{"id":8424,"date":"2015-07-30T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-07-30T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=8424"},"modified":"2015-07-30T12:00:55","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T16:00:55","slug":"female-1960s-computer-nerd-defrosted-for-the-gender-war-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/30\/female-1960s-computer-nerd-defrosted-for-the-gender-war-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Female 1960s computer nerd defrosted for the Gender War Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TIME has <a href=\"http:\/\/time.com\/3948364\/moon-landing-apollo-11-margaret-hamilton\/\">an article on Margaret Hamilton<\/a> and the software for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Apollo_11\">the Apollo 11 mission<\/a>. The journalist is quick to point out that &#8220;she was successful in the pre-women\u2019s lib era in a field that remains tough for women to crack.&#8221; Being an Ellen Pao-style gender warrior was apparently secondary in Hamilton&#8217;s mind to achieving a successful landing on the moon, but the present-day journalist is quick to fill in the gaps: &#8220;Hamilton says that she was so wrapped up in her work that she didn\u2019t notice the gender problems of the time&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What kind of discrimination did Hamilton actually face? <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)\">Wikipedia <\/a>notes that this female graduate of Earlham College was hired for some of the most advanced computer system projects of the day, e.g., <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment\">SAGE <\/a>at MIT, and weather simulation for the professor\u00a0who popularized modern &#8220;chaos theory.&#8221; Hamilton was promoted to &#8220;director and supervisor of software programming for Apollo and Skylab.&#8221; Then she was founder and CEO of her own software company, apparently successful enough to survive for at least eight years. For about the last thirty years she has had her own company as well. Her writings are published by the IEEE (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.htius.com\/Articles\/r12ham.pdf\">example<\/a>), one of the two most prestigious societies in computer science.<\/p>\n<p>These are the facts that support the present-day journalist&#8217;s conclusion that the software industry was unfriendly to women in the 1960s and remains so today.<\/p>\n<p>[Hamilton may have used her gender to advantage via\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.realworlddivorce.com\/Massachusetts\">Massachusetts family law<\/a>. She married a Harvard Law School graduate\u00a0who went on to found a Boston-area law firm (<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/metro\/2014\/08\/30\/james-cox-hamilton-mentor-young-lawyers-also-handled-aclu-cases\/CGoF5qLYsNnUEap7BuTrGJ\/story.html\">Boston Globe<\/a><\/em>). The article says that there was a divorce lawsuit but it isn&#8217;t clear what alimony and child support profits, if any, Hamilton earned.]<\/p>\n<p>Separately&#8230; what do we think of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.htius.com\/Articles\/r12ham.pdf\">the ideas in that IEEE paper<\/a>? Plainly\u00a0big software systems need\u00a0to be more resilient and to have some learning capabilities. But is this Universal Systems Language an important step in that direction?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TIME has an article on Margaret Hamilton and the software for the Apollo 11 mission. The journalist is quick to point out that &#8220;she was successful in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Female 1960s computer nerd defrosted for the Gender War Age - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/30\/female-1960s-computer-nerd-defrosted-for-the-gender-war-age\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Female 1960s computer nerd defrosted for the Gender War Age - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"TIME has an article on Margaret Hamilton and the software for the Apollo 11 mission. 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