Questão de Inglês — Adjetivos | Adjectives — CESPE / CEBRASPE 2023

     Tracy Chou is a 31-year-old programmer — and “an absolute rock star,” as her former boss Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, once said. Yet for all her street cred, Chou still finds herself grappling with one of the biggest problems in the industry: Female programmers are regarded skeptically, and sometimes even treated with flat-out hostility. She’s seen the same pattern of behavior personally during her decade in coding: colleagues who muse openly about whether women are biologically less wired to be great programmers.

       There’s a deep irony here — because women were in computing from its earliest days. Indeed, they were considered essential back when “computers” were not even yet machines. Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans. And for a time, a large portion of them were women.

      Soon, the human computers faced an even more existential threat: digital computers, which promised to work with far greater speed and to handle complex math.

         Women, though, were among the original coders of these strange new digital brains, because in the early days programming was seen as dull work. The earliest programmers for the Eniac — the military-funded first programmable general-purpose computer — were entirely women. And though they wound up inventing brilliant coding techniques, they received none of the glory: When the Army showed off the Eniac to the press, it did not introduce the women who had written the code.

Internet: <smithsonianmag.com>(adapted).