10 of the Most Inspiring Women in Tech History

Women have played fundamental roles in creating and shaping the technologies that we all take for granted today. Here are the stories of ten of these women, we hope you enjoy reading about their fantastic achievements:

Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723- 1788) Together with Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut, Lepaute tackled a seemingly unsolvable three body problem- to calculate the next passing of Halley’s comet. The team worked intensely for 6 months to calculate the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn on the comets path. Amazingly, the comet appeared almost exactly on their predicated date, with Lalande saying without Lepaute, the calculations would have never been completed. Her methods of calculating gravitational forces on moving objects laid the groundwork behind GPS and satellite navigation today.

Technology today would not be the same without the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. In 1842, she was asked to translate an article about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, however since she understood the machine so well, her extended article was three times the original and contained several computer programs. She also highlighted potential uses of the machine, as creative as producing music, demonstrating for the first time, how computers could be used for so much more than just numerical calculation. 

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) worked as a ‘human computer’ at Harvard College Observatory. Across years she worked to change our understanding of the universe by identifying a relationship between how long a star pulses and how bright it actually is. This is known as Leavitt's Law which helped to determine distances to stars too remote for existing methods. Eventually her discovery would be used by Edwin Hubble to prove that the Universe is expanding. 

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) Hopper was determined to prove computers could do more than arithmetic, even interpret symbols. She demonstrated this with her breakthrough, creating the world's first compiler. Now programmers could avoid writing in raw machine instructions and instead in something resembling human language. Hopper played a central role in developing COBOL, a high-level programming language that's still currently running in banking and government systems.

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) Lamarr was widely known as a Hollywood actress, when she was in fact an inventor. In World War II she co-developed a radio guidance system using frequency-hopping technology to make Allied torpedoes harder to jam. Despite the US Navy having no interest, the technology she pioneered is now the backbone of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Lamarr was finally made it into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, which was decades overdue.

Mavis Batey (1921-2013) Batey worked as a code breaker at Bletchley park in World War II. Her largely female group worked on the Italian Navy’s messages, encrypted using a variation of the Enigma. Batey decoded a message :‘Today’s the day minus three’. Her team worked vigorously for three days and  unravelled a series of messages which informed the Royal Navy to ambush an Italian attack at the Battle of Matapan. She also broke into a seemingly unbreakable German Enigma, which enabled Allied forces to stage the D-Day landings in 1944 at Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy.

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) Johnson joined NACA (NASA’s predecessor) with a group of other African American women hired as human computers. She distinguished herself with her extraordinary mathematical ability and was moved into the all-white, all-male Flight Research Division. Johnson calculated trajectories for some of the most important missions in space history, including Apollo 11's journey to the Moon. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and her story, along with her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, was told in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Known as a pioneer in computer development, Kathleen Booth (1922-2022) invented the world's first Assembly language. This made it possible to write code in human readable instructions rather than in binary, completely changing how people interact with computers. In 1955, Booth gave the first demonstration of a computer doing anything other than numerical calculations as she gave the first public demonstration of text translation by a computer. This would later influence everything from Google Translate to modern AI language tools.

Fei-Fei Li (1976) Li co-created ImageNet, which is a massive database of over 14 million labelled images. Once researchers began to classify it accurately in 2012, the modern AI and deep learning revolution rapidly advanced. The effects of powering image recognition can be found everywhere today, including medical scans detecting cancer, self driving cars, FaceID. She is one of the most influential people in Artificial Intelligence, she served as Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud and now co-directs Stanford’s Human-Centred AI Institute. Li uses this role to push for AI built around human wellbeing instead of performance.

Joy Buolamwini (1989) Buolamwini was a researcher at MIT when she discovered facial recognition software could not detect her face until she held up a white mask. This led her to her research Gender Shades, showing how commercial facial recognition systems had significantly higher error rates for darker skinned women than for lighter skinned men. Amazon, Microsoft and IBM all paused their facial recognition products in response to this. The Algorithmic Justice League was founded by her to keep fighting this bias in technology.

There are many other women who have played crucial roles in taking technology forwards over the centuries and there are countless other stories we could tell. And, of course, there are very many tremendous Women in Tech today- whose stories are just unfolding!!