Advances in CS appropriate for CS1 and CS2 made by female computer scientists Over the course of the CS major at my school, especially in years two and three (roughly equivalent to years 1 and 2 at a university), as I introduce my students to significant advances in Computer Science, I include some information about the scientists who were instrumental in making those advances. This includes people such as Church, Turing, von Neumann, Knuth, Babbage, Chomksy, Dijkstra... all prominent CS luminaries. They are also all male.  Over the three years that I teach my students, I want to be able to paint a more accurately balanced picture of the field than there have been zero contributions by women.

There is also research that back up the assertion that, in the interests of helping to encourage females to enter the STEM fields, it is important to include "people who look like me". 

Who, then, are scientists that are, or were, prominent in the field of computer science and whose important work is appropriate to incorporate into the early years of a CS degree?

I do not intend to hit them over the head with this, and I do not want to emphasize interesting biographical excerpts, since it is not a history of CS course. I want to emphasize the CS itself and only introduce the relevant scientists as part of the CS concept being discussed. This means that not every female computer scientist is appropriate, even if they did prominent work. Even with these more limited choices, the clear subtext should be that women really have added important things to this field.
I think Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is perhaps the easiest to explain to new students, and to tie in with an important advancement in computer science.

I try to discuss the transition from early programming in machine language to programming in higher level languages. I'll usually show the students some machine code that I will tediously decrypt. Then I show and talk about assembly languages. Then I'll make a point that "there has to be a better way". Then I'll introduce Grace Hopper and her ideas about compiled languages. Showing a little COBOL code with English words and contrasting it to the equivalent machine code is striking.