GREAT DAMES at the FOREFRONT of COMPUTING
- Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), analyst of Charles Babbage's analytical engine and described as the "first computer programmer"
- Henrietta Swan Leavitt instrumental in discovery of the cepheid variable stars, which were evidence for the expansion of the universe.
- Grete Hermann publishes the foundational paper for computerized algebra
- Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000), co-inventor of an early form of spread-spectrum broadcasting
- Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman, original programmers of the ENIAC
- Grace Hopper (1906–1992), United States Navy officer and first programmer of the Harvard Mark I, known as the "Mother of COBOL". Developed the first evercompiler for an electronic computer known as A-0.
- Dana Ulery (1938-), computer scientist; first female engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, 40-bit word size computer.
- Jean E. Sammet (1928-), mathematician and computer scientist; developed FORMAC programming language. Was the first to write extensively about history and categorisation of programming languages (1969).
- Mary Allen Wilkes computer programmer; First person to use a computer in a private home and the first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer (LINC) 1965
- Sister Mary Kenneth Keller (1914 - 1985) first American female Doctorate of Computer Science (1965)
- Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), pioneer of information retrieval and natural language processing
- Lynn Conway (1938-), led the "LSI Systems" group; co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems
- Sophie Wilson (?), designed the Acorn Microcomputer.
- Adele Goldberg (1945-), one of the designers and developers of the Smalltalk language
- Roberta Williams (1953-), pioneering work in graphical adventure games for personal computers, particularly the King's Quest series.
- Susan Kare (1954-), created the icons and many of the interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, was an original employee of NeXT, working as the Creative Director.
- Radia Perlman (1951-), invented the Spanning Tree Protocol. Has done extensive and innovative research, particularly on encryption and networking. USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award 2007, among numerous others.
- Éva Tardos (1957-), recipient of the Fulkerson Prize for her research on design and analysis of algorithms
- Shafi Goldwasser (1958-), theoretical computer scientist, two-time recipient of the Gödel Prize for research on complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory, and the invention of zero-knowledge proofs.
- Barbara Liskov together with Jeannette Wing develops the Liskov substitution principle
- Sally Floyd (~1953-), most renowned for her work on Transmission Control Protocol
- Jeri Ellsworth (1974-), self-taught computer chip designer and creator of the C64 Direct-to-TV
