Elsie Shutt

Elsie Shutt (born 1928) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who founded Computation Incorporated (CompInc) in 1957, when Massachusetts law required her to quit her job after she became pregnant. She was the first woman to establish a software company in the United States.

Early life

Elsie Shutt was born in New York and grew up in Baltimore, MD. After her father died when she was four, her mother worked as a chemistry technician at Johns Hopkins Hospital.[1]

Education

Shutt graduated from Eastern High School in Maryland. Shutt graduated with an undergraduate degree at age 20 from Goucher College, where her mother had previously graduated with a degree in chemistry.[2] Shutt went on to a graduate fellowship at Radcliffe College for math. Then later, won a Fulbright Scholarship to France [2]

Career

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]:123

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][3] When she became pregnant in 1957, Massachusetts state law required her to quit Raytheon.[2]

Shutt founded Computation Incorporated (CompInc) in 1957 as an all-female company in the early era when software companies worked part time from homes as freelancers.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Early employees, Elaine Kamowitz and Barbara Wade, also had babies. Shutt refused to hire more than 13 staff members.[2] Shutt served at the helm for more than 45 years.[2] Shutt and her employees were nicknamed, "the pregnant programmers" and worked on contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell, Raytheon, Harvard, and the Air Force[9]

Shutt was the first woman to start a software business in the United States.[2]:121

References

  1. ↑ Elsie Shutt: an oral history conducted in 2001 by Janet Abbate, IEEE History Center, Hoboken, NJ, USA. http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Elsie_Shutt
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Janet Abbate (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01806-7.
  3. 1 2 Keinan, Eliana. "A New Frontier: But for Whom? An Analysis of the Micro-Computer and Women’s Declining Participation in Computer Science." (2017). http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2573&context=cmc_theses
  4. ↑ Schafer, Valérie, and Benjamin G. Thierry. Connecting Women. Springer, 2015.(p.x)
  5. ↑ http://theweek.com/articles/442965/women-who-shaped-computer-age
  6. ↑ Shirley, Steve. "II. THE DISTRIBUTED OFFICE." Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 135.5371 (1987): 503-514.
  7. ↑ http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ Betty Friedan (1998). It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement. Harvard University Press. pp. 46–. ISBN 978-0-674-46885-6.

Further reading

"Mixing Math and Motherhood." Business Week, March 2, 1963, 86.

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