They were the very early pioneers #WomenInTech

If you look at the history of computing, women have been there right from the start, even though most of the times they don’t get that much publicity, which usually go to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. There was a time you would have thought there was no-one else in technology other than these two bigwigs, if you go through the media coverage at that time. A look at both underplayed and well-known women in technology down the ages...

Hedy Lamarr: (Main pix) Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) enables Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) mobile communications. Way back in 1942, Lamarr was one of the patent holders for an early version of frequency hopping. That technology was eventually used on US naval ships and also in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, though her contributions were recognized much later. She was only posthumously inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. Of course there’s also the fact that she was a Hollywood bombshell and acted in many movies!

Ada Lovelace: If the first ever science fiction writer was a woman (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley) then it’s interesting to note that the first writer of an algorithm was also a woman. While Charles Babbage came out with the Analytical Engine (proposed in 1837), it was Lovelace who was ready with an algorithm which could be used by the machine, had it been built. She was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and a countess. She talked of the complexity of future computers beyond mere calculating devices.

Grace Hopper: Hopper was a computer scientist and a PhD in mathematics. She was part of the team that developed UNIVAC I (the first large-scale electronic computer to go on sale) and was also responsible for the development of COBOL, one of the earliest computer languages. For that she was called the Grandmother of COBOL. The Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer was named after her. She retired as a Rear Admiral in the US Navy and they named a destroyer after her: The USS Hopper.

Women computers: In the very early days, computing and calculating used to be a long-drawn tedious process and the people doing it were called human computers. The earliest computers were by and large women. They were numerous in places like Bletchley Park (where they cracked codes that helped defeat the Nazis), Harvard and NASA. The last was popularized in popular culture by the film Hidden Figures, which showed how women played a key role in the space mission of the 1960s. Bollywood also came out with Mission Mangal, which highlighted the role of women in India’s space programme too.

Karen Spärck Jones: Every time you do Google search, you lean back on the concept of IDF (Inverse Document Frequency), something Karen introduced way back in 1972. More precisely today it is TFIDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency), a numerical statistic that is used as a “weighting factor in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modelling”. She also did research in NLP (Natural Language Processing), which is really a hot topic today. Karen was Professor of Computers and Information at Cambridge University.

Joan Ball: Online dating became huge in the modern age but did you know that Joan started the St. James Computer Dating Service way back in 1964? They matched up pairs via a computer, which was a revolutionary thing at that time.

Margaret Hamilton: Director of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory’s Software Engineering Division of when it developed flight software for America’s Apollo space program she was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hamilton wrote software for satellite tracking and was part of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project which began in the late 1950s.

Carol Shaw: One of the earliest game designers, she created 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, River Raid and Video Checkers for the Atari 2600 back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Radia Perlman: Big in the world of communication networks, she invented the algorithm on which STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) was based and that’s key to the operation of network bridges and also TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). Perlman is a PhD in mathematics from MIT.

Carly Fiorina: She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard and fought with her board to make the merger with Compaq happen and also oversaw subsequent massive layoffs and a change in HP’s work culture. Fiorina also had failed bids at a US Senate race and also the Presidential one, where Republican hopeful Ted Cruz, who eventually lost to current US President Donald Trump, had picked her as his probable running mate.

Meg Whitman: Like Fiorina, billionaire Whitman was the CEO of H-P and she also dabbled in politics, running for the Governor of California. Whitman was the President of eBay for 10 years, during which time it grew from $4 million to $8 billion. She is currently CEO of Quibi and on the board of Dropbox.

Marissa Mayer: Mayer’s Stanford University major combined philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics and computer science. She also specialized in Artificial Intelligence. Mayer was one of the earliest employees of Google (on the AdWords team) and later became President and CEO of Yahoo!, during which time it acquired Tumblr. She then co-founded Lumi Labs.

Ginni Rometty: She joined IBM as a system analyst in 1981 and rose to become the head of the company in 2011 (She was President, CEO and Chairperson). Under her, IBM had many tie-ups: Apple, SAP, Twitter and Box. She was replaced by Arvind Krishna.

Sheryl Sandberg: After Mark Zuckerberg, she is the most famous face of Facebook. This billionaire is the Chief Operating Officer and before that was a Vice President at Google.

Susan Wojcicki: She is the CEO of YouTube and one of the founding members of Google and was associated with the iconic Google Doodles and also Google Images and Google Books. She was in charge of acquisitions of both YouTube and DoubleClick.

Elizabeth Holmes: Probably the most infamous of all women in technology. Health tech company Theranos was founded by a 19-year-old Holmes who managed to get VC funding of a whopping US$700 million for a company valuation of US$10 billion. In the end Theranos went bankrupt and Holmes’ net worth became zero.

Getting a raw deal in science

Historically women in science have been sidelined even if they over performed. The best example of that is Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who noticed an anomaly while looking through observations on a radio telescope. Bell stubbornly pursued it despite being told not to do so. The anomaly was a Pulsar and she had discovered it. But it went downhill from there. Five people’s name appeared on the paper and Bell was second on it. Finally her supervisor and somebody else won the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the Pulsar! That outright misogyny led one newspaper headline: The No-Bell Prize!

But how are they on the decline?

While there were many women technologists early on and many women tech CXOs off late, one curious thing is a decline in the US. According to one survey, women being awarded computer science degrees peaked in 1984 at about 37%. That just fell below 30% by the end of that decade and a mere 10% at the decade beginning in 2010. Why are there so less women coders?

The infamous James Damore Google memo which talked of biological differences between men and women was rubbished and he was subsequently sacked from Google. Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley, written by American journalist Emily Chang, was equally controversial. It talked in detail about sexism and gender inequality in the tech industry.

But India leads the way in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) at least. One latest survey puts the latest STEM women graduates in India at 43%, the highest in the world. This is not surprising as at least till school, girls usually outperform boys and form a good chunk of the toppers. However in terms of actual employment of STEM women, another survey puts it at a lowly 14% leaving a lot to be desired.

So here’s hoping that the 2020s see a lot more women in technology, in all fields and at all levels all across the world!