Elsie Shutt was one of the first women to start a software business.

She was born in New York City in 1928. Her family soon relocated to Baltimore, Maryland. Her father died when she was only four. Her mother worked as a chemistry technician. It’s likely that she was inspired by her mother, as she went on to earn a chemistry degree from Goucher College - her mother’s alma mater.

She went on to complete a graduate fellowship at Radcliffe College and then became the second female teaching fellow there.

One summer, she got a job at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. There, she learned how to program on ENIAC (the first electronic general purpose computer) successor ORDVAC (Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) under Dick Clippinger.

In 1953, she was hired by Clippinger at Raytheon, an aerospace and defense manufacturing company. Under the law in Massachusetts at the time, when she became pregnant in 1957, she was forced to quit.

But Raytheon was simultaneously starting to scale back programming projects, so clients who came to the company were referred to Shutt. She worked on a freelance basis out of her home. Eventually, she saw enough business that she decided to start a company that would allow her to help clients but also employ women in a technical field, which was a rare opportunity at the time.

She founded Computations Incorporated (CompInc) in Harvard, Massachusetts. The company mostly designed programming for businesses and scientific companies. Shutt kept the company small with about 13 employees maximum. She mostly hired young mothers. She hoped to change the stereotypes of women in the workplace and wanted to show that women were more than capable of holding a technical job and raising a family.

The company was very successful. They landed many large contracts, including work on the operating system for Honeywell’s new mainframe as well as government contracts and university agreements.

There is little information about her life in the years after the company. All that’s to be found is her husband Philip’s obituary from 2012. The couple had three children.

About 60 years ago, Arlene Gwendolyn Lee “Gwen” was graduating from Allenby Junior Public School in Toronto. Upon graduation, she was given notice to continue her studies at a trade-type school across town. Her parents were furious and went to the school demanding to know why she wasn’t selected to attend the academic college-preparation academy nearby. The principal said the decision was made and noted that it might be wise for her to learn a trade before she started a family.

This anecdote of her early years comes from a blog post penned by her son, Reginald Braithwaite.

A few days later, she, her father and her two uncles returned to the school. The men shared their anger with the situation and the principal went back on the decision.

She attended North Toronto Collegiate where she learned, thrived and discovered her passion for music. She graduated and went on to attend the University of Toronto.

In her free time, she attended dances. One day, she met a man named Charles and they quickly fell in love. They hoped to rent an apartment in a nice neighborhood and live a happy life together. But because Charles was white and Gwen was black, at the time, renting a shared apartment was illegal.

They needed to buy a home to live together, but they needed to find well paying jobs to do so. Gwen saw a newspaper ad for Empire Life who hoped to hire young men for a career in data processing. The role required no previous experience and the interview was open to any men who showed up.

She went and the interviewers let her know she was in the wrong place and to go to another room for the keyboarding exam, Reginald Braithwaite wrote. She was determined to take the test though. She asked if she could and they reluctantly agreed. The questions were mostly logic based and she did extremely well. She placed in the 99th percentile and the interviewers were shocked.

In fact, they thought her responses were too good to be true and they wondered if she had cheated. They grilled her with questions, but after numerous correct answers, it became clear they’d be foolish to not give her a chance.

She became a programming analyst, the most senior position at the time. She led numerous computerization projects for the insurance and municipal fields, her son noted.

While she had a successful career, she noted that not all women can say the same.

“I had it easy,” she later told her son. “The computer didn’t care that I was a woman or that I was black. Most women had it much harder.”

She’s now retired and spends time running a small business selling books online, her son wrote.

Last year, the New York Times Magazine featured Gwen’s story, along with many other women in coding. We’ll feature them on this blog in the coming months.

Sarah Goode was an African American entrepreneur and inventor. She’s the first African American woman to officially receive a U.S. patent.

Technically, Judy W. Reed was the very first African American woman to patent an invention, but she didn’t sign hers. She only wrote “X” on the patent for an improved dough roller design.

Goode was born in 1850 to a family of slaves in Toledo, Ohio. When the Civil War ended, the family was granted freedom and moved to Chicago, Illinois. There, she met Archibald "Archie" Goode who she married and had six children with. Archie was a builder and upholsterer; the family opened a furniture store to sell their goods.

As customers came in to shop, they all seemed to have similar issues. Many lived in small, working-class apartments and didn’t have much room for furniture or storage. Average sizes of tenements were about 25 feet wide and 100 feet long.

She came up with an idea – a combination bed and desk that folded up when not in use.

When the bed was folded up, the piece served as a fully functioning roll-top desk for work or reading. At night, the bed would fold out. Along the sides were drawers and compartments for storage as well.

Her creative solution helped people feel less cramped in these small apartments and served as a precursor for other space saving inventions, like the Murphy bed.

She applied for a patent in 1885 and became the first African American woman to ever be granted one in the United States.

Sarah Goode died in Chicago in 1905 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery.

We’ve all made a mistake when writing and needed a bottle of liquid paper to correct the mistake. We can thank Bette Nesmith Graham for the ability to do so.

She was born in 1924 in Dallas, Texas. She dropped out of high school and went to secretary school. By 1951, she had worked her way up to the position of executive secretary for W.W. Overton, a high level bank executive.

In her day-to-day work, she used the newly invented IBM typewriter but quickly grew tired with having to redo an entire page when one small error occurred. She was determined to find a more efficient system.

One day, painters were decorating the bank windows for the holidays and when they made a small error, they simply painted over it with a new layer. This observation served as the inspiration for what would become her namesake invention. She mimicked what the painters did during her typewriting using white tempera paint to cover small errors.

The other secretaries loved the idea and started to request their own supplies of the paint mixture. By 1956, she had sold her first bottle of “Mistake Out” and soon recruited her son and his friends to help her with production. The boys were paid $1 an hour to fill nail polish bottles with the solution and label them. She continued to experiment with the formula until she achieved a quick-drying but opaque product. The refined product, a mixture of paint and other chemicals, was rebranded as “Liquid Paper” and she applied for a trademark and patent in 1958. She mostly kept her work a secret, but one day she accidentally signed a bank letter with the name of her private side business and she lost her job.

But, that gave her the time to fully devote herself to making her invention succeed. Graham's Liquid Paper Company experienced tremendous growth over the next decade. By 1967, the company had an automated production plan and its own office.

In 1975, they moved to a 35,000-square foot operations center in Dallas. She sold the company to Gillette Corporation four years later for $47.5 million, just six months before her death in 1980.

Her son, Michael, who is known for his membership with the 1960s rock group The Monkees, was left in charge of her fortune and nonprofits.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen is most known for her contribution in developing the first anti-fungal drug, nyastatin. She and Rachel Fuller Brown (last week’s WoW) teamed up in 1948 to make the discovery.

She was born on August 24, 1885 in Rich, Mississippi. Her parents died when she was four and she and her siblings were adopted by their aunt and uncle. She went on to attend the Mississippi University for Women and earned a Bachelor of Science in 1910. She continued her education at both the University of Tennessee and University of Virginia. While she was continuing her education, she taught high school physics and biology.

She completed her graduate studies at Columbia University as well as a Ph.D. in microbiology. She was one of the first female students there.

During World War I, she served as an Army diagnostic laboratory technician. This experience helped her get a job with the New York State Department of Health where she worked on bacterial diagnosis. Some of her work there included tracing improperly preserved foods and an outbreak of anthrax.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen (left) and Rachel Fuller Brown (right).

From there, she worked at the New York office of the Division of Laboratories and Research of the State Department of Public Health and studied fungi and fungal diseases. In 1944, she was chosen alongside Rachel Fuller Brown to spearhead an investigation on fungi. Hazen specifically studied diseases that were spread across New York.

Soon, she had a growing collection of fungi and potential antifungal agents. Alongside Brown, she worked to look for an antifungal agent.

Microorganisms (animals or plants of microscopic size) called actinomycetes were known to produce antibiotics. Brown started to work on them and found that they did kill fungus but they were also fatal to mice.

They narrowed her microorganism search to one in particular, Streptomyces norsei, which was found in soil on her friend’s dairy farm in Virginia.

She purified the antibiotic and in 1950, Brown and Hazen announced the discovery. They patented it under the name "nystatin" in honor of the New York State Division of Laboratories and Research.

It became popular as medicine but also for preserving art and helping to cure diseases on trees.

In her later life, she continued research and tried to find new uses for nystatin. She died June 24, 1975 in Seattle, Washington.