapley, jokingly quantified the work in terms of the number of ‘kilo-girl hours’ it would take, but Sobel squashes the  myth that these women were simply human automata, engaged in the astronomical equivalent of fiddly but repetitive needlepoint. Their sharp intellects and intimate familiarity with the  photographic plates meant that they could spot novelties and underlying patterns that would be invisible to the casual observer. When those were combined with a burning curiosity about the workings of the cosmos, all the ingredients for a series of important discoveries were in place.”

Oh! I love this article, actually.

Richelle: What about that article surprised you?

Jelly: What surprised me about this article? Well, number one is that I’m very happy that there are people who, you know, who say that, “Hey, this is not true. This is just a myth.” These women have sharp intellect and intimate familiarity, and they could spot novelties and underlying patterns that would be invisible to the casual observer.

So number one, this is not an easy task. It’s very hard. And I like that word intimate familiarity because it means it’s their expertise. This is what they’re doing: they’re experts in this one.

Richelle: I think with your research about this, what the women were actually doing… We not just think of them as this group of women sitting at desks and doing computational work. You actually see that they have significant, important discoveries that they contributed.

Their contributions may be attributed to somebody else, or to their supervisor, or to the team in general, but they actually have important discoveries under their names.

So when we talked about numerical needle work, I think the article also dismissed that. It’s not repetitive needle work. They’re not human automata. It’s about being intimately familiar with the patterns, being curious as well. That’s something that women are good at, by interpreting the data in their own way and humanizing those machines.

I think that brings us to a book that I read. It’s called “Broadband: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.” It’s by Claire Evans.

So she was talking about that it’s a myth that men are for hardware and women are for software, and that the significance of software before was diminished, that it’s not as important as the machines that were made by men, etc.

She says that it’s a myth too. She dismisses that.

I’m going to read some part of the book:

“The technological history we’re usually told is one about men and machines, ignoring women and the signals they compose.
Female mental labor was the original information technology, and women elevated the rudimentary operation of computing machines into an art called programming. They gave language to the bots. They wrestled brute mainframes into public service, showing how the products of industry could serve the people if the intent was there.
They all care deeply about the user. They are never so seduced by the box that they forget why it’s there: to enrich human life.”

Jelly: The words that she said: “they care deeply about the user and they forget about the box”. And their goal is to enrich human life, you know, towards this problem that you’re trying to solve.

‘Cause I remember that movie called “Imitation Game.” Remember that one?

So there was a scene there where Alan Turing and his team, they were so stuck. They cannot decrypt these messages, that’s coming in from Germany.

And so, their lead said, “You have one month. If you didn’t finish this, if you didn’t decrypt this, then this project, this computer that you’re creating, that Alan Turing is creating, will be shut down.”

And so they went into the bar and, you know, maybe just celebrate their last day. I don’t know what they’re doing. But then they met this one woman, and she said, “You know…”
Because there are many teams who decrypt messages. And Alan was the one who’s creating this computer so that they could automatically decrypt messages, or at least faster.
So there was this one woman who was decrypting messages, and she said, “I’m so interested with this message that I’m decrypting because this soldier is talking to his girlfriend, you know?”
And she began, let’s say, sharing the gossip that this soldier is saying to his girlfriend.

And then Alan was like, “Hey, how did you know that? How did you know that he’s talking to his girlfriend?”

And the woman said, “Well, because he uses the word, I don’t know, let’s say ‘love’ or ‘honey’. And in my experience, that’s how you called your girlfriend.”

And then that’s like a Eureka moment for Alan.

Like, you don’t have to actually decrypt the whole message. You just have to decrypt this one word, which is a human kind of thing, you know? Because this is a human behavior.

And they just need to understand this behavior.

And so they were able to decrypt something just by one word, or just by identifying a specific word that all of these soldiers would use.

And so with that woman, with that contribution of identifying or empathizing, basically, with the data that you have, humanizing that data, caring deeply about that, it’s a big contribution.
That they were able to crack the problem that they are trying to solve.

Richelle: I agree, I think when we try to think of the contributions between men building the machines and then women humanizing the data and doing computational work, in what we call now software, you see that it’s easy to dismiss because these big machines, we can see them, but the contributions of women were often invisible.

Like, it’s intangible versus tangible machines, right? So, it’s easy to ignore. It’s easy to dismiss.

But we know that was a turning point. Like in Bletchley Park, there were many women there who have made intangible contributions, and they really helped decrypt messages that are very important in the war.

So the humanizing of data is another, like, barrier to us having this connection to the contributions of women. And it’s not something that we say, “Okay, so the evolution of computers is this, this, this, and this man did this.”

For example, when Charles Babbage was designing the machine, it was Ada Lovelace who designed some algorithm for it. So we recognize Charles Babbage and his machines, but the contribution of Ada Lovelace in algorithms was only celebrated recently.

It’s not part of the technological history that was passed on.

So it’s important that we also recognize those stories from these women.

Jelly: How about you, Richelle? Why is women’s visibility important to you?

Richelle: I think for me, it’s about representation, right?

We talked about the term normalization, and it was normalized for me when I was starting my career that my first manager was a woman our department head was a woman. So in leadership positions, women were there.

So as you mentioned, you know, it’s a culture shock moving now to Europe when we become the minority and that representation is not there. And now we have to be a representative of women in technology, you know?

To me, the stories that we are telling in this podcast when we’re researching the women in our technological history, I see that they belong in technology. And if they belong, then I belong.

And the women that are coming up, you know, that they don’t have to feel like they’re anomalies. They don’t have to feel like, you know, they’re a minority. But that their contributions are as important as the women in the past.

And we belong in this industry. We belong as decision makers.

Actually to me, I think that’s the important part. That we are represented, that women are represented in this industry as decision makers, as part of that table, right? Because when all the decisions are made not for us or by us, then the empathy is gone for our group, right?

Because that’s where the diversity comes in, right? If nobody speaks up for one group, then that group is dismissed or their contributions are not recognized, so they’re not part of the consideration for a decision.

And we see that in AI or in these technologies that are coming up right now.

So when we lose sight of who belongs in that industry, and we see that thousands and thousands of women came before us, we exclude them in our future.

And to me, visibility is important because I was mentored by women. That means that I also pass that on, that it’s full circle for me now. I’m mentoring young women and young people coming in as new mainframers. So it impacts that, because I want to hear their opinions. I want to consider them in decision making, right?

So it’s about systemic change. It’s about, you know, we want to fund or we want to see programs for women in STEM or for women joining technological careers.

It’s about hiring. We want to see that women are represented, that diverse opinions and diverse cultures are represented because we want the decisions to have empathy for all groups, right?

In the past, there was a cycle of erasure of dismissing contributions, so we want to break that cycle.

Because visibility is important. It’s representing the past, representing current contributions of women in leadership, and also for future generations.

We want them to see that they belong in the industry.

Jelly: I agree. I like what you said about systemic erasure.

It’s normal before, and we don’t want that to be normal again. We want to play our part and contribute to removing that cycle of erasure.

Richelle: And I think the reason why it’s so stark for us is because our normal is very different. Our normal is: we grew up with representation. My mom is an engineer. My dad is an engineer. So to me, it’s normal. Our leaders were women.

So that stark contrast between those two cultures is something that is triggering for us. Hey, we need to speak about this because we see the difference, and we see that it’s something that we can work on.

Jelly: We want to contribute to that, and that’s why we want to create this podcast.

Richelle: So, aside from this podcast, can you think of other examples of women-led projects or companies who have communities for women and accessibility and so on?

Jelly: Yes, of course, yeah. There are a lot of She-E-Os out there, and one thing that I can think of is AnitaB.org.

It’s a great conference. It’s a Grace Hopper conference, actually, that’s, you know, for women.
And there are a lot of organizations who do coding. Women Who Code.
Even here in Austria, there are a lot of Women Who Code programs or projects that will, you know, promote STEAM for women.

How about you?

Richelle: The show Bletchley Circle was a good fictional TV series featuring the women of Bletchley Park.

Of course, Hidden Figures. I think it’s the most well-known, and just that title means that, you know, even then they recognized that the contributions of these women are hidden.

I also like the tagline of Rewriting the Code, and it’s always like, you belong, you know. No matter your age or where you’re coming from, you belong.

I think belongingness, to me, is important because when somebody is represented, when you see somebody represented, you feel like, “Oh! I can be them as well.”
When I see it, I can be it, and I can belong.

It’s about reclaiming space, right? Because we’ve always had contributions. Women have always had contributions as a society, but it’s reclaiming that, you know?

We are acknowledging that women’s contributions are also important.

Now that we’ve talked about all of this, let’s go back to the original term that we started with, which is “Kilogirl.”
What comes to mind when you hear the term kilogirl?

Jelly: For me, what comes to mind is women’s resilience.
It’s their resilience, their strength. The fact that they will fight to have that: to reclaim their space and to have that safe space for them.

And I love that they also think about diversity, you know, and I just celebrate whenever I hear kilogirl. I’m proud of it!

How about you?

Richelle: When I think of the term kilogirl, now, I think of the term thousands.
There are thousands of women who came before us, and that’s our legacy.
It’s a rich legacy of women who have made great contributions to technology.

So again, about representation. I’m thinking about those who have come before us and those who are the next generation. They deserve to know that these women are part of our history and that they are not alone.

You’re not a minority.
You have come from a great line of women in technology.
And those women, they started this coven, and now we are part of it.

Jelly: And that’s it!
Thanks for joining us in this episode!
I learned a lot…
I felt a lot…
And I hope you did too.

Richelle: For our next episode, we are going to talk about “When Computers Wore Skirts”.
We are going to talk about the tangible contributions of women in technology through the decades.
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.

[Outro Voice]: Thank you for tuning in to the Mainframe Connect Podcast and this episode in the I am a Mainframer Series, sponsored by Phoenix Software International and by Vicom Infinity, a converged 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: