Women in Computing from Colossus to the present

You'll have read about the restoration of Bletchley Park's WWII code breaking computer Colossus. While that project grabbed the headlines, a report into the lives of the women who operated code breaking machines and computers concluded at about the same time.

iPM has had an early chance to hear from the authors of that report and the surviving Bletchley women they interviewed. It provides an important insight into the contribution of women to the early days of computing - a contribution that goes right back to arguably the first computer programmer Ada Lovelace. Worryingly in researching this piece we also discovered that the gender divide in IT is getting worse not better. Dr Jan Peters of the British Computer Society is one of the authors of the report, in the audio below she talks about the lives of the women at Bletchley

Dr Sue Black of the University of Westminster and BCSWomen also worked on the research. She talks about the current situation of women in the computer business, it's a worrying picture but the solution is far from clear.

UPDATE: There are some unpublished comments which for some reason are refusing to appear in the blog. If they don't appear soon I may personally go downstairs and hit the servers with a stick.

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