The archetype of skinny, buzz-cut, chain smoking male engineers with skinny black ties working with computers, rockets, bombs, and other assorted Cold War toys isn't always how the story of technology in the mid-20th Century was born. One of the most influential people in the development of modern electronic computers was a female naval mathematician named Grace Hopper. There's a wonderful SMBC comic about her, and you can read more about her here:
Grace Hopper
Outside of the arcane world of computer science (and probably even within it), Admiral Hopper's name is virtually unknown, but it's hard to overstate how important her work was in laying the foundation for the computers nearly everyone in the developed world interacts with every day. Before Hopper computers were treated as dumb machines handy only for mindlessly plowing through mountains of basic arithmetic operations. After her contributions to early computer languages and her work building the first compiler, it soon became apparent how much more was possible. Naturally, the Navy sought to apply this work to ballistics calculations and computational modelling of the hellish worlds of nuclear explosions and missile warhead reentry, but the peaceful world got a lot of mileage out of the computer revolution as well.
How many more talented women like Hopper were (and still are) deterred from contributing to the technical world by the backward attitudes about gender that our society still feels a hangover from? It's a tragic thing, but there's much to be thankful for from those who stuck it out.
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