A History of Our Leading Ladies in

TechnologyTHE IMPORTANT ROLE OF WOMEN IN SHAPING THE TECHNICAL AGE

It is vital today to recognise & celebrate women in

tech, taking note of their accomplishments that began over a

century ago and continuing today.

Observing the pivotal role that women played in tech history is just one way to help safeguard their place in its future.

“Our young people are the future. We must provide for them. We must give them the positive leadership they’re looking for…You manage things; you lead people.”

“In tech, girls don’t code because girls don’t code.

One way of changing this is carefully documenting the role women played in tech dawn of technology.”

SHERYL SANDBERG

GRACE HOPPER

ADA LOVELACE“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”

• Lovelace published guidelines for THE WORLD’S FIRST ALGORITHM envisioned to be processed by a computer in 1843 before computers even existed!

• While the first computer wasn’t built until the 21st century, Ada’s work has granted her the title of the FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMER IN HISTORY

• Lovelace was a visionary who had the foresight to understand the potential uses of the machine, including the manipulation of symbols and creation of music

GRACE HOPPER“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.”

• Grace Hopper INVENTED THE FIRST COMPUTER IN 1951, the platform for modern computing.

• Hopper led the team that invented COBOL (COMMON BUSINESS-ORIENTED LANGUAGE), the first user-friendly business software program

• She was the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale & the first woman to be promoted to the rank of Admiral in the U.S. Navy

THE ENIAC SIX“Not only did they program the ENIAC, during WWII without manuals or programming languages, but they dedicated years after the war to making programming easier and more accessible for all of us who followed”

• The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the FIRST GENERAL-PURPOSE ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTER.

• It was programmed manually using 3000 switches and dozens of cables and digit trays to physically route data. The ENIAC SIX used complex differential equations, written by hand, to calculate ballistics trajectories. They are;

Jean BartikBetty” Snyder

Kay McNultyMarilyn Meltzer

Ruth TeitelbaumFrancis Bilas

ERNA HOOVER“I designed the executive program for handling situations when there are too many calls, to keep it operating efficiently without hanging up on itself. Basically it was designed to keep the machine from throwing up its hands and going berserk.”• Erna Hoover created a COMPUTERISED TELEPHONE SWITCHING SYSTEM to quickly

process calls revolutionising the art of modern communication• She was the recipient of one of the FIRST SOFTWARE PATENTS EVER AWARDED for the

“Feedback Control Monitor for Stored Program Data Processing System.”• Hoover worked on high-level applications: radar control programs of the Safeguard Anti-

Ballistic Missile System, artificial intelligence methods, large databases and transactional software.

MARGARET HAMILTON“We still do other things out of ignorance today, such as continuing to pay women lower salaries than men.”

• Remember the moon landing in 1969? IT IS LIKELY THAT THE 1969 NASA MISSION TO THE MOON WOULD HAVE FAILED WITHOUT THE LIKES OF MARGARET HAMILTON

• Margaret was the inventor of software on Apollo 11 that enabled computers to rank the highest priority job. Without Hamilton, the Apollo astronauts would not have come home due to coding errors encountered during the flight.

• She wrote code for the WORLD’S FIRST PORTABLE COMPUTER

RADIA PERLMAN“The world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I’m successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and be self-managing.”

• Radia Perlman is known by many as the “Mother of the Internet”, but don’t call her that - a network engineer, she helped make Ethernet technology a household name

• She developed the SPANNING TREE PROTOCOL, enabling the scalability of network traffic using Ethernet.

• Dr. Perlman’s work has had a profound impact on how networks self-organize and move data. Her innovations enable today’s link state routing protocols to be robust, scalable, and easy to manage.

SOPHIE WILSON“Most engineers like to proceed from A to B to C in a

series of logical steps. I'm the rare engineer who says the answer is obviously Z and we will get on with that while you guys work out how to do all the intermediate steps. It makes me a dangerous person to employ in IT but a useful one."

• Sophie Wilson is a computer scientist who designed the architecture behind the Acorn Micro-Computer — the first computer sold by British technology company, Acorn Computers

• She CREATED THE ORIGINAL ARM COMPUTER PROCESSOR, which would later become one of the most successful IP cores

• By 2012, her design could be found in most of the world’s mobile computers & smartphones

LYNN CONWAY“It’s like building bridges…people can say the design stinks, your ideas aren’t any good. But if the bridge stands, it stands. What works, works.”• While at IBM, Conway facilitated the creation of the first superscalar design• Her innovations during the 1970's at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have impacted chip

design worldwide. Many high-tech companies and computing methods have foundations in her work.• Conway had been ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICANS TO UNDERGO A MODERN GENDER

TRANSITION, which cost her a job and her family. Once she established herself as a woman, she kept the past a secret. Conway stayed behind the scenes as much as she could. As a result so did many of her achievements.

MAVIS BATEY“To test the day's settings, the Germans sometimes

used their girlfriends' names and dirty words; it was a great shame when they were stopped, as we enjoyed the dirty words.”

• Batey was one of the leading female code-breakers at Bletchley Park cracking the Enigma ciphers that led to the Royal Navy’s victory at Matapan in 1941.

• Her most important role was her role in BREAKING OF THE ENIGMA CIPHER USED BY THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE, THE ABWEHR.

• Mavis broke a second Abwehr machine, the GGG, allowing British intelligence to read high-level Abwehr messages and confirming that the Germans did, in fact, believe fake intelligence that they were given by SS double agents.

YVONNE BRILL “I think my biggest contribution now can be to ensure that women who deserve to be nominated for awards get nominated.”

• Brill invented a propulsion system in the 1960s to save communications satellites from going out of orbit. This system is called the ELECTROTHERMAL HYDRAZINE THRUSTER (EHT).

• With her device now fitted as standard in modern communications satellites, she greatly contributed to our use of the Internet today, enabling digital communications on a global level.

• “There are still companies all over the place where they have just one woman engineer. And that individual needs to have someone — others to relate to, to maintain their equilibrium sometimes in that job that they hold, you know, to help them realize that they’re on the right path.”

KAREN SPÄRCK JONES‘I think it's very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”’

• She introduced INVERSE DOCUMENT FREQUENCY (IDF) term weighting, which has been adopted as standard in modern systems, including web search engines; AKA the capacity of ranking algorithms to automatically recover text from an catalogue of documents.

• Karen was instrumental in providing a huge boost to AI and language work in the 1980s & has been a vocal advocate for Women in Tech

• “I think women bring a different perspective to computing, they are more thoughtful and less inclined to go straight for technical fixes. My belief is that, intellectually, computer science is fascinating - you're trying to make things that don't exist.”

EVELYN GRANVILLE“We accepted education as the means to

rise above the limitations that a prejudiced society endeavoured to place upon us.”

• The second African American woman to earn a Ph.D in mathematics• After joining IBM in 1956, she created COMPUTER SOFTWARE THAT ANALYSED

SATELLITE ORBITS FOR NASA'S PROJECT VANGUARD AND PROJECT MERCURY SPACE PROGRAMS.

• Granville was a champion of education believing that regardless of race and gender, everyone deserved access to knowledge.

SISTER MARY KENNETH KELLER"We're having an information explosion, among others, and it's certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it's available."

• Keller was a Catholic nun, mathematician and a pioneer of computer science • She was THE FIRST WOMAN TO RECEIVE A PH.D IN COMPUTER SCIENCE IN 1965• While at Dartmouth, where she briefly broke the “men-only” rule, Keller played a significant

role developing a key computer language: BASIC (BEGINNER’S ALL-PUPROSE SYMBOLIC INSTRUCTION CODE)

HEDY LAMARR“Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

• The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, DEVELOPED A "SECRET COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM" TO HELP COMBAT THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR II.

• HER "SPREAD SPECTRUM" TECHNOLOGY STIMULATED THE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS BOOM, creating the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible.

• The first female recipient of the BULBIE™ GNASS SPIRIT OF ACHIEVEMENT AWARD, a prestigious lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors (AKA "The Oscar™ of Inventing“).

JUDY MALLOY“Nevertheless, opportunities for many kind of public literature will emerge and evolve as web users become accustomed to wandering interactively … where many kinds of writing that take advantage of the computer's ability to manipulate narrative data, continue to thrive."

• In 1986 Malloy wrote and programmed the first hypertext novel, “Uncle Roger” and has been writing hypernarratives since 1986

• However, history remembers the first hypertext novel to be programmed by Michael Joyce • “When I began publicly writing Uncle Roger in 1986 on the WELL, it was in a conferencing

system similar to what is now called "threads" on some web systems. Like any audience, the audience reacted. I was aware of their presence and the telling of the story was in itself interactive because audience members made comments and sometimes even contributed to the story."

JANESE SWANSON“[we women] earned far less than their male colleagues… had to raise hands to get a word in [at meetings] … and always had a hard time getting men to focus on what we were saying rather than our legs and breasts.”• Swanson founded GIRL TECH, WHICH CREATES PRODUCTS AIMED AT MAKING

TECHNOLOGY MORE INTERESTING FOR GIRLS, after finding that so many wonderful technology products were developed for and marketed solely to boys.

• Swanson co-developed the first of the “Carmen Sandiego” educational games.

CAROL SHAW‘When I was in junior high and high school, I was good at math. I entered a bunch of math contests and won awards. Of course, people would say, “Gee, you’re good at math – for a girl.” That was kind of annoying. Why shouldn’t girls be good at math?’

• Shaw programmed one of the Atari’s best-known shooter games, River Raid• River Raid is universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design for the Atari 2600

console, allowing gamers for the first time to experience an extravagant amount of non-random, repeating territory in spite of constrictive memory limits.

• Shaw’s work as a pioneer game designer has made her a legend to two generations of tech pros and gamers – some even say she was THE FIRST FEMALE VIDEO GAME DESIGNER

Bibliography Empowered by:

< />Leading

Ladies

Bateman, Jessica. "'She's Been Life Changing': Why Female Mentors Matter in Tech." Women in Technology. Guardian News and Media, 16 Jan. 2017. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/jan/16/shes-been-life-changing-why-female-mentors-matter-in-tech

Bedford, Tori. "ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons on the 'Significant Problems' Women In Tech Still Face." Chicago Inno. Chicago Inno, 21 Oct. 2016. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2016/10/21/top-company-for-women-in-techs-cto-says-theres-a-ways-to-go/

Bilton, Nick. "'The Innovators' by Walter Isaacson: How Women Shaped Technology." The New York Times. The New York Times, 01 Oct. 2014. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson-how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0

Crezo, Adrienne. "Inspiring Quotes from 10 Influential Women in Tech." Mental Floss. Mental Floss, 14 Oct. 2013. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.http://mentalfloss.com/article/53181/inspiring-quotes-10-influential-women-tech

Herold, Rebecca. "Overlooked Women in Tech Innovation History." Tech Page One. Dell Technologies, 30 Mar. 2015. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.http://www.techpageone.co.uk/business-uk-en/overlooked-women-tech-innovation-history/

Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015. Print.

Moreno, Katherine. "Forgotten Women in Tech History. | Domo Blog." Domo.com. Domo, 1 Feb. 2016. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.https://www.domo.com/blog/forgotten-women-in-tech-history/

Morris, David Z. "Tech’s Gender Pay Gap Hits Younger Women Hardest." Fortune. Fortune, 22 Jan. 2017. Web. 22 Feb. 2017.http://fortune.com/2017/01/22/techs-gender-pay-gap-young-women/

Nemchonok, Sasha. "10 Famous Women in Tech History." Dice Insights. N.p., 17 Mar. 2016. Web. 08 Mar. 2017.http://insights.dice.com/2016/03/14/10-famous-women-in-tech-history/

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