Celebrating Women in STEM
The ENIAC Programmers: ‘Refrigerator Ladies’ No More When historians first found photos of the women who coded instructions for ENIAC, the first all-electronic digital computer, they mistook them for “Refrigerator Ladies” – models posing in front of the machines. The six women Francis “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Betty “Jean” Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence had some of the greatest (which were largely overlooked) contributions to early computing in America. The group of women manually programmed the computer for the US Military, cutting down ballistic firing calculation times down from 30 hours to just a few seconds. Although their hard work was not acknowledged until long after the programmers had completed their work on ENIAC, their impact on the field is undeniable. The role of the women who programmed ENIAC was uncovered by a woman named Kathy Kleiman. As a Harvard undergrad studyi