Elsie Shutt

Elsie Shutt
Born 1928 (age 87–88)
New York City
Education Goucher College (B.A.)
Occupation
  • Technology entrepreneur

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.[1] Shutt was notably one of the first woman to start a software business in the United States.[2][3]

Early life and education

Elsie Shutt was born in New York City and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. After her father died when she was four, her mother worked as a chemistry technician at Johns Hopkins Hospital.[4] Shutt attended Eastern High School in Baltimore and graduated with an undergraduate degree at age 20 from Goucher College, from which her mother had also graduated with a degree in chemistry.[2] Shutt went on to complete a graduate fellowship at Radcliffe College in mathematics. Following this, Shutt was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in France [2]

Career

Shutt 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] 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][5] 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.[5][6][7][8] Early employees, Elaine Kamowitz and Barbara Wade, also bore children. Shutt reportedly refused to hire more than 13 staff members and lead the company for more than 45 years.[2] At the time, it was highly unusual for pregnant women to continue in their professional endeavors, leading some to deem Shutt her employees "the pregnant programmers." At its peak, her company entered into contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell, Raytheon, Harvard University, and the United States Air Force[9]

References

  1. ↑ "Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding". NPR.org. Retrieved 2018-08-12.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Janet Abbate (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01806-7.
  3. ↑ "The women who shaped the computer age". 21 October 2014.
  4. ↑ Elsie Shutt: an oral history conducted in 2001 by Janet Abbate, IEEE History Center, Hoboken, NJ, USA. http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Elsie_Shutt
  5. 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
  6. ↑ Schafer, Valérie, and Benjamin G. Thierry. Connecting Women. Springer, 2015.(p.x)
  7. ↑ Shirley, Steve. "II. THE DISTRIBUTED OFFICE." Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 135.5371 (1987): 503-514.
  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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