Today, much of what’s possible for women in tech – like Williams – is to the credit of American icon, Grace Hopper. The computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral, born in December 1906, was once described as, “All Navy, but when you reach inside, you find a pirate dying to be released.” She is credited with developing the precursor to COBOL, a computer- programming language widely used today. Like Lovelace, Hopper started showing an interest in tech as a kid, spending her days disassembling and reassembling her family’s only alarm clock. She went on to attend Vassar College, earning a BA in physics and mathematics, after which she earned her MA from Yale in 1930, and her PhD four years later, making her one of the first women to do so. She returned to Vassar to teach math in 1931.

In 1943, however, Hopper obtained a leave of absence and joined the Navy Reserve. She graduated first in her class a year later and was assigned as a lieutenant to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she learned to program the Mark I, a general-purpose electro-mechanical computer based on Charles Babbage’s designs and Ada Lovelace’s notes. Hopper remained in the Navy as a reserve officer after the war and became a research fellow at Harvard. Although Lovelace was the first debugger, Hopper coined the term after finding an actual bug in one of the computers. By 1949, she moved into the private sector, and her team created the world’s first computer language compiler only three years later. Soon after, Hopper was recalled to active duty by the Naval Reserve to standardize communication between different computer languages. She was sixty years old at the time. After seventy-nine-year-old Hopper finally (involuntarily) retired in 1986, she continued to work as a consultant and public speaker for Digital Equipment, driven by her passion for technology until her passing in 1992.

Another female tech maven, Deena Varshavskaya, founder and CEO of Wanelo, did the reverse, using technology to fuel her passion. The Siberian native founded her company in 2012, and it’s already one of the biggest digital retailers around. Shortly after moving to the United States with her father when she was sixteen, Varshavskaya enrolled at Cornell University to study psychology, film, and computer science, but dropped out before graduating. She founded two start-ups and worked for different companies before the idea for Wanelo came to her in 2006. “Venture capitalists tend to look for patterns when they’re considering companies to invest in, and… I was a solo female founder with no technical background and no team, which is what I call the Silicon Valley plague,” she writes in an email. After forty investor rejections, Varshavskaya pressed on undeterred. “My parents taught me at a very young age to question everything and set my own rules… I wanted to find my passion and work on something meaningful,” she explains. “It’s harder than it sounds, but it’s about declaring big dreams (preferably things that seems totally impossible), then closing the gap between what you said you’d do and actually doing those things.” Varshavskaya used technology to realize an idea she knew could significantly impact an industry.

This is not entirely dissimilar to how Hedy Lamarr approached inventing. However, she wouldn’t become as successful at making a business out of it. Most people know her as one of the brightest stars of MGM’s Golden Age, but the Austrian-Hungarian beauty was also a tech pioneer. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in November 1914. She helped co-invent spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology that paved the way for today’s Wi-Fi. Although back then, she intended to create an electronics system that would allow the Allies to effectively coordinate torpedo attacks against enemy forces without their communications being intercepted.