We tend to attribute these modern marvels to the famous founder myths of Silicon Valley - young men in dorm rooms or sprawling corporate campuses who tamed the chaotic digital frontier. But the truth is, the foundation of our modern digital economy was laid decades earlier.
Through The Women's Domain at 5874 Commerce, we are committed to highlighting and championing the female voices that shape our industry. Today, we are looking back at the forgotten women of STEM whose foundational work makes modern tech, and by extension, modern commerce, possible.
The Woman Who Taught Machines to Read: Karen Spärck Jones
If you want to find a specific product on an ecommerce site, you type a request into a box, and the irrelevant results are discarded instantly. You get exactly what you asked for. The accepted history tells us this search technology was invented in the late 1990s alongside the expanding World Wide Web.
The actual math existed decades before the web, pioneered in 1972 by a researcher in Cambridge, England, named Karen Spärck Jones.
Working with cardboard punch cards in an era when computational linguistics was viewed as a fringe pursuit, Spärck Jones realised a structural truth about human language. She noted that common words like "the" or "and" are useless for retrieving specific information. Instead, she created a mathematical signature by weighing the importance of a rare word in a specific document against how common that word is in the entire library.
She called it TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency). She wrote the formula by hand and published it in a quiet niche journal. Decades later, when early search engine engineers hit a mathematical wall trying to organise billions of web pages, they dug into academic archives and found her 1972 paper. They took her math, scaled it, and built trillion-dollar empires upon it. Spärck Jones rarely gets the credit, but her equation remains the underlying logic for how machines understand human requests today.
The Mathematician Who Mapped the World: Gladys West
Global commerce relies entirely on the precise logistics of supply chains. Whether it is a container ship crossing the Atlantic or a last-mile delivery driver finding a customer's address, the backbone of this movement is GPS.
The mathematical foundation for GPS was built by Gladys West, a brilliant mathematician who started her career in 1956 at the U.S. Naval Proving Ground. As one of the few Black women in her field at the time, West analysed data from satellites to put together models of the Earth's exact shape.
The Earth is not a perfect sphere; it is an irregular, constantly shifting shape called a geoid. West programmed complex algorithms into massive, early-era supercomputers to account for gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort the Earth's shape. Her meticulous, groundbreaking model of the globe became the absolute foundation for the Global Positioning System (GPS). Without her invisible mathematics, the location-based technology that drives modern shipping, delivery, and mobile commerce simply would not exist.
The Engineer Who Stabilised the Web: Radia Perlman
In the digital world, downtime means lost revenue. When we build high-performing digital storefronts at 5874 Commerce, we rely on the fact that the underlying internet infrastructure is incredibly robust. That stability is largely thanks to Radia Perlman.
Often referred to as the "Mother of the Internet" (a title she humbly rejects), Perlman is a software designer and network engineer who invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) in 1985. Before her invention, computer networks were fragile. If there were multiple paths for data to travel, it would often create infinite "routing loops," causing networks to crash catastrophically.
Perlman designed an algorithm that allowed networks to manage these multiple paths effortlessly, automatically disabling redundant links and creating a single, stable path for data to flow. It was the crucial breakthrough that allowed small, localized networks to scale up into the massive, interconnected, and highly stable global web we use today.
Building on Their Legacy
Karen Spärck Jones once warned audiences that computing was too important to be left exclusively to men. The invisible mathematics, algorithms, and protocols created by these women are the very engines of modern commerce.
At 5874 Commerce, our initiative The Women’s Domain is driven by this same understanding. By uncovering the unseen and unread histories of women in tech, we aren't just correcting the historical record - we are recognising that diverse perspectives are essential for building the technology of tomorrow.
The next great leap in tech, AI, or ecommerce won't just come from the traditional Silicon Valley archetypes. It will come from the voices we empower, champion, and remember today.
