Elsie Shutt

Elsie Shutt
Elsie Shutt
Born	1928 (age 95–96); New York City
Education	Goucher College (B.A.)
Occupation	Technology entrepreneur ;
Known for	“The excitement of designing a system: . . . finding out what the problem is; analyzing it; designing something that will make it work; and then doing it. And seeing it work, and having a client who is happy with it. That’s very satisfying.” - Elsie Shutt, 2001

Last updated March 15, 2024

Elsie Shutt (born 1928) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. She founded Computations Incorporated (CompInc) in 1957, when she was not permitted to work part-time at home after she became pregnant. Shutt was one of the first women to start a software business in the United States.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Early life and education

Elsie Shutt was born in New York City and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital following her father's death when she was four. Shutt attended Eastern High School in Baltimore and graduated from Goucher College at age 20, where her mother had also graduated with a chemistry degree. She later completed a graduate fellowship in mathematics at Radcliffe College. Shutt's accomplishments include becoming the second female teacher, succeeding Lisl Novak Gaal. Additionally, she holds the distinction of being the first female graduate student to teach remedial trigonometry to Harvard students. Subsequently, Shutt received a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in France. ^[4]^[2]

Career

Early years

Shutt learned to program on ENIAC successor ORDVAC (Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) under Dick Clippinger during a summer job at U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.^[2]^[5] In 1953 Shutt was hired at Raytheon (an aerospace and defense manufacturing company) by her old boss, Dick Clippinger. There, she started work on software for the Raycom computer.^[2]^[6] When she became pregnant in 1957, Massachusetts state law required her to quit Raytheon.^[2] However, Raytheon began to refer Shutt to their clients because the company was scaling back its outside programming projects. Shutt began doing freelance programming work from her home.^[2]^[4] This work was done for over a year with her friend Irma Wyman.^[2] Shutt eventually decided to pursue the entrepreneurial venture of starting a business that would give women part-time work in this technical field.^[2]^[5]

Computations Incorporated

Shutt founded Computations Incorporated (Comp Inc.) in 1957 as a primarily all-female company in the early era when software companies worked part-time from home as freelancers.^[2]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9] Comp Inc., a Harvard, Massachusetts-based company, utilized systems analysis and design along with programming help for both the business and scientific industries.^[2] Early employees Elaine Kamowitz and Barbara Wade, who previously worked as freelancers before being incorporated, also bore children. Shutt reportedly refused to hire more than 13 staff members and led the company for more than 45 years.^[2] At the time, it was highly unusual for pregnant women to continue in their professional endeavors, leading some to dub Shutt and her employees "the pregnant programmers."^[4]^[10] She began Comp Inc. to prove that women could still hold programming occupations while taking care of a family—having a baby did not detract from their technical expertise.^[2] Shutt employed preferential hiring of young women with little children.^[2] She hoped that by doing this, she would increase a woman's chance of getting a full-time job as a programmer once her children grew up.^[2] Even women with no experience were hired because there was a training program in place.^[2] Comp Inc.'s employees were mainly women, with a few men, but all the partners were women.^[2] The company's primary clients were the United States government and the science, education, and business industries.^[2]^[10] Computations, Inc. also emphasized “desk-checking” between employees (manually checking each other's code), and clients claimed they saved as much as 50% by outsourcing to Shutt's company.^[11] At its peak, her company entered into contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell,^[10] Raytheon,^[10] St. Regis Paper Co.,^[10] Harvard University,^[10] The University of Rochester,^[10] and the United States Air Force.^[10]^[12]

Personal life

Shutt had the support of her husband: emotionally, financially, and domestically. She even hired a babysitter to work every Wednesday so she could offer that day without having to tell the client she would have to look for a sitter.^[11] She enjoyed the days with her children and would rent computer time from companies during “non-prime times” who wanted to keep their computers on in the evening.^[4]

Related Research Articles

The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and modern computing technology and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper or for chalk and slate, with or without the aid of tables.

Freelance, freelancer, or freelance worker, are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance workers are sometimes represented by a company or a temporary agency that resells freelance labor to clients; others work independently or use professional associations or websites to get work.

Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements. Since the 18th century, women have developed scientific computations, including Nicole-Reine Lepaute's prediction of Halley's Comet, and Maria Mitchell's computation of the motion of Venus.

Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Betty Holberton</span> American computer scientist (1917–2001)

Frances Elizabeth Holberton was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Bartik</span> American ENIAC computer programmer (1924–2011)

Jean Bartik was one of the original six programmers of the ENIAC computer.

This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other types of programming. Women have also been involved in computer science, various related types of engineering and computer hardware.

Janet Abbate is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the history of computer science and the Internet, particularly on the participation of women in the field. Janet Abbate is also the author of Inventing the Internet, Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure, and Recoding Gender Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Janet Abbate also attended The University of Pennsylvania for her Ph.D.

Judith A. Clapp is a computer scientist who began her career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently moved to the Lincoln Laboratory and then to MITRE, where she was a leader in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) military project, including the development of the SAGE computer.

Hilary J. Kahn (1943–2007) was a South African British computer scientist who spent most of her career as a professor at the University of Manchester, where she worked on computer-aided design and information modelling. Kahn participated in the development of the Manchester MU5 computer. Later she became involved in standards development and was both the chair of the Technical Experts Group and a member of the Steering Committee for the development of the EDIF standard. Kahn retired from Manchester in 2006 and died in 2007.

Mary Clare Coombs was a British computer programmer and schoolteacher. Employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the LEO computers, she is recognised as the first female commercial programmer. The National Museum of Computing documents her contribution.

Gender disparity in computing concerns the disparity between the number of men in the field of computing in relation to the lack of women in the field. Originally, computing was seen as a female occupation. As the field evolved, so too did the demographics, and the gender gap shifted from female dominated to male dominated. The believed need for more diversity and an equal gender gap has led to public policy debates regarding gender equality. Many organizations have sought to create initiatives to bring more women into the field of computing.

Eleanor D. L. Ireland was an early British computer scientist and member of the Women's Royal Naval Service.

Frances Frei is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management and the course lead for first-year diversity and inclusion studies at Harvard Business School. She has worked for Uber and been on the board of directors at WeWork.

Ann Hardy was an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for her pioneering work on computer time-sharing systems while working at Tymshare from 1966 onwards.

Sylvia B. Wilbur was a British computer scientist who helped develop the ARPANET, was one of the first to exchange email in Britain, and became a leading researcher on computer-supported cooperative work.

F International was a British freelance software and systems services company, founded as Freelance Programmers in England in 1962, by Dame Stephanie Shirley; she was involved in the company until she retired in 1993. The company was renamed in 1974 to F International. In 1988 the company was renamed again, to The FI Group, and later as Xansa plc. Xansa plc was acquired by the French company now known as Sopra Steria in 2007.

Susan Bond, was a scientific officer and computer programmer for the Mathematics Division of the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) in the United Kingdom. She worked extensively on the programming language ALGOL 68 and the Royal Radar Establishment Automatic Computer (RREAC), an early solid-state electronics, ICL 1907F computer.

Bobby Hersom is a British mathematician and computer scientist known for her early work on computers at Elliott Brothers, Hatfield Polytechnic, and the Rothamstead Agricultural Research Station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Betty Ryan</span> American game developer and programmer

Elizabeth (Betty) Ryan is an American game developer and programmer. She worked for General Computer Corporation (GCC) in the 1980s and was the 9th employee and first woman video game programmer at GCC. She programmed the 1982 Atari, Inc. arcade game Quantum as well as working on games for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Atari 7800.

References

↑ "Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding". NPR.org. Retrieved 2018-08-12.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Janet Abbate (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing . MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01806-7.
↑ Janet Abbate (21 October 2014). "The women who shaped the computer age". Theweek.com.
1 2 3 4 "Oral-History:Elsie Shutt - Engineering and Technology History Wiki". Ethw.org. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
1 2 Thompson, Clive (13 February 2019). "The Secret History of Women in Coding". The New York Times . Retrieved 18 February 2019.
1 2 Eliana Keinan (2017). "A New Frontier: But for Whom? An Analysis of the Micro-Computer and Women's Declining Participation in Computer Science". Scholarship.claremont.edu. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
↑ Schafer, Valérie, and Benjamin G. Thierry. Connecting Women. Springer, 2015.(p.x)
↑ Shirley, Steve. "II. THE DISTRIBUTED OFFICE." Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 135.5371 (1987): 503-514.
↑ Valérie Schafer; Benjamin G. Thierry (8 October 2015). Connecting Women: Women, Gender and ICT in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Springer. pp. 10–. ISBN 978-3-319-20837-4.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Mixing Math and Motherhood". Business Week: 86–87. March 1963.
1 2 Abbate, Janet (2012). Recoding Gender. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9014.001.0001. ISBN 9780262305464.
↑ Betty Friedan (1998). It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement. Harvard University Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-674-46885-6.