Elsie Shutt

Elsie Shutt (née Goedeke, born 1928) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. She founded Computations Incorporated (CompInc) in 1957, when she was not permitted to work part-time at home after she became pregnant. Shutt was one of the first women to start a software business in the United States.

Early life and education
Elsie Shutt was born in New York City and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Her mother worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital following her father's death when she was four. Shutt attended Eastern High School in Baltimore and graduated from Goucher College at age 20, where her mother had also graduated with a chemistry degree. She later completed a graduate fellowship in mathematics at Radcliffe College. Shutt's accomplishments include becoming Harvard's second female teaching fellow in maths, succeeding Lisl Novak Gaal. Additionally, she holds the distinction of being the first female graduate student to teach remedial trigonometry to Harvard students. Subsequently, Shutt received a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in France.

Early years
Shutt learned to program on ENIAC successor ORDVAC (Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) under Dick Clippinger during a summer job at U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. In 1953 Shutt was hired at Raytheon (an aerospace and defense manufacturing company) by her old boss, Dick Clippinger. There, she started work on software for the Raycom computer. When she became pregnant in 1957, Massachusetts state law required her to quit Raytheon. However, Raytheon began to refer Shutt to their clients because the company was scaling back its outside programming projects. Shutt began doing freelance programming work from her home. This work was done for over a year with her friend Irma Wyman. Shutt eventually decided to start a business that would give women part-time work in this technical field.

Computations Incorporated
Shutt founded Computations Incorporated (Comp Inc.) in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1957 as a primarily-female company, to provide more secure employment than freelancing for women with children and to prove that women could still hold programming occupations while taking care of a family—having a baby did not detract from their technical expertise. As it was unusual for pregnant people to continue in their careers at the time, some dubbed Shutt and her employees "the pregnant programmers." Shutt reportedly refused to hire more than 13 staff members and led the company for more than 45 years, preferentially hiring young women with young children with an aim to increase employees' chances of full time programming employment after their children had grown older. Low-experienced employees had access to training programs to further pursue this aim. Comp Inc. employed a few men, but most hires were women, particularly at the partner level, who were all women.

The company utilized systems analysis and design along with programming help for primary clients such as the United States government and the science, education, and business industries. Computations, Inc. also emphasized “desk-checking” between employees (manually checking each other's code), and clients claimed they saved as much as 50% by outsourcing to Shutt's company. At its peak, her company entered into contracts with Minneapolis-Honeywell, Raytheon, St. Regis Paper Co., Harvard University, The University of Rochester, and the United States Air Force.

Personal life
Shutt was married to her husband Phillip, with whom she had three children. During her career, Shutt had the support of her husband: emotionally, financially, and domestically. She even hired a babysitter to work every Wednesday so she could offer that day without having to tell the client she would have to look for a sitter.