When people talk about the “first woman programmer,” they usually point to Ada Lovelace in the 1800s. She is an icon, and rightly so—she represents the possibility of code. But for a young girl trying to navigate the unforgiving arena of modern tech, Lovelace is a distant symbol, not a roadmap. She lived in a world of theory, centuries removed from the corporate battlefields of today.
To find a tangible roadmap, we have to look at the 1940s and 50s. But we have to be honest about the context: back then, programming was not the power center it is now.
In the era of the ENIAC, the job of “coding” was socially equated to being a telephone operator. It involved plugging cables and punching cards. The intellectual feat required to do this was genius-level, yet the social status was secretarial. It was “women’s work”—a service role that supported the “real” engineers.
The work was necessary, but the context was confinement. That dynamic isn’t aspirational. However, what is inspirational are the women who refused to be confined by that status. These are the women who commanded the industry instead of just participating in it.
I recently finished reading The Code by Margaret O’Mara. It’s a brilliant history of Silicon Valley, but I noticed a tension in how she handles gender. Throughout the book, she frequently takes “breaks” to mention statistics—how few women were present, or the structural exclusion they faced.
These statistics are essential for the historical record; we need to know the barriers existed. But facts about exclusion rarely provide fuel for the ambitious. They act as warnings, not maps. They tell you where the minefield is, but they don’t show you how to cross it.
The best parts of the book are when she shifts focus from the obstacles to the navigators—the outliers who were too busy winning to let the statistics slow them down.
Take Ann Hardy. History remembers the Homebrew Computer Club as the epicenter of the PC revolution—a “boys’ club” where amateurs like Steve Jobs and Wozniak presented their creations. But while the boys were playing in the club, Ann Hardy was already running the infrastructure of the future.
She was a key executive at Tymshare, the company that pioneered “time-sharing” (the great-grandfather of cloud computing). Hardy was hardly just a participant or diversity hire; she wrote the core operating system herself.
There is a famous story that captures her reality. Hardy was in the hospital, in labor with her first child, when the Tymshare system crashed. Her male colleagues—who had assumed her husband must have written her code—called him to fix it. He told them he didn’t have a clue how it worked. They had no choice but to call Ann in her hospital bed to get the system back online.
Then there is Esther Dyson. She wasn’t a coder, but she became the intellectual “court jester” of Silicon Valley. Through her newsletter, Release 1.0, and her exclusive PC Forum conference, she became the industry’s kingmaker. In the 80s and 90s, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to get past Esther. She eventually became the founding chairman of ICANN, effectively helping to govern the internet itself.
And finally, Mary Meeker, the “Queen of the Internet.” As a star analyst at Morgan Stanley, she legitimized the dot-com boom to Wall Street. Her “Internet Trends Report” became the gospel of the industry.
I love this brand of feminism. It isn’t about ignoring the structural barriers or pretending they don’t exist. It is about rendering them irrelevant through sheer competence. These women didn’t make their careers about protesting the game.
They simply outplayed the competition.
It’s the kind of feminism you see in The Queen’s Gambit. The main character doesn’t demand the rules of chess be changed to accommodate her; she simply plays better than everyone else. It is an exhausting strategy—you have to be undeniably superior just to break even—but it is effective. She refuses to back down. She rarely makes speeches. She just wins.
That is the strongest argument you can make. You don’t need to ask for permission to play the sport. You just need to be the one winning it.
The three women above did exactly that—they just kept winning.