On Ada Lovelace Day, the ENIAC programmers and Karen Spärck Jones show different ways technology’s contributors go missing from the story, and what communicators can do about it.
Technology companies come to us with very different problems. Some have a good story that nobody has heard. Others struggle to get a word in while bigger companies keep the headlines.
Doing something important doesn’t guarantee people will know about it. Ada Lovelace Day is a moment to pause and think about that.
Ada Lovelace Day is held every October, on the second Tuesday, to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It is named after Ada Lovelace, the visionary mathematician and writer. Her notes on Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine in the 1840s are often described as containing the first computer program. The day exists because contributions like hers are so easy to overlook.
There are many different reasons why women’s names are left out of technology stories. Some were excluded from the public announcement, while others earned respect within their profession, but their contribution never became widely known. Sometimes it’s as simple as the company, the machine or the person at the top becoming shorthand for the whole story.
Each of these situations raises a question for communicators: who gets the credit when we explain how technology came to be?
ENIAC was one of the earliest electronic computers. Six women programmed it, including Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton. They worked without programming languages or manuals, figuring out how to make the machine perform complex calculations. According to the ENIAC Programmers Project, when it was unveiled to the press and public in 1946, the women were not introduced. [1]
Their work was part of the demonstration. Their names weren’t.
I only came across them while researching this blog. That says nothing about what everyone else knows, but it made me think about who else is missing from the public consciousness. We talk endlessly about the pioneers of computing, and yet here were six women whose contribution I had never heard explained.
Decades later, Kathy Kleiman and the ENIAC Programmers Project researched their work, recorded their accounts and helped bring their stories to a wider audience through a documentary. [1][2]
It would be glib to slap “PR problem” on top of this. The women were not responsible for their omission. But it does show why the public account matters so much to our understanding of tech, yesterday and today. A breakthrough often gets reported, but the people who made it possible can stay on the outside of that story, and in history, that’s likely to be the women.
Karen Spärck Jones is another example of an outstanding individual in the tech world. She introduced inverse document frequency, a way of giving more weight to words that help distinguish one document from another. That work became fundamental to the information retrieval the web operates on.
Unlike the ENIAC programmers, Spärck Jones received major professional awards (Cambridge obituary). But professional recognition and public visibility are two very different things. Having your work understood within a specialist field doesn’t always mean the wider public understands the work and the impact it has had on their lives. When we explain the development of search, we tend to skip straight to the brand (Google) rather than explain the ideas behind it and name the people responsible.
A familiar company name is easy, but it can also become a shortcut that leaves much of the history out.
Every time we, as PR professionals, write an article, a press release or a social post, or facilitate an interview, we’re creating history. That should weigh on us, and it all involves choices. Who gets quoted? Whose contribution gets explained? Who appears in the headline? Who is described as a pioneer, and who gets left out of the release?
You can’t include everyone in your story, but the choices of who we include can become the public record of a technology. That record gets repeated, shortened, repeated again. Eventually, the version people remember may contain only a handful of names.
That matters commercially too. The public record is what journalists and analysts draw on when they describe a company and its technology, and increasingly it is what AI tools draw on when they answer questions about it. Businesses that name the people behind the work, and put technical specialists forward to explain it, give those audiences something specific and credible to repeat. That is how reputation gets built: through named, verifiable detail in the places people look when they make decisions. For a CMO or CEO, the people missing from your story are missing from your reputation too.
For communicators, that should prompt more than an annual list of impressive women.
When a company announces a breakthrough, we can ask who actually did the work. We can put technical specialists forward for interviews. We can explain an individual’s contribution clearly enough for someone outside their field to understand it. We can look beyond the usual spokesperson. We can push for more, for better.
The same goes for the tech industry itself. Every product rests on earlier work by people who rarely make the FAQ. If you can’t say who shaped the foundations your business sits on, perhaps it’s time to go back and try harder.
That is part of telling an accurate, interesting story that deserves to travel.
Ada Lovelace Day gives us a reason to reflect on the familiar names and question the contribution of those overlooked. In our work today, we need to look beyond the usual spokesperson and make complex contributions understandable.
Women who have helped advance innovation should have their place in history. While we can't change who was introduced at the ENIAC launch in 1946, we need to think about who is being introduced today.
[1] ENIAC Programmers Project. “Documentary Info”. Undated.
[2] IEEE Spectrum (2022). “The Computers Who Brought ENIAC to Life”. Interview with Kathy Kleiman.