Kandra Polatis Brings Women’s Computing History at UM-Dearborn Into View With IHP Project

Reena Hamad Editor-in-Chief

Kandra Polatis (right) with Digital Humanities Coordinator Marlaine Magewick at 2026 IHP Summit//Reena Hamad

Dr. Kandra Polatis, a new research fellow for the Inclusive History Project (IHP), is a historian specialized in modern Japan and the history of science and medicine. Polatis earned her doctorate from the University of California Santa Barbara in September 2024. Her dissertation examines the connected paths of scientists moving through the Japanese empire and the deceased individuals whose bodies they studied, measured, dissected, collected, and exchanged. 

Polatis’ work explored how researchers relied on the bodies of marginalized people, including women, poor, and colonized populations, to shape theories and practices now understood as forms of scientific racism. She also traces what she describes as a “bone trade network” spanning the United States, Japanese, and Western European empires. 

Since completing her PhD, Polatis served as one of the IHP research associates closely involved in producing the Blenda Wilson documentary screened this past February. Just a few of her contributions to the research process included digitally curating interviews Wilson gave in 2003 with retired English Professor Elton Higgs and located records from Wilson’s tenure as chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In the background of this critical work, Polatis has been working on a groundbreaking digital exhibition that highlights the often-overlooked labor and support women provided in sustaining computing at UM-Dearborn. 

Polatis’ digital exhibition Hidden in the System, makes the case that women were central to the rise of computing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, even as documentation of their contributions were often neglected or actively erased. The exhibition traces a long path from the 1940s and 1950s, when programming was often considered feminine labor through the decades when computing became more professionalized and increasingly coded as male. 

Her research has found that marginalization of women in computing history is actually at odds with historical records. In 1985, women earned 37% of all undergraduate degrees in computer and information science nationwide. The University of Michigan-Dearborn reflects that benchmark, with women making up 37% of its computer science graduates in 2023, matching the national average from 1985.But even so, women remain far from equal representation alongside men in the greater Detroit computing industry. 

In light of this continuing gender disparity, Kandra Polatis’ exhibition asks that question of what historical forces contributed to the masculinization of computing and how those forces unfold in UM-Dearborn’s institutional history specifically. Who were the women within the University of Michigan system whose work helped shape computing technologies forever? 

The digital exhibition also follows how computing evolved at UM-Dearborn from a specialized research tool into a core part of everyday university life. Key milestones include the campus’s connection to the Michigan Terminal System in 1969, the creation of a formal computer science concentration in 1974, the shift to online registration in 1980, and the growing influence of engineering and industry partnerships through the 1980s and 1990s. 

Polatis says the inspiration for this exhibition was hearing an oral history interview featuring Roma Heaney, retired Director of the Office of Institutional Research. During her time here, Heaney spent four years working on the implementation of a student information system called Banner. It was a project that required all the technology on campus to be upgraded to offer access to the administrative system and utilized the help of Barbara Kriigel who had been involved with the library’s transition to a library information system. 

“When I listened to her story for the first time, I remembered my history of computing courses and how women were the unacknowledged programmers of the first digital computers. It seemed like Heaney was continuing that sort of unacknowledged computing work–not programming…but in implementation of a large information system.” 

By placing institutional history alongside present-day gender disparities in tech and tracing those of the past, the exhibition suggests that today’s imbalance did not happen by accident. It emerged through intentional choices in history and structures that gradually made computing seem more masculine despite the fact that women had been part of its foundation all along.