To celebrate Ada Lovelace day – oh, Ada is just basically the world’s first computer programmer – here’s alook at seven inspiring women in technology, either pioneers from the past who have shaped the current tech we often take for granted, or women currently working in Stem and making waves. Technology is still a sector with a vast gender imbalance, but these women prove how much technology could gain from sorting it out, and fast.
Sheryl Sandberg
The woman who introduced “lean in” to the cultural lexicon. Sandberg is the chief operating officer at Facebook, whose employee makeup is 68% male according to June 2015 figures, and she previously worked for Google. Sandberg was included in the world’s 100 most powerful people by Time in 2012, the year she became the first women on Facebook’s board of directors. The magazine said she “understands intuitively the potential of social networking to create positive change on a grand scale”.
Joan Clarke
Brought recently to mainstream attention thanks to the Academy Award-winning biopic of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, Clarke was one of the team cracking codes and deciphering ciphers at Bletchley Park during the second world war.
Clarke, who was played by Keira Knightley in the feature film, was recruited into the Government Code and Cypher School in 1939 after studying at Cambridge.
Bletchley had thousands of women code breakers who, until recent years, had been overshadowed. Thankfully, now the likes of Clarke, Betty Webb and Mary Every are being given their due.
Radia Perlman
Perlman is sometimes referred to as the “mother of the internet” (which she does not like) because of her invention of “spanning-tree protocol” (STP). Put simply, SPT prevents repetition of information and action when a network is shared by one or more machines (known as bridge looping).
Perlman, who studied at MIT and whose mother was a programmer, has registered more than 100 patents. Kinda lazy. She once told an interviewer she actually “hates” technology and gets annoyed when people ask her to fix their printer, for instance.
Speaking on advice she would give young engineers, Perlman said: “Start out with finding the right problem to solve. This is a combination of “what customers are asking for”, “what customers don’t even know they want yet” and “what can be solved with something simple to understand and manage”.
Hedy Lamarr
An actor by profession, Lamarr basically invented radio frequency-hopping on the side, when she was drafted into the war effort to “focus her efforts on countering torpedoes”, as you do. Along with George Antheil, Lamarr tweaked radio frequencies at sporadic intervals between transmission and reception, creating a system in which messages could not be easily intercepted.
In addition to being a glamorous 1940s Hollywood movie star and a radio innovating genius, Lamarr also once invented a variation on a carbonated soft drink and a traffic light.
Zoe Quinn
One of the most prominent women in the games industry, Quinn developed the interaction fiction game, Depression Quest for the web. You can play Depression Quest here. Players are “given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone.”
Quinn has worked on many other games including They Bleed Pixels, and has become a prominent woman in the gaming industry along with Anita Sarkeesian, who analysed the depiction of female characters in video games, and Brianna Wu, another video game developer and head of development at Giant Spacekat.
Mitchell Baker
Baker is the executive chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla makes free software – you are probably aware of their popular browser and OS mobile operating system, Firefox. Apparently known as the “Chief Lizard Wrangler” at Mozilla, Baker was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
Lila Tretikov
Tretikov is the executive director of the Wikipedia Foundation. Tretikov started out as as a software engineer back in 1999, and was involved in several software patents. Treitkov was the chief information officer of SugarCRM, which produces web software, before she joined Wikipedia in 2014, succeeding Sue Gardner. In an interview with the Guardian following her appointment she said:
“The only thing we can do to change things, is to charge ahead and change things through actions, through trying. Who knows, in 50 years we could be trying to help men change the status quo of the world, where women have been proven the capable ones.”
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