How women helped build the internet, and why it matters

There are a couple of omnipresent narratives for the history of women in tech. One is simplistic and linear: men built computers and the internet, and now women are struggling to break in. A more nuanced version includes pioneers like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, who helped invent programming as we know it, or NASA’s “human computers,” highlighted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. But that narrative consigns women’s influence to the very beginning of computing history,