Women pioneers transform world through technology
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Across the globe, five women have made notable contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) despite ongoing gender disparities in those fields.
While women comprise nearly 50% of workers in non-STEM fields, they only make up 29.2% of the STEM workforce, and female STEM students are twice as likely to experience gender discrimination as their non-STEM counterparts.
These challenges haven’t stopped innovators like Ada Lovelace, who in the 1840s envisioned computers as more than just calculating machines and wrote what is considered the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Later, Katherine Johnson, an American mathematician, manually calculated trajectories for NASA’s early space missions, verifying data before computers were widely used and helping John Glenn orbit the Earth in 1962.
Dame Stephanie Shirley founded Freelance Programmers in 1962 with just £6, creating a work-from-home system and using a male pseudonym to overcome gender bias. Shirley later established Autistica, an organization dedicated to autism research, after losing her son. More recently, Michelle Zatlyn co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 to improve internet security. Today, the company blocks over 182 billion cyberattacks daily and protects roughly 20% of all internet traffic.
Finally, Elizabeth Coulombe co-founded Tero, a company that creates devices turning food waste into usable fertilizer in hours, having diverted an estimated 832,000 liters of waste from landfills since 2020.
