Top Female Programmers and Coders Around the World

Let’s build gender equality! We should all agree that women have failed to gain equality, there is no country in the world that achieved gender equality and that’s why we should all be calling out for a world where men and women are treated in exactly the same way, where they both are equal. Men and women are both part of the whole, the world could not keep moving without any of them, but women should be treated equally when it comes to education, work, sports, wealth, health, and every other aspect that is building the personality of a person.

#EachforEqual is the theme of the International Women’s Day 2020 and since this is a whole month dedicated for women, their achievements, and their movements to gain their rights, we decided to shed the lights on the top female programmers and coders in the world.

Famous Female Programmers and Coders

Every woman is powerful enough to fight bias and help create gender equality. Every woman is powerful enough to compete with men in different fields when it comes to work. Every woman is powerful enough to broaden perceptions, improve situations, and celebrate her own achievements.

When it comes to coding and programming, men are usually taking the lead in this field and coming directly into the bigger picture which has always been considered by a lot of people hard for women to work in it. In fact, there are different women out there with recognizable achievements done in the field of coding and programming, those who we should shed the lights on, keep remembering, and mention whenever possible.

Here are some of the famous female names who managed to do great achievements in the world of programming and coding.

• Ada Lovelace

Did you know that the first computer programmer was a woman? A lot of people are unaware of this piece of information, they believe that men were the ones to start it all. Ada Lovelace was the first female programmer in the world, she was a mathematician in Victorian Times and known for her contributions to the mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage.

Ada Lovelace was also the first person to realize that Analytical Engine could be used for more than just calculations and that’s why she wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine, and this made her the first computer programmer in the world.

• Margaret Hamilton

If we decided to look at the numbers then definitely, we will find that men are dominating the world of programming, but according to what has been done in the field, women have done great achievements that made them equal to men. Margaret Hamilton was the director of Software Engineering Division at MIT who wrote the code for Apollo Guide Computer (AGC) from scratch, this led to the first moon landing possible and spawned a new industry. Since then, Hamilton became an expert in systems programming. Hamilton also created the Universal Systems Language and founded a company for that called Hamilton Technologies Inc.

For her achievements, Margaret Hamilton was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama in 2016, which is considered the highest civilian honor in the United States.

• Grace Hopper

She was known as the “Queen of Software’’ for the way she decided to make code easier to read by humans. Grace Hopper is an American computer scientist and a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy who was behind the creation of COBOL back in 1959, which is one of the high-level programming languages still used today. Hooper believed that opening up computing to business and non-scientific applications required simpler programming languages and that’s why she developed a means using words rather than numbers, COBOL the most known of them which stands for Common Business Oriented Language.

• Joan Clarke

Joan Clarke was an English cryptanalyst who was well known for her role as a code breaker during the Second World War and who was the only woman there to work on decrypting the German Enigma messages. Did you know that regardless of all this, Clarke was getting paid less than her male coworkers?

During her time, there was no policy in place for a senior cryptanalyst who was a female and that’s why she was eventually promoted to a linguist so that she might get a pay-raise, even though she didn’t know any other languages.

• Marissa Mayer

Even though her name might be always linked to Yahoo, since she has been known as the CEO of Yahoo before the company was sold, Marissa Mayer contributed in other work that made her name recognizable as well in the world of programming and coding. Mayer worked for Google, she was the company’s twentieth employee and the first female engineer who helped in creating products for Google, such as Google Maps, Google News, and Gmail.

In every field out there, you will find at least one woman with outstanding achievements which you might have never heard about, or you will find a woman struggling to get paid equally like her male colleagues just for the fact that the world believes that specific fields are linked to men only. Men and women are equal and the whole world should call out for their equality in everything; media coverage, workplaces, health and wealth, sports coverage, etc.

These are the women we always get inspired by in our field, coding and programming, the ones who took the lead to encourage other women to do what they love even if they will be the first ones to do so.

Subscribe and learn how to code through our game-based platform. Someday you or your child might be featured in an article with an achievement in the field.

Happy International Women’s Day; it’s not just for a day, but equality should go for the whole year.