August 26 is Women’s Equality Day.
On this date in 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, granting American women the right to vote. It took 72 years of organizing, protesting, and refusing to be ignored. And even then, the right wasn’t equally accessible to all women. Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color faced barriers that persisted for decades after.
Progress doesn’t arrive all at once. It gets built, piece by piece, by people who insist on it.
The Women Who Built the Foundation
The tech industry likes to pretend it invented itself. A bunch of guys in garages, changing the world.
The real history is different.
Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm in the 1840s, a century before computers existed. Grace Hopper developed the first compiler and helped create COBOL, a language still running financial systems today. Margaret Hamilton wrote the code that landed humans on the moon. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson did the math that made space flight possible while working in a segregated facility.
The ENIAC programmers, six women who programmed one of the first general-purpose computers, weren’t even credited in the original press photos. The men stood next to the machine. The women who made it work were left out of the frame.
This isn’t ancient history. Radia Perlman invented the spanning tree protocol that makes network switches work. Dr. Marian Croak holds over 200 patents and pioneered Voice over IP technology. Jen Simmons and Rachel Andrew helped shape modern CSS layout. Joy Buolamwini is exposing bias in AI systems right now.
The web, the code, the networks, the devices. Women built the foundation. They’re still building.
What Equality Actually Looks Like
Equality isn’t a finish line. It’s not “we fixed it, we’re done.”
Women make up about 27% of the tech workforce. In leadership roles, that number drops further. The gap is wider for women of color. Pay disparities persist. Funding for women-led startups remains a fraction of what goes to male founders.
These aren’t complaints. They’re facts. And facts are the starting point for change.
What does progress look like in practice?
It looks like hiring decisions based on skills, not assumptions. Flexible work arrangements that acknowledge caregiving responsibilities don’t fall equally. Pay audits that catch gaps before they become lawsuits. Leadership pipelines that don’t mysteriously empty out at the mid-career level. Credit given where credit is due.
It also looks like the small stuff. Listening in meetings. Not interrupting. Amplifying good ideas regardless of who said them. Not assuming the woman on the Zoom call is the note-taker.
None of this is revolutionary. It’s just intentional.
Why This Matters for Business
This isn’t just a moral argument. It’s a business one.
Diverse teams make better decisions. Companies with women in leadership outperform those without. Products designed by diverse teams work better for diverse users. (Turns out, when everyone on your team looks the same, you build products that work for people who look like your team.)
The businesses that figure this out have an advantage. The ones that don’t are leaving money on the table and limiting their own potential.
At YellowWebMonkey, we don’t have to theorize about what women-led teams can do. We are one.
Our entire team is women. The developers, the designers, the strategists, the project managers. Women. We build websites, solve problems, manage servers, and help businesses grow. We’ve been doing it since 2009.
This wasn’t a marketing decision. It’s just how things evolved. We hired the best people for the job. They happened to be women. And we’ve built a company culture around flexibility, accountability, and getting the work done, the kind of environment where talented people want to stay.
We work with women business owners. We work with veteran-owned businesses, including women veterans like Cheri Owen of Hearing the Light. We see every day what women can build when they’re given the opportunity and the support.
The Work Continues
Women’s Equality Day is a reminder, not a celebration of completion.
The 19th Amendment was a starting point, not an ending. The women who fought for it didn’t see the full results of their work. Some of them died before the amendment passed. Others lived long enough to vote but not long enough to see women in Congress, in boardrooms, in mission control.
Progress is generational. The women building today are building on foundations laid by women who never got credit, never got paid fairly, and never got to see how far things would go.
That’s how it works. You build what you can. You push where you can. You make it a little better for the people who come after.
A Simple Acknowledgment
Today we acknowledge the women who fought for the right to vote 106 years ago. The women who wrote the code we still use. The women building businesses, raising families, and pushing for change right now.
And we acknowledge that we get to do this work, as an all-women team, because of the women who came before us.
The work isn’t done. But it’s moving forward. Let’s honor the trailblazers who paved the way by continuing to empower today’s girls to raise their voices, break barriers, and shape a more just world. Check out A Mighty Girl to explore inspiring stories, books, and resources that celebrate courageous women throughout history.
Happy Women’s Equality Day.
