Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I’ve made this promise:
“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire…”
The many great women that could be portrayed today makes the choice hard. One of my favorites is Grace Murray Hopper, and if I wrote about her I would have added the picture of her sitting in a large meeting in her black (or maybe dark blue) admiral’s dress - apparently alone among all the men - with her crochet work, as a silent protest against the masculinity permeating the room. Or I could have written about the ENIAC women, pioneers in making a computer do something, and I would have showed an interview with Kay Mauchly Antonelli saying “There were no manuals those days, they had not yet been written… there were nothing available to us at all, except the wiring diagrams of each unit [of the ENIAC]. So some of the professors at Pen helped us to learn how to even read the wiring diagrams. And we learnt how each accumulator worked from the back… ”
But I’ve chosen another woman; Dame Stephanie Shirley - or Steve Shirley, which she apparently called herself to avoid the barriers experienced by female computer scientists in the 1960s and 70s. She started her own software company in 1962 in the UK, hiring only women in the early period (until 1975, when the gender equality legislation in England required that the company also hired men), organizing work in a way that made it possible for women with responsibility for children/family to also be part of working life in general and computing in particular. The concept was special enough to be noticed and portrayed in a Norwegian computer magazine, Datatid, several times during the 1980s. According to Datatid the company had 600 employees in 1981, and 1100 in 1987.
In the 1980s this company was special not only by hiring mainly women, but also by mainly hiring women with education within IT. Datatid reported about several Norwegian projects with the intention of providing computer related jobs for women in the same period. However, none of them seem to have involved women with a special IT education, but rather involved short training for punching jobs or secretarial work, and for former “telephone women” who had been made redundant after automation of the phone system.
Dame Stephanie Shirley has donated large sums of money to charity through the Shirley Foundation, in particular for research into autism and for IT projects.
Dame Stephanie Shirley is not the only female computer scientist appointed Dame: Recently the computer scientist professor Wendy Hall was also appointed Dame.
I hope we have passed the time when women in computing had to disguise themselves as men, although we probably need more Ada Lovelace Days to make women in technology more visible. Read about more women in technology in the Ada Lovelace Day Collection.
Another reason for more Ada Lovelace Days; tonight we’ll have a “Girl Geek Dinner”!
