In May 1948, women were strikingly prominent in ACM. Founded just months earlier as the "Eastern Association for Computing Machinery," the new professional society boldly aimed to "advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information."36 No fewer than 27 women were ACM members, and many were leaders in the emerging field.a Among them were the pioneer programmers Jean Bartik, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Snyder of ENIAC fame; the incomparable Grace Murray Hopper who soon energized programming languages; Florence Koons from the National Bureau of Standards and U.S. Census Bureau; and noted mathematician-programmer Ida Rhodes.26 During the war, Gertrude Blanch had organized a massive human computing effort (a mode of computation made visible in the 2016 film Hidden Figures47) and, for her later service to the US Air Force, became "one of the most well-known computer scientists and certainly the most visible woman in the field."24,25 Mina Rees, a mathematics Ph.D. like Hopper and Blanch, notably funded mathematics and computing through the Office of Naval Research (1946–1953), later serving as the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1949, Rees was among the 33 women (including at least seven ACM women) who participated in an international conference at Harvard University, chairing a heavyweight session on "Recent Developments in Computing Machinery."29

Paul Daugherty is chief technology officer at Accenture. Cracking the Gender Code, a research report produced jointly by Accenture and Girls Who Code, can be downloaded here. The chasm between the number of job openings in today's digital economy and the number of skilled workers available is growing in the wrong direction and threatening the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Fact No. 1: In 2015, there were 500,000 new computing jobs available in the U.S., but as recently as 2014, fewer than 40,000 new computer science graduates to fill them. This shortage will continue to grow as rapid advances in mobile, cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies continue to redefine business, society and the global economy.