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Elsie Shutt

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Elsie Shutt
Born1928 (age 95–96)
New York City
EducationGoucher College (B.A.)
Occupation
Known for“The excitement of designing a system: . . . finding out what the problem is; analyzing it; designing something that will make it work; doing it; seeing it work, and having a client who is happy with it. That’s very satisfying.” - Elsie Shutt, 2001

Elsie Shutt (née Goedeke, born 1928) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. She found Computations Incorporated (Comp Inc) in 1957, when she was not permitted to work part-time at home after she became pregnant. Shutt was one of the first women to start a software business in the United States.[1][2][3]

Early life and education

Elsie Shutt was born in New York City and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Her mother worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital following her father's death when she was four. Shutt attended Eastern High School in Baltimore and graduated from Goucher College at age 20, where her mother had also graduated with a chemistry degree. She later completed a graduate fellowship in mathematics at Radcliffe College. Shutt's accomplishments include becoming Harvard's second female teaching fellow in maths, succeeding Lisl Novak Gaal. Additionally, she holds the distinction of being the first female graduate student to teach remedial trigonometry to Harvard students. Subsequently, Shutt received a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in France. [4][2]

Career

Early years

Shutt learned to program on ENIAC successor ORDVAC (Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) under Dick Clippinger during a summer job at U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.[2][5] In 1953 Shutt was hired at Raytheon (an aerospace and defense manufacturing company) by her old boss, Dick Clippinger. There, she started work on software for the Raycom computer.[2][6] When she became pregnant in 1957, Massachusetts state law required her to quit Raytheon.[2] However, Raytheon began to refer Shutt to their clients because the company was scaling back its outside programming projects. Shutt began doing freelance programming work from her home.[2][4] This work was done for over a year with her friend Irma Wyman.[2] Shutt eventually decided to start a business that would give women part-time work in this technical field.[2][5]

Computations Incorporated

Shutt founded Computations Incorporated (Comp Inc.) in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1957 as a primarily-female company, to provide more secure employment than freelancing for women with children and to prove that women could still hold programming occupations while taking care of a family — having a baby did not detract from their technical expertise.[7] Elsie Shutt's founding of Computations Incorporated in 1957 was groundbreaking at a time when few women worked in the male-dominated field of computer science. According to Janet Abbate, author of Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing, Shutt was among the early pioneers who showed that women could excel in programming and systems analysis while managing family responsibilities. Comp Inc. became known for its high-quality software solutions, which were provided to major clients such as Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force.[8] As it was unusual for pregnant people to continue in their careers at the time, some dubbed Shutt and her employees "the pregnant programmers".[9][10] Shutt reportedly refused to hire more than 13 staff members and led the company for more than 45 years, preferentially hiring young women with young children with an aim to increase employees' chances of full time programming employment after their children had grown older.[7] Low-experienced employees had access to training programs to further pursue this aim.[7] Comp Inc. employed a few men, but most hires were women, particularly at the partner level, who were all women.[7]

The company utilized systems analysis and design along with programming help for primary clients such as the United States government and the science, education, and business industries.[7][10] Computations, Inc. also emphasized “desk-checking” between employees (manually checking each other's code), and clients claimed they saved as much as 50% by outsourcing to Shutt's company.[11] At its peak, her company entered into contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell,[10] Raytheon,[10] St. Regis Paper Co.,[10] Harvard University,[10] The University of Rochester,[10] and the United States Air Force.[10][12]

Personal life

Shutt was married to her husband Phillip, with whom she had three children.[13] During her career, Shutt had the support of her husband: emotionally, financially, and domestically. She even hired a babysitter to work every Wednesday so she could offer that day without having to tell the client she would have to look for a sitter.[14]

References

  1. ^ "Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding". NPR.org. Retrieved 2018-08-12.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Janet Abbate (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01806-7.
  3. ^ Janet Abbate (21 October 2014). "The women who shaped the computer age". Theweek.com.
  4. ^ a b "Oral-History:Elsie Shutt - Engineering and Technology History Wiki". Ethw.org. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  5. ^ a b Thompson, Clive (13 February 2019). "The Secret History of Women in Coding". The New York Times. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  6. ^ Eliana Keinan (2017). "A New Frontier: But for Whom? An Analysis of the Micro-Computer and Women's Declining Participation in Computer Science". Scholarship.claremont.edu. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  7. ^ a b c d e Janet Abbate (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01806-7.
  8. ^ "Recoding Gender". MIT Press. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
  9. ^ "Oral-History:Elsie Shutt - Engineering and Technology History Wiki". Ethw.org. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h "Mixing Math and Motherhood". Business Week: 86–87. March 1963.
  11. ^ Abbate, Janet (2012). Recoding Gender. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9014.001.0001. ISBN 9780262305464.
  12. ^ Betty Friedan (1998). It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement. Harvard University Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-674-46885-6.
  13. ^ "PHILIP SHUTT Obituary (2012) - Harvard, MA - Boston Globe". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  14. ^ Abbate, Janet (2012). Recoding Gender. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9014.001.0001. ISBN 9780262305464.

[1]Further reading

"Mixing Math and Motherhood". Business Week, March 2, 1963, 86.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference :2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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