Kathy Kleiman is an attorney and technologist practicing Internet law in Alexandria, Va. She is also the director of the ACM's Internet Governance Project, and a former programmer.

After hearing about ENIAC women during her undergraduate program in social theory and conducting exhaustive research, Kleiman wrote about pioneering women for a women's history class. Thanks to a study grant from Radcliffe, she attended ENIAC's 40th anniversary celebration in 1986. She met the programmers personally and learned that unlike most women who had worked in "men's jobs," such as welding, during the war, the ENIAC programmers continued on, because none of the returning soldiers had programming knowledge. "Most [of the women] would say that they were incredibly lucky to be involved at the time they were involved, in doing the work they were doing," Kleiman notes.

She wants to find funding to bring their story to a wider audience because "I'd like to let women and men and girls and boys know that computing is not just for geeks," she says, "that amazingly interesting, bright, creative women were the first programmers, and that the industry still needs amazingly interesting, bright, creative people."

Publications