Women made up roughly 30% of computer programmers well into the 1970s. Today, this number is lower. The 1980s—a time when women enrollment rates in computer science programs were at its lowest—represent a crucial period for the rise of computing gaming. Across the decade, images of the weird, brilliant, male computer hacker began to take hold of the media’s attention, showing up in storylines for major movies and popular accounts, but neglecting the important work of women in that process. We want to change this misrepresentation of women in the gaming industry by establishing their presence into the historical archives.

Atari Women is a research project which is part of FemTech.dk organised in collaboration between the Human Centred Computing (HCC) Section at University of Copenhagen, in Denmark and the Human Centred Design & Engineering (HCDE) Department at  University of Washington, Seattle, USA.