Women have been programming since before it was a thing. Take Ada Lovelace: Daughter of Lord Byron, she's often credited as the first computer programmer. Her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contains notes of the first machine-implemented algorithm.

Code named "Project PX" and funded by the United States Army, the first general-purpose computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC). It was developed at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The ENIAC programmers included a number of women: Jean Bartik, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Frances Spence, and Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton. Despite their groundbreaking work, the Army never released the names of the women who worked on the ENIAC, and they were largely forgotten until Kathy Kleiman discovered their story in 1985.

There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work.

Hungarian-born Rózsa Péter studied number theory and poetry before becoming interested in the idea that would become recursion theory. She published her paper "Recursive Functions" in 1951, but it wasn't until the mid-50's that she began to apply her work to the realm of computers.

In her career with the Navy, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper worked on the first commercial computer (UNIVAC) and laid the groundwork for the programming language COBOL. But her most notable invention was the compiler, which can transform a source language into binary code. (In other words, it can translate the code you and I write into 0s and 1s.) She developed it in 1952, but she said "Nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

One of the first African-American women to earn a Ph.D in mathematics, Evelyn Boyd Granville focused on aeronautics and space during her career. In 1956, she worked with NASA and IBM on Project Mercury, the first manned space flight. She worked with NASA again a few years later on the Apollo Project.

One of the first women (if not the first woman) to earn a Ph.D in computer science, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller also contributed to the development of the BASIC language during her time at Dartmouth College. She then founded the computer science department at Clarke College and directed it for the next 20 years.

A professor at Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Spärck Jones was interested in natural language processing and information retrieval. In 1972, she introduced the concept of inverse document frequency, which most search engines still rely on.

Often called "the Mother of the Internet," Radia Perlman's work on spanning tree protocol enabled the development of modern networking. She holds more than 100 patents, which is what mothers do best.