Originally posted to my personal blog at Posit Design
When I first learned about Ada Lovelace Day back in January , I was about halfway through drafting this, my response to—and in some ways, retaliation against—the many "best"/"most influential" people in tech list links that were flooding emails, facebook pages, delicious networks, and print publications right around the turning of the new year. Nearly all of the influencers and icons were men. Even on lists that went as deep in as "The 100" or "The 1000" people who should be on your radar, it was very rare to find more than 2 or 3 women.
One of my biggest problems specific to women-on-the-web lists is how so many hew very rigidly to the highly damaging smart-v-pretty dynamic (e.g. Republican billionaires Meg Whitman/Carly Fiorina v tell-all sexpots Jessica Cutler/Emily Gould, none of whom are actually technologists at all ). Fast Company and HuffPo blogger Allyson Kapin assembled some nice lists of female Web 2.0 influencers, but they were primarily of web entrepreneurs rather than webworkers. So I'm going to try to focus this list on genuine geek girls—who actually get their hands dirty in code and play with soldering irons.
However, one of my other issues with most best-in-tech lists is their near-total exclusion of interface/aesthetics/design people, so I'll be skewing my list towards some designers. But I'm not being exclusive: I have mathematicians on here and programmers, software and hardware developers, and hackers, but also writers, artists, web evangelicals, educators, and entrepreneurs.
- The Mother of All Programming Languages: Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace . The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Ada was raised by her mother to despise poetry. As a result of her mathematical education, the Countess of Lovelace was writing programming languages in the 1840s for machines that didn't exist yet. She was the first person to posit that computing machines might one day be capable of more than mathematics (specifically anticipating digital music), and to posit the distinction and relationship between hardware and software. Charles Babbage, the man who conceived the earliest idea of a computer, which he called the Analytical Engine but never managed to build, called Ada "The Enchantress of Numbers." She is universally acknowledged as the world's first computer programmer.
- The Mother of Computer Engineering: Admiral "Amazing" Grace Murray Hopper . A member of the WAVES who worked on the MARK I during WWII, Grace Hopper developed UNIVAC-1, the first commercial American computer, and COBOL, one of the earliest programming languages. She was the earliest to voice the idea that programming languages could be close to English in syntax and diction. One of the very first computer engineers, her most notable achievement was writing the very first compiler program, a set of instructions that translates computer languages.
- The Mother of Software Designers: Dr. Barbara Liskov . The first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science, from Stanford University in 1968. Her doctoral work focused on chess software, which I definitely appreciate. In her profile on engineergirl , she says without irony that, because she never expected, as a woman, to have a career, it freed her up to study what truly interested her. Liskov's early innovations in software design have been the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, C#, and Java. She recently became the second (Frances E. Allen was first) woman to win the Turing Award, considered the Nobel of Computer Science.
- The Mother of Hypermedia: Dame Wendy Hall . Like Lady Lovelace and "Amazing Grace," Wendy Hall studied mathematics in the early part of her academic life. Her career in computer research began in 1984, and she headed the team that developed the Microcosm hypermedia system, a forerunner of the internet. She is a founding director, with Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who did, in fact, invent the internet) of the Web Science Research Initiative. Dr. Hall earned the title "Dame": she was raised in London's poor, crime-infested East End, and was the first in her family to attend university. She's a vocal advocate for women in maths and sciences, and current president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
- The Mother of GUI: Susan Kare . Do the images below mean anything to you? They were all designed by Susan Kare, who also created the Lasso, the Grabber, the Paint Bucket, the Trash Can, and the cloverleaf-like "infinite loop" symbol on the Apple command key, as well as the fonts Geneva, Chicago, and Monaco. She is the truest pioneer of GUI (graphical user interface): the click-and-pick archetype of personal computing (as opposed to command-line coding) pioneered by Apple back when it was Macintosh, and which made possible the explosion of personal computing way back in the early 1980s. And she's still involved in computer design projects. You know those "gifts" that Facebook asks you to send to your friends? Some people even pay money to post those pixels on profiles. Susan Kare designs them.
- Mother of Start-Ups: Esther Dyson . She edited Release 1.0 , a monthly technology-industry newsletter, for 20+ years before selling it to CNET. A founding director of ICANN, she's also a serial entrepreneur and serial venture capitalist: Esther Dyson was an early investor in Flickr, del.icio.us, Zedo, Technorati, and many more start-ups. She also wrote the seminal article on intellectual property in the digital age for Wired magazine—in 1994. She's currently living just outside Moscow, training to be a cosmonaut.
- The Mother of Hackers: Susan Thunder . Su san Headley is probably the most bad-ass woman on this list: she was a messed-up abused teenage girl working as a prostitute in Hollywood before she discovered how to break into military computer systems. The thousands of dollars a month she earned at her night job all went toward computer parts and telephone equipment (this was the late 1970s). According to legend, when her regular boyfriend told her he'd been seeing someone else and planned to get married, she started getting intentionally sloppy, framing him for some of her biggest hacks. Then she went state's evidence and got him thrown in jail. By 1982, Susan was working as a systems administrator and computer security expert. Two years later, she testified at a US Senate hearing, where she demonstrated how easily she was able to penetrate government computers to access top-secret data—in front of the assembled senators. Susan Thunder is often cited as an inspiration for the movie War Games , and is the highest-profile female hacker (that we know of!). After a brief stint as a professional poker player, she currently works an an antique coin specialist.
- The Mother of Web Standards: Molly E. Holzschlag . I've mentioned my adoration for Molly before. She's the brains behind WaSP, active with W3C, and former director of the World Organization of Webmasters; one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of separation of form and content in web design, she makes the rules that make the web work well and look pretty. She was my very first tech heroine, and I still want to be her when I grow up.
- The Mother of Gadgetgirls: Katie Lee . A technology journalist and founding editor of Shiny Media, the UK's most profitable and largest blogging company (sort of the Brit answer to the Gawker Media network), Katie was the driving force behind their flagship blog, shinyshiny.tv , the world's first devoted to geek girl gadgets, and the proposition that women don't care about (or need) pink and sparkly gear: it's a mix of serious tech reviews and slam-downs of Hello Kitty cellphones. They aren't too cool to not squee over cute laptop cases or Super-Mario-themed clothing, though.
- The Fourth Wave (Digital) Feminists : These are the gals of my generation: iJustine , Veronica Belmont , Ashley Qualls , Deanna Zandt , Laurel Ackerman , Jennifer Kelton , all of the pseudonymous creators of pimp-my-pages, animated user icons, and endless digital epherma on LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, et alia. And me .
This isn't a strictly contemporary rundown, and it involved (by now) months of painstaking research and some very tough decisions. There are some big gaps. Anita Borg and Red Burns aren't on it, and probably really should be. Danese Cooper and Cia Romano got knocked off at almost the last possible second. But once you start looking, brilliant women computer scientists are all over the place. It's about the looking . My only and biggest regret about this list is the fact that queer women (to my knowledge) and women of color aren't represented. It's not about being PC; it's not representative of any IT department I've ever worked with. Also, it means that I've done what I was trying to fix: created a list that includes people like me and excludes everyone else. Fixing that involves looking harder.
Some good places to start looking are geekgirls.org , engineergirl.com , the The San Diego Supercomputer Center's Women in Science website, O'Reilly's Women in Tech community, and Fast Company 's enormously expanded Women in Technology website.
To keep excellent tabs on upcoming female rockstars, check out (and try to apply for!) these annual awards for women in tech: March of Dime's Heroines in Technology Awards ; RIM's Women & Technology Awards ; and the Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Awards .
Explore all of the Ada Lovelace Day posts at http://ada.pint.org.uk/ !
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Lynn Conway would be a good trans techie role model.
"with Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who did, in fact, invent the internet)"
That statement at a feminist site is like a satire of technical ignorance. Please correct it as soon as possible.
Tim Berners-Lee invented html and http. RPC, email, ftp, telnet and other services & applications came before the web by decades.
The "internet" is called "the internet" because it uses "the internet protocol". That was invented by Vint Cerf. Often it is written TCP/IP because it is matched with the Transmission Control Protocol. TCP was invented by Dave Clark.
Please, Please correct.
Thank You.
Technical women may find company at systers, For HCI, researchers and academics
www.anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers
net-grrls for operators, associated with nanog
http://www.linuxchix.org/ for those looking at open source. A good way to get into open source is to begin by exploring a system and writing documentation, btw.
Oh my.
You made a young female videogame designer's day happy. I'm swooning like a schoolgirl. This is so awesome!
Thanks!
This list is unfortunatly filled with technical errors which reduces the real value in having such a list. My original post got eaten, but you missed two incredibly important figures in digital design; Muriel Cooper and Zuzanna Licko, and an important computer scientist and writer in Adele Goldberg.
Lastly, I'm not sure someone who intentionally framed someone for a crime is really worthy of being a heroine, especially when the person they framed is actually a very important historical figure themselves.
This list is by no means intended to be final, but to inspire exactly just these conversations. I'm not a web historian, I'm just a designer and writer trying to call out some of my personal heroines.
Lynn Conway almost immediately sprung to mind when I considered tech-women, but as a close friend is FtoM, and I'm writing as a ciswoman, I wanted to stay away from the politics of trans. But she's definitely a trans techie role model!
Of course no one person actually invented the internet. In my mind "actually" stands in for "supposedly" or "theoretically" and there are big flashing sarcastic air-quotes around the whole phrase. I'm not sure I can edit on the community site, but I'll definitely modify on my blog.
Awareness that a half-dozen ill-chosen words can spoil 1500 carefully-considered ones for a reader is a good lesson for a writer.
I've never heard of Cooper, Licko, or Goldberg, but you can be sure I'll be researching them. The whole point of Ada Lovelace Day is for us all to call out and name and teach others about they women in tech we most admire. You should definitely write about them next year, or put up a belated post for ALD09!
I included Thunder because I felt the list would be incomplete without a female hacker, and they're hard to find because most women hack under male or neutral pseudonyms. So I spent several days looking, and hers was the name that kept coming up. I really don't think morality is a necessary issue in calling someone a heroine, though, especially in a feminist lens. I have a background in classics, so I go to Medea, Livia, Antigone, Clytemnestra. I wouldn't want any of them at my next party, but I adore them all.
@Tenko, you'll probably be even more inspired by an ALD post written at and posted from the Game Developer's Conference; it's called "Where the Girls Are"; there's also a substantial overview by Deus Ex Machinatio's post about women gamers and game designers. I haven't by any means read all the ALD posts, but I've read dozens, and those two stuck with me.
You could say Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web (html and http being the 2 central parts of it) but, from another geek, please remember that the Web is not the Internet.
For example, email is sent over the internet, but is not part of the web (you can send email without ever opening a web browser).
Same with AIM, FTP, SSH, and bazillions of other protocols. They seem to blur together because some of these non-web protocols have web gateways (like webmail, which just takes what you type and turns it into an email message, sent over the usual non-web channels) and others are "behind-the-scenes" and thus not as well known.
Factual errors aside, this is pretty badass. Finding the stories of women in tech is a lot easier when you have names, and I'm in dire need of more female techie role models.
The woman with the PHD (Barbara) ever made any efforts for Sharepoint Java