The ENIAC Six: When Programming Was “Women's Work”

The ENIAC Six: When Programming Was “Women's Work”

On March 8, Software Informer is releasing a special series dedicated to women in IT and related industries: five features and five personal stories. Now we take a step back to a time when computers were loud, hot, and very bad at being polite — and when programming was often seen as a support job, not a star role.

This is a deep dive into the ENIAC computer, the ENIAC Six (often called the first computer programmers), and the early history of women in computing, including how programming shifted from “women’s work” to a prestigious, well-paid career.

A Computer That Still Needed Humans

ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School for the U.S. Army, starting in the early 1940s, mainly to compute values for artillery range tables (ballistics). In simple words: it helped calculate how a shell would fly, depending on many conditions.

ENIAC was huge. It weighed about 30 tons, had more than 100,000 components, and used plugboards to “program” instructions. It could run at electronic speed once wired, but rewiring it for a new problem could take days. It shows what “programming” meant back then: not typing, but physical planning, wiring, and checking.

Also, ENIAC did not arrive with friendly tools. No modern programming languages. No manuals like “ENIAC for Beginners.” So the question was not “Who can code?” The question was “Who can figure out how to make this machine do anything at all?”

ENIAC Six Programmers: The First Computer Programmers in History

The ENIAC Six are usually listed as: Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean “Betty” Jennings Bartik, Frances “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances “Fran” Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum. They were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997 — more than 50 years after their core work.

Before they were “programmers,” many women were hired as human computers during World War II. This was a job title. It meant doing hard math by hand or with mechanical desk calculators, often for military needs like ballistics. The U.S. Army recruited women for this work in the early 1940s, and from that group, six women were selected to program ENIAC around 1945.

One reason women were chosen is simple and very historical: wartime labor shortages opened doors, and computing work was often placed in a “clerical” box, even when it required serious math skills. Historian Jennifer S. Light describes ballistics computation and early programming as work sitting between scientific and clerical labor: it needed advanced training, yet it was still categorized as clerical. That category shaped who got hired, who got paid, and who got credit.

The ENIAC Six were pioneers. But the system around them was not designed to treat them like pioneers.

What ENIAC “Programming” Looked Like in Real Life

If you picture programming as writing lines of code, ENIAC will disappoint you.

ENIAC was programmed using plugboards and physical wiring. Once the instructions were “programmed” through wiring, it ran fast. But each new problem could require long rewiring and careful checking. Britannica describes the trade-off clearly: plugboards let ENIAC run at electronic speed, but changing problems meant physically rewiring, which took days.

The ENIAC Six had to translate math problems into machine actions. They used logical diagrams and had to understand how parts of the machine worked together. The “interface” was direct and demanding — and the memory was limited — which made programming harder than people outside the room understood.

ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes. Machines like this could fail in very physical ways. So early programmers needed both mathematical thinking and practical problem-solving. This is one key point that gets lost when people call their work “clerical.” Their work required deep understanding — the kind of understanding that makes a new technology usable.

A small ironic detail: early programming looked a bit like telephone switchboard work — cables, connections, careful routing. But when women did similar “connection” work in other industries, it was often treated as routine. When this connection work made a computer possible, history still struggled to call it innovation.

Demonstration Day: The Machine Got Applause, The Programmers Did Not

ENIAC became famous partly because of its public unveiling in February 1946. Penn Today notes that when ENIAC was unveiled, two women had created the test run that impressed the media. It also notes that a missile-trajectory calculation devised by Bartik and Holberton was the basis for the press demonstration.

But here is what often happened in press coverage: photos showed men, articles named men, and the women who made the demo work were missing from the story. Penn Today describes how archival photos include women and men, yet published articles and pictures featured only men. After the successful demonstration, the women were not invited to a celebratory dinner.

Public credit creates professional status. Professional status creates power. Power shapes who gets hired next time, who gets promoted, and whose work becomes “the standard.” The ENIAC Six did not only lose a few compliments. They lost decades of visibility.

The good news is that their story did not stay hidden forever. IEEE Spectrum describes how researcher and filmmaker Kathy Kleiman tracked down the women and recorded oral histories, helping bring their work back into public memory.

When “Women’s Work” Becomes Valuable, The Rules Often Change

Now we reach the uncomfortable part of the title: programming was seen as “women’s work” — until it became prestigious.

In early computing, programming was often described as routine and mechanical, closer to implementing than inventing. That framing made it easier for organizations to place the job in a lower-status category. Historian Jennifer S. Light explains that programming, as an extension of human computing, fit well with ideas of “women’s work” in the 1940s.

But status in tech does not stay still. In the 1960s and 1970s, the industry began to treat programming as a key skill that was in high demand and increasingly well paid. JSTOR Daily summarizes historian Nathan Ensmenger’s argument: a “newfound appreciation for computer programmers,” plus rising demand, came with a major rise in salaries — and a shift in who was seen as the “right” kind of programmer.

Ensmenger’s research also highlights how the profession started to “make itself masculine” during this period, as part of professionalization and status-building. He notes that women were unusually well represented in early programming compared to many technical fields, but that the community also pursued strategies that made programming more stereotypically male over time.

A particularly sharp tool in this shift was the hiring culture. Ensmenger’s point is that companies used aptitude tests and stereotypes that favored candidates seen as “antisocial, mathematically inclined, and male,” and that these stereotypes then reinforced themselves.

This is how a job can change its “gender label” without changing its core difficulty. One decade, it is treated like support work. Another decade, it becomes “elite.” And suddenly, the pipeline, the marketing, and the culture start selecting for a different group.

So the ENIAC Six are a case study in how prestige is built — and how easily credit can be reassigned.

What Happened to The ENIAC Six?

IEEE Spectrum notes that after ENIAC was completed, the six women continued working for the U.S. Army, helped teach the next generation of ENIAC programmers, and that some later contributed to foundations of modern programming.

Even so, public recognition arrived late. The Hall of Fame induction in 1997 is a symbol of that delay: society often gives medals long after it gives promotions.

Why The ENIAC Six Story Matters Now

If you work in tech today, you might think this story is old enough to be “safe.” It isn’t. The pattern is still familiar.

Here are a few practical lessons for modern teams:

• Naming matters. If your company ships a product, who is named as the creator? Who is described as support? Visibility shapes careers.
• Tools shape status. When work looks “manual,” people may call it low-skill. But hard work can be manual. ENIAC programming was physical and still deeply intellectual.
• Prestige is political. As Ensmenger’s work suggests, professional identity can be built in ways that include or exclude. “Merit” is real, but so are stereotypes, tests, and gatekeeping.
• Tech history is a hiring tool. When people can “see themselves” in the past, it becomes easier to imagine themselves in the future. IEEE Spectrum makes this point directly: opening the doors to history can help recruitment into engineering and computer science.

This is also why the ENIAC Six belong in a Women in IT series. Their work shows that women were never “new” to computing. What was new was who got remembered.

Final Thoughts

In our first piece, we asked what it means for an AI to “die,” and why ideas like shutdown and identity matter when machines sound human. In this story, the “identity problem” looks different: it is not a chatbot losing memory, but human experts losing credit — and almost disappearing from the official narrative.

The ENIAC Six remind us that technology always has a hidden layer: the people who make it work, explain it, test it, and give it a “voice.” If we want better tech in the future — including safer AI — we should get better at naming the humans behind it. The machines already have enough branding.