HP wouldn’t be HP without these 7 history-making women

If necessity is the mother of invention, women have been a necessity for invention at Hewlett-Packard (now HP Inc.) over the course of its 84-year history. 

Take Betty Porter Sox, a scrappy math whiz from Long Beach, California, who became the first female computer programmer at HP and one of the first in the world. “She loved being the only woman in the room,” says her daughter Nancy Sox, reflecting on how her mother, who passed away this year at 99, embraced smashing gender barriers as much as she loved being a tech innovator. “She was compelled to compete with everyone over everything.” 

Sox was among a lineage of women at HP who shaped the company — and the annals of technology — in more ways than we can fathom.

Women have been on the front lines at Hewlett-Packard from the start, like Marjorie Kidd and Barbara Ames who worked in the drafting department during World War II and whose detailed drawing boards enabled faster, more accurate production, to Caroline Kusske who fine-tuned HP’s original winding equipment in 1946 making it more efficient, to Lynn Tillman, a lab development manager, who designed the keyboard and programming for the financial calculator in the early 1970s, to the many women who worked in public relations, marketing and communications all the way to the top, which was the case for Carly Fiorina who made history as CEO in 1999, becoming the first woman to head a Dow 30 firm. Today, 30% of those in leadership roles at HP are women, nearly double the industry standard.

With HP’s new goal of achieving gender and racial parity in leadership roles by 2030, and because March is Women’s History Month, we look back at the visionary women who made HP what it is today.

Gladys Anenson, first female machinist at HP

In 1946, the iconic Rosie the Riveter’s tenure on the factory floor was on the wane, but Gladys Anenson’s 35 years at HP was on the rise. The seventh of nine siblings from South Dakota, Anenson, (née Thomas) had moved to the Bay Area, met and married Henry Anenson, and was widowed young. In 1943, she was hired at a four-year-old electronic testing company run out of a Palo Alto garage. At first, she was tasked with assembling small parts in Hewlett-Packard’s machine shop. The foreman, observing her talent at engraving — a skill needed to inscribe words on the front instrument panels of electronic equipment in the days before silk-screening knobs and dials became the norm — made her the first female machinist in the company’s Redwood Building. She was promoted to department supervisor, the first woman in that role at the company in 1946. Some 20 years later, Anenson became a printed circuit board designer and eventually retired from HP as a supervisor in 1978.

Edna MacLean, first female engineer at HP

MacLean had been working for HP as a part-time lab tech in R&D while she completed her degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Upon graduation, she became a full-time production engineer in 1953, kicking off a long career she later called “challenging and rewarding for the right woman,” frequently writing about her work in HP publications. But she assured women hoping for jobs as engineers: “Future opportunities for women in technical fields can only increase.”

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Betty Porter Sox, first female computer programmer at HP

Recently widowed with two small children, Betty Porter Sox was working as a volunteer in Palo Alto when she met Bill Hewlett. She had graduated from Stanford University Summa Cum Laude in Physics in 1946, and hearing of his newly formed electronics company, asked him for a job. Hewlett hired her in 1956, the start of a storied 47-year career. Known as Betty Badenhop at the time, she developed the corporate payroll system that was used for over 35 years and wrote hundreds of data processing programs. “She was very good at math and always the smartest person in the room, which led to her being on that original team of six who learned to program or code as we call it now,” says  Nancy Sox, who joined her mother at HP in the 1970s in the accounting department. “Because one of the things she handled was payroll, she knew how much everyone made and was the highest paid woman at the company for a while. But there were a lot of women writing code at the time. It was a great place for women.”

Jane Evans, first female engineering grad hired at HP 

Jane Evans may not have been the first female engineer at HP, but the applications engineer’s 25-year-career at the company was marked by many firsts, including being the first female engineering graduate the company hired back in 196, shortly after she had smashed the glass ceiling at California State University at San Jose as the first woman to earn an electrical engineering bachelor’s degree.

The Houston native had earned her bachelor of science in chemistry from Rice University and worked at Union Carbide in Texas, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, and the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, but leaned into tech after moving to the Bay Area with her husband, John Evans, a nuclear physicist. At HP, Evans helped shape the company into the electronics powerhouse it became, innovating the first atomic clock, several instruments and RTE, a real-time operating system, as well as marketing these products to consumers. Asked about the burgeoning women’s rights movement by HP’s Watts Currents magazine in 1970, Evans said: “My hope for the future is a society where each person can contribute his, or her, something of value without having to waste any Iife force overcoming prejudice.” This role model to generations of women engineers was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame in 1999.

Emily Duncan, early diversity advocate at HP

Not all pioneering women at HP have science degrees. Just ask Emily Duncan, who began her two-decades long career at the company in 1985, becoming its first female manager of corporate work force diversity in 1993, and later became the vice president of culture and diversity in 1997.  In the early '90s Duncan launched HP’s diversity-related initiative Accelerated Development Program (ADP) to augment the number of women and minorities in senior management positions. The program offered some 50 high-achieving employees mentorship, pairing each one with an executive at the company, and programming monthly meetings so participants could emerge more confident, with an expanded network and the skills and experience needed to rise within the company. The merits of her program were borne out by data, which showed that from 2001 to 2003, 80% of ADP participants received promotions. Through ADP and other initiatives, she showed that diversity was a good business decision, as well as a moral imperative to create a more equitable workplace and world. “Understanding how to manage and value diversity is critical for HP’s future success,” Duncan has said.

Dr. Qian Lin, first female Fellow at HP

Growing up in China, Dr. Qian Lin, HP Fellow and VP, Chief Technologist for Machine Learning and Vision Systems, often heard the adage: “Women hold up half the sky.” Those words left an impression as she excelled in school and eyed a future in science, moving to the US to attend Stanford University for her engineering Ph.D. Thirty years ago, she began an internship at HP right just as the demand for personal printers was on the verge of skyrocketing. Her first research project was developing halftoning technologies for printers. A photography buff, Dr. Lin also developed the first digital cameras with embedded capture capabilities for panorama stitching and automatic red-eye correction, and she led the research and development of HP Pixel Intelligence, an analytics engine for understanding visual information. “My inventions help women, because we are busy, we have to multitask between kids, work, and home; but we love taking photos of our children and families and want to enjoy this technology but we need it to be automated as much as possible,” she says. Throughout her distinguished career, Dr. Lin is credited with inventing at least 45 issued patents, has led groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and deep learning, with applications in machine learning, print workflow and quality, and 3D printing. Currently, she’s developing applications to visually enhance a person’s virtual presence while using video conferencing platforms as COVID shifted work to remote and hybrid models. Her team consists of partners from all around the country, many of whom are women. “I think there’s a culture of women supporting each other here,” she says.

Dr. Lihua Zhao, 3D printing pioneer and Head of HP’s 3D Print Lab

In grade school, when Dr. Lihua Zhao was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she responded without hesitation: “A scientist.” Her mother, an accounting manager, encouraged her to follow her STEM dream. After graduating with a bachelor’s and master’s in chemistry in China, she received her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry and Materials Science from University of California, Irvine, in 2006, eventually landing at UC Berkeley as a research associate with an opportunity to be a visiting scholar at HP Labs. “I liked the intersection between industry and academics,” she says. “HP Labs is a city in this intersection, where we get to build early ideas, and it’s innovative, but you need a core academic knowledge of hard science,” adding that she always felt supported as a woman and an Asian American at HP. “In 15 years, I’ve never had to ask for a promotion,” she says. “I started working with 3D printing in 2013. It was not a heavily funded project yet. Nine years later, I’m the Global Head of the 3D Lab at HP Labs. Now it’s my turn to open the door for others.”