{"id":649,"date":"2017-04-24T01:42:01","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T06:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mariehicks.net\/blog\/?p=649"},"modified":"2019-07-26T01:12:45","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T06:12:45","slug":"the-women-of-woomera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/?p=649","title":{"rendered":"The Women of Woomera"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I was on National Radio Sydney in Australia talking about women in computing. I didn&#8217;t actually get to go to Australia&#8211;the show was taped via phone&#8211;but I did get a taste of some fascinating Australian history of computing. The show&#8217;s producer shared records about the women computer programmers who worked at Woomera missile testing range in the 1950s and 1960s with me. Woomera was a joint initiative set up by the UK and Australian governments to give Britain a place to test its long-range weapons. Women there did a lot of similar computer work as women in the UK and the US who worked on ballistics research by computer. A 1964 article from the Canberra Times, for instance, tells the story of &#8220;Mrs. Emily Hurt, an expert from the Honeywell Electronic Data Processing Company,&#8221; yet does so under the (somewhat incorrect) headline &#8220;Unusual Career for a Woman.&#8221; The article also leads with &#8220;She met the man she was to marry over the computers&#8230;&#8221; before talking about her technical skills and actual work.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/radionational\/programs\/latenightlive\/programmed-inequality:-how-britain-discarded-woman-technologist\/8449600\">Hear more in my full interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I was on National Radio Sydney in Australia talking about women in computing. I didn&#8217;t actually get to go to Australia&#8211;the show was taped via phone&#8211;but I did get a taste of some fascinating Australian history of computing. The show&#8217;s producer shared records about the women computer programmers who worked at Woomera missile testing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-computing","category-sts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}