Lovelace's algorithms were only first published in 1953, so empirically speaking she is very little more than a symbol, how to do these things were already reinvented and deployed in common use by then. Computing would have gotten just fine without her algorithms (but maybe her cheerleading babbage was important). Hopper's invention of the concept of a compiling language is arguably huge and she really was the first to do it and obviously it made a difference.

I would go so far as to say that I suspect the idea of a compiling language cames more easily from a female perspective than a male perspective of the era/discipline.

"Nobody believed that I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."