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Hidden Her-story: The Top-Secret “Rosies” of World War IICreated by Gerry Bayne (EDUCAUSE) on January 30, 2009
This hour and ten minute podcast features a keynote speech by LeAnn Erickson, Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Her speech, "Hidden Her-story: The Top-Secret "Rosies" of World War II," was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Philidelphia. As you read this, somewhere in the United States a young college woman is completing a class assignment on a computer, i-chatting with a friend in another country, or perhaps blogging about the day's activities on her own website. She uses sophisticated technology every day, but the odds are she is not working toward a career in the computer field. Today less than one-third of computer engineers and scientists are women, while fewer than one in four computer programmers are female. What might this co-ed think if she knew that 60 years earlier six women not much older than she helped make computer technology a working reality? Would she think differently about a future career if she knew that a 26-year-old woman wrote the first computer manual? In 1942, only months after the United States entered World War II, a secret military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike recruiting “Rosie” to the factory, this search targeted female mathematicians who would become human "computers" for the U.S. Army. These women worked around-the-clock shifts creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied victory. “Rosie” made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was invented to aid ballistic calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers. “Top Secret ´Rosies’: The Female ´Computers’ of WWII” is a documentary project currently in postproduction that will share this untold story of the women and technology that helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age. Impact:
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