Giving Compass' Take:

• Smithsonian Magazine tells the remarkable story of Angeline Nanni, who became a code breaker at the height of the Cold War, along with several other female contemporaries.

• What can Nanni's story tell us about the importance of increasing access to STEM learning, especially among women and girls? How can we break through society's stigmas in this area?

• Here's more on how we can close the gender gap in computer science.


Numbers came easily to Angeline Nanni. As a girl of 12 in rural Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, she kept the books in her father’s grocery store. In high school, she took all the accounting classes on offer. Enrolled in beauty school after graduation — cosmetology being one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s — Angie focused on the business side while her sisters, Mimi and Virginia, learned to style hair ...

Angie Nanni’s instinctive grasp of an unusual form of math called non-carrying addition and subtraction changed the trajectory of her life. It also helped seal the fate of other Americans, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Their conviction was based in part on the work of Angeline Nanni and a group of other extraordinary American women.

Their persistence and talent brought about one of the greatest counterespionage triumphs of the Cold War: Venona, the top-secret U.S. effort to break encrypted Soviet spy communications. For nearly 40 years, Angie and several dozen colleagues helped identify those who passed American and Allied secrets to the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Their work unmasked such infamous spies as the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, the German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs and many others. They provided vital intelligence about Soviet tradecraft. Their work was so highly classified that President Harry Truman likely did not know about it.

Read the full article about women code breakers by Liza Mundy at Smithsonian.com.