Elsie Shutt


Elsie Shutt is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who founded Computations Incorporated in 1957, when Massachusetts law required her to quit her job after she became pregnant. Shutt was notably one of the first women to start a software business not only in the United States but the entire world.

Early life and education

Elsie Shutt was born in New York City and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. After her father died when she was four, her mother worked as a chemistry technician at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Shutt attended Eastern High School in Baltimore and graduated with an undergraduate degree at age 20 from Goucher College, from which her mother had also graduated with a degree in chemistry. Shutt went on to complete a graduate fellowship at Radcliffe College in mathematics. She became the second ever female teaching fellow after Lisl Novak Gaal. Shutt also taught remedial trigonometry to Harvard students, the first female graduate student to do so. Following this, Shutt was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in France

Career

Early Years

Shutt learned to program on ENIAC successor ORDVAC under Dick Clippinger during a summer job at U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. In 1953 Shutt was hired at Raytheon by her old boss, Dick Clippinger. There, she started work on software for the Raycom computer. When she became pregnant in 1957, Massachusetts state law required her to quit Raytheon. However, Raytheon began to refer Shutt to their clients because the company was scaling back its outside programming projects. Shutt began doing freelance programming work from her home. This work was done for over a year with her friend Irma Wyman. Shutt eventually decided to pursue the entrepreneurial venture of starting a business that would give women part time work in this technical field, an opportunity that was nonexistent before.

Computations Incorporated

Shutt founded Computations Incorporated in 1957 as a primarily all-female company in the early era when software companies worked part time from homes as freelancers. CompInc, a Harvard, Massachusetts based company, utilized systems analysis and design along with programming help for both the business and scientific industries. Early employees, Elaine Kamowitz and Barbara Wade, who previously worked as freelancers before being incorporated, also bore children. Shutt reportedly refused to hire more than 13 staff members and lead the company for more than 45 years. At the time, it was highly unusual for pregnant women to continue in their professional endeavors, leading some to dub Shutt and her employees "the pregnant programmers." She began CompInc to prove that women could still hold programming occupations while taking care of a family—having a baby did not detract from their technical expertise. Shutt employed preferential hiring of young women with little children. She hoped that by doing this she would increase a woman's chance of getting a full time job as a programmer once her children grew up. Even women with no experience were hired because there was a training program in place. CompInc's employees were mainly women with a few men, but all the partners were women. The company's primary clients were the United States government and the science, education, and business industries. At its peak, her company entered into contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell, Raytheon, , Harvard University, The University of Rochester, and the United States Air Force.