On Women’s Equality Day, Southwest Florida women look back

Amelia Earhart flew solo. Rosa Parks refused to get up and Sally Ride went way, way up. Those women are pioneers of their time. They are some of the famous women in history, but not the only ones.

Ruth Anderson uses a laptop and an iPhone, both are technologies she helped develop decades ago.

“There are quite a few books written about women programmers in World War II to help in the war,” Ruth said, “and I was one of them.”

Ruth, 101 years old, was born in Boston. She is a rarity as she went to college in the 1930s during the Great Depression while most women were expected to get married and tend to the house.

Ruth told WINK News, when she went to college, the primary profession for a woman was to be a teacher, a nurse or a secretary. She graduated from Boston Teachers College, which is now part of the University of Massachusetts.

During World War II, many new opportunities opened up to women. American men, who went off foreign continents to serve their country, left open jobs that women filled.

“I was lucky I majored in math and that’s how I got a job at MIT with a bunch of scientists,” said Ruth, referring to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a historic school in Boston.

Ruth was part of a research team developing radar technology. It is a team that may have been all men, were it not for the war.

“Everything fell into place for me,” Ruth said.

Higher education and the job force look a lot different than in Ruth’s day. Women now make up 51% of the workforce, but a significant pay gap still exists. Women earn 79 cents to each dollar a man makes.

Now, women outnumber men at colleges in the United States. More women are going into STEM fields – a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines – than any other industry.

Ruth charted a path years before the west coast of the country became a tech and innovation hub. After the second war, she moved to California to work for the Navy to develop drones.

“Very few people had gone to the west coast then,” Ruth said, “so I was sort of a pioneer in that respect.”

Ruth has witnessed a constantly changing history in our country. She remembers a lot, including the civil rights, feminist and Me Too movements, along with the woman’s reproductive and equal pay rights.

Ruth said that woman working in the government is the most significant change in the last century.

“We’ve had our first women, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; the first Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,” Ruth said. “We almost had a female president, but we didn’t make it. So lots of changes.”

Our progress is the result of many women, like Ruth, whose names are not written in history books. However, through hard work and determination, these women have collectively moved our society on a forward path to greater women’s equality.

While she acknowledges things are different nowadays, there is still more work to do.

“Women have to do things twice as well as men in order to get half as much credit”