Woman of the Week – Elsie Shutt

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.