The History of Women in Computing at Ruby on Ales

the history of
women in
computing
Saturday, March 9, 13
Image: http://www.nsf.gov/cise/csbytes/newsletter/images/1952_hopper-grace_large.jpg

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@eliseworthy
Elise Worthy

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@jlsuttles
Jessica Lynn Suttles
* this is what my face looks like on the internet

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Wabi & Sabi
* i live in santa monica with my cats wabi & sabi
* cats are people too

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* i love being a software engineer
* i work at g5 here in bend, or

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https://github.com/g5/microformats2
* microformats are carefully designed HTML class names that extend the semantics of HTML
* enable authors to publish higher semantic ﬁdelity content
* more info: http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2

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the history of
women in
computing
Image: http://www.nsf.gov/cise/csbytes/newsletter/images/1952_hopper-grace_large.jpg

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women made
programming
what it is today

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...despite
serious
inequities.

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http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/ShermanPeabody.jpg

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1800s

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Programming as we know it has pretty pedestrian roots. Many of us know about the inefficient punchcard computers of our past.
Until starting to do research for this project, I had no idea where they ﬁrst were used. In fact, punchcard programming dates back
to the early 19th century. And, if you can imagine the required uses of programming back then, it’s no surprise that the technological
innovations of the day were primarily industrial.
image: http://blog.needsupply.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/silk-weaving-th-local-history-collection.jpg

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jacquard
loom
1801
The idea originated with the Jacquard Loom, and the punched cards dictated patterns to be woven into the cloth.
Of course, this was very rudimentary. The cards controlled a sequence of actions, but there was no computation
controlled by the cards. The Jacquard Loom in and of itself isn’t that interesting, however it was the stepping
stone for something much more impacting to history.
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Jacquard_loom_p1040320.jpg

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1830s

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analytical
engine
1837
The Jacquard Loom paved the way for the Analytical Engine. It adapted the punch card idea to the first general-purpose computer.
The Analytical Engine was proposed by Charles Babbage, who was an English mathematician. Although only theoretical in its time, the actual
machine was recently completed. It was Turing Complete and had an arithmetic logic unit, control flow for conditional branching and loops,
and integrated memory for storage of data.
I love the story of the Analytical Engine because it’s so juicy.
It was never completed due to lack of funding and conflict between Babbage and the chief engineer.
Image: http://ds.haverford.edu/bitbybit/bit-by-bit-contents/chapter-two/2-7-the-analytical-engine/

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ada
lovelace
Additionally, the Analytical Engine was worked on by Ada Lovelace. Ada was a mathematician and the daughter of Lord Byron.
From what I’ve read, she also seems like quite a saucy character.
Image: http://www.girlguides.co.za/images/stories/News/Misc/AdaLovelace.jpg

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the ﬁrst
program

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Consider her dad, Lord Byron. Lord Byron was a famous poet. When I searched for his work, I got a whole bunch of quotes and love, art, and
emotion.
Of course, he left Ada’s mom, so I don’t believe there was much time for transference of soft skills!
Image: http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/2/5/2634125.jpg

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Instead Ada turned out to be a genius mathematician. Hah! Take that, dad.
Anyway, Ada is recognized as the ﬁrst computer programmer, as she wrote a program show how the Analytical Engine could calculate a sequence
of
Bernoulli numbers. I looked them up and couldn’t even understand the Wikipedia article, so don’t ask me to explain what she did. This is some
hardcore math.
Image: http://www.girlguides.co.za/images/stories/News/Misc/AdaLovelace.jpg

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But back to the saucy story, because I think this is worth remembering. Babbage and Loveless were pretty entrepreneurial. I mentioned that
they didn’t
have enough money to build the Analytical Engine. Well, what better way to get rich than go to the racetrack?
Of course the pair wanted to apply logic to horse racing, but their statistics didn’t pan out. Ada ended up pawning her jewelry to get out of
debt.
Luckily for us, before the project went down in ﬂames, Ada wrote the working program for the Bernoulli number calculation and made history.
Image: http://www.art-gifts-direct.co.uk/
Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2657

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1920s

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http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/7/6/52044176.jpg
* ﬁrst-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (i.e. voting
rights, property rights)

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1940s

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But by WWII, the US military had fully grasped how technology could be used to its further its motives.
WWII undeniably shaped programming and marks a beginning for women in programming in the United States.
Image: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/uploads/2009/10/ussshaw.jpg

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waves
1942
On July 30, 1942, in response to men being called into active duty and a shortage for at-home duties, WAVES became a women-only division of the US Navy.
WAVES stands for women accepted for volunteer emergency service.
‘Emergency service’ meant that women were only accepted because of the unusual circumstances of WWII, and that women would not continue Navy careers after the war.
Image: http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/wwii-waves-poster-granger.jpg

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`
hired as computer to being the first women programmers.
the first programmers of the ENIAC, to calculate artillery firing tables, were all women.

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grace
hopper
Included in the group of women who took a leave of absence from their jobs to participate in the war effort was Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper had graduate degrees in
math and physics and was a professor at Vassar.
Because of her academic and professional achievements, she came into the military with authority, starting out as a lieutenant. Because of the military’s rigid rank protocol,
which is conjectured to have abated the prejudice that Hopper faced.
Additionally, Hopper’s freedom was aided by the novelty of the computing profession. Because computing was a new discipline, there was more cultural confusion
and undeﬁned roles relating to gender stereotypes.
Image: http://24.media.tumblr.com/6d366345bc0a31e76d428c2e21e7bdbe/tumblr_mgyl2juekD1qz4tnco1_500.jpg

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post-war
After the war, Hopper permanently resigned from teaching at Vassar, despite pressure for women to step down during post-war demobilization. She was denied entry into the
Navy, but joined the Naval Reserve to
aid in the establishment of the Harvard Computation Lab.
The most common story I’ve heard of is Grace Hopper being the person to coin the term “bug” because of a moth that got caught in one of the large computers.
After learning a lot more about her, it is a shame that that’s the most common story, because Grace Hopper’s impact on programming is far more signiﬁcant.
Image: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96921.jpg

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http://explorepahistory.com/kora/ﬁles/1/2/1-2-1536-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0l3f7-
a_349.jpg

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the ﬁrst compiler

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mother of
COBOL
Hopper’s achievements are substantial.
While at the Harvard Computer Lab, she was one of the first programmers of the Mark I. The Mark I was slow - it could only perform 3 operations a second.
She focused on improving efficiency relentlessly. Her interest in increasing efficiency lead her to create the first compiler for the UNIVAC in 1952, despite a cold reception to
the new idea. Until then, all coding
had been done in machine code, a time-consuming and often frustrating activity. The ability to write English words to get the job done was a great
advance in
computer science, although it met with strong resistance from engineers at the time.
During the same time, she wrote papers which would become the foundation for high-level languages. As the director of automatic computing for Remington Rand, her
department released
the first compiler-based programs, which, combined with other work from IBM, became the foundation for COBOL.
Image: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96921.jpg
resource: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2657

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one of the ﬁrst
high-level
languages

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one of the ﬁrst
high-level
languages
fortran and lisp in the same 3 year period.

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late 1990s
80% of all code
50% of new apps
95% of ﬁnance data
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/graduate/631/Fall2002/COBOL.pdf

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org
xor ax, ax
mov ds, ax
mov si, msg
boot_loop:lodsb
or al, al
jz go_flag
mov ah, 0x0E
int 0x10
jmp boot_loop
go_flag:
jmp go_flag
msg db 'Hello, world', 13, 10, 0
times 510-($-$$) db 0
db 0x55
db 0xAA

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MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
DISPLAY "Hello, world"
STOP RUN.

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puts “Hello, World”

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but it was not
sunshine and
roses

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1950s

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http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kMkowsz5f6Q/T9neKWqcahI/AAAAAAAAA-A/Y7O3Kt04vHE/
s1600/Fathers+day+Remington+King+for+a+day+SWScan06412+-+Copy+-+Copy.jpg

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http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/
2009/08/150_extra_engineers_thumb.jpg

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1960s

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http://theletteredtexan.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2012/01/cronkite-reporting-on-the-space-
race.jpg
* space race -> manpower shortage -> jobs for everyone!

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http://thecomputerboys.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cosmopolitan-april-1967-1-large.jpg

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http://toto.lib.unca.edu/ﬁndingaids/photo/national_climatic_data_center/Machines%20&
%20People/Key%20Punch%2066%204th%20ﬂ.JPG
pink collar works

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Leffler_-_WomensLib1970_WashingtonDC.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Leffler_-_WomensLib1970_WashingtonDC.jpg
# Jessica’s notes
* first began in the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1980s in the United States, and eventually spread
throughout the Western world
* second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace,
reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.

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1970s
* the second-wave feminist movement took a prominent role within society in the US
* women are not equals
* 1970: marked the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment (female suffrage)
* Equal Rights Amendment
- designed to guarantee equal rights for women
- 1972: passed in both houses of Congress
- went on to the state legislatures for ratiﬁcation
* 1973: Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade and constitutionalized right to abortion

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* large numbers of women were entering STEM (aka science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields
* feminist movement increased interest in having a professional career
* feminist movement increased interest in having careers in traditionally male-dominated fields
* this is particularly apparent in computer science
* computer science is a new and exciting field
* the first computer science department was founded at Purdue in 1962
* image: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/other/womenbach.htm

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Adele
Goldberg
* Adele Goldberg was a researcher at Xerox PARC
* image: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/pcforum/5711666761/

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* earlier today Evan Light attributed Smalltalk to Alan Kay, but Goldberg played an instrumental role
* Goldberg participated in the design & development Smalltalk-80
* object-oriented, dynamically typed, reﬂective language
* this may sound familiar (Ruby)
* image: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/73/42/0507224128a00036d10e8010.L.jpg

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* Ruby has a lot of Smalltalk-like features
* image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)

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Ruby is a language designed in the following steps:
* take a simple lisp language (like one prior to CL).
* remove macros, s-expression.
* add simple object system (much simpler than CLOS).
* add blocks, inspired by higher order functions.
* add methods found in Smalltalk.
* add functionality found in Perl (in OO way).
So, Ruby was a Lisp originally, in theory.
Let's call it MatzLisp from now on. ;-)
matz.
* matz wrote this in a mailing list in a response to how Ruby is different from LISP in 2006
* source: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/179642

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* Goldberg and her team developed many of the concepts that became the basis for GUIs
* this replaced earlier command line based systems
* Steve Jobs demanded a demonstration of the Smalltalk System
* Goldberg refused, understanding it’s value, but her superiors ordered her to
* Apple eventually used many of the ideas as the basis for their Macintosh desktop
* image: http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/programovani/vyvojove-prostredi-davnoveku-smalltalk-80

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* personal computers were expensive and not integrated into everyday life
* the golden age of video arcade games
* video arcade games are closest most people get to interacting with computers
* 1972: Pong - Atari
* image: http://timesillustrated.com/2012/11/29/ataris-pong-is-released/

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* 1979: Asteroids - Atari
* image: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacewar/asteroids-2.png

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* 1978: Space Invaders - designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, manufactured by Taito in Japan
* image: http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/SpaceInvaders-090910_01.jpg

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1980s
* some ground gained by feminist in the 60s and 70s was lost
* 1982: Equal Rights Amendment fails to pass
* women continued to enter undergraduate programs & the workforce in larger numbers
* in an effort to disassociate marital status from name & title:
- women began to keep their maiden names
- instead of Mrs. (Misses) or Miss. (Miss) women start to use Ms. (Mizz)
* 1984: Sandra Day O’Connor ﬁrst woman appointed to the supreme court
* personal computers experienced explosive growth
* Commodore 64 became the best-selling computer model of all time

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* the number of women in computing continues to grow!

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Elizabeth
Feinler
* Elizabeth Feinler is an information scientist at the Stanford Research Institute
* her group became the overall naming authority of the Internet
* developed and managed the name registries of the top-level domains
- .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, and .com
* image: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/gallery/photos/w11.html

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Adele
Goldberg
* 1984-1986: Adele Goldberg served as president of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
* image: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/pcforum/5711666761/

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* then something strange happens (mention green line again)
* women stop entering & start leaving computer science
* this doesn’t happen in other ﬁelds
* in the beginning computer science programs arouse out of diverse departments
* as computer science matured it found a home in engineering departments (see bottom line)
* http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/other/womenbach.htm

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* 1982: Ms. Pac-Man - Midway Manufacturing (not Namco the Pac-Man licensor)
* image: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/percentage-of-chart-which-resembles-ms-pac-man.html

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* 1981: Donkey Kong - Nintendo
* featured a male protagonist & a damsel in distress
* image: http://gamesdbase.com/Media/SYSTEM/Arcade/GameOver/big/Donkey_Kong_-_1981_-_Nintendo.jpg

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* 1985: Super Mario Bros - Nintendo
* featured a male protagonist & a damsel in distress
* countless other games have this same theme
* image: http://legendsoﬂocalization.com/media/super-mario-bros/names/princess.png

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* 1989: Game Boy - Nintendo
* gaming becomes more ingrained in everyday life
* now games ﬁt in your pocket
* its not a Game Girl
* http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Nintendo_Gameboy.jpg/350px-Nintendo_Gameboy.jpg

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* 1984: Revenge of the Nerds
* image of the stereotypical nerd appears in popular culture
* image: http://haphazard-stuff.blogspot.com/2012/12/revenge-of-nerds-1984-review.html

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1990s
* 1992: “Year of the Woman”: record number of women are elected to high ofﬁce in the US
* ﬁrst lady Hillary Rodham Clinton travels abroad as State Department representative
* Madeline Albright becomes US Secretary of State
* Janet Reno becomes US Attorney General
* Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the second woman on the Supreme Court

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* a third-wave of feminism begins
* just to be clear waves of feminism are not about popularity
* they are driven by philosophically different ideas
* but that is outside the scope of this talk
* image: http://thinktankbradenton.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/feb-10-third-wave-feminism-sexuality-and-sexual-politics/

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* the last wave of feminism caused an increase in women in computing
* but this time women continue to leave computing, though not quite as many

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* Jane Margolis - a social scientist studying gender and education
* Allan Fisher - the founding dean of the undergraduate program in computer science
* began a study at Carnegie Mellon University to try to understand the gender imbalance
* they interviewed 100 computer science students of both genders over a period of 5 years

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* made some changes to admission standards (none of which were gender speciﬁc):
- kept high GRE scores
- added emphasis on leadership qualities
- dropped requirement for prior programming experience
- added some catch-up courses to level out background differences
* image: http://price.mit.edu/blog/tag/computer-science/

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* the retention rate after two years also dramatically increased
* image: http://price.mit.edu/blog/tag/computer-science/

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2000s
* history requires amount of perspective, so it’s hard to make sweeping statements

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* we’re almost back to where we started!
* notice that there is a general trending upwards of all the other ﬁelds

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* the nerd in popular culture got a makeover
* but he is still not someone that women connect with
http://theboken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/socialnetwork.jpg

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* self explanatory
* image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qHwv7WIqWCs/TqLWZJekuoI/AAAAAAAAA-0/zh7F25xWQDc/s1600/Brogrammer+
%25281%2529.jpg

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Fran
Allen
* 2006: Fran Allen (already ﬁrst woman IBM Fellow)
- ﬁrst woman in 40 years to win Turing Award from ACM
- for her work in high performance computing
- considered the Nobel Prize of computing
* image: http://www.princeton.edu/~archss/Photos.htm

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Barbara
Liskov
Single responsibility
Open/closed
Liskov substitution
Interface segregation
Dependency inversion
* 2008: Barbara Liskov
- awarded Turning Award from ACM
- for her work in the design of programming languages
- Liskov Substitution Principle is the L in SOLID Principles of OO Design introduced by Michael Feathers

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2010s

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* hacker school 2012
* etsy hacker, 37 signals, & yammer provided grants to women
* made sure to get the word out to women
* the turn out was great, WAY too many applied

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http://railsgirls.com/
“Our aim is to give tools and a
community for women to understand
technology and to build their ideas. We
do this by providing a great experience
on building things and by making
technology more approachable.”
* women are given priority, but men are welcome
* foster a very fun, supportive environment

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* it turns out when you host an event speciﬁcally for women a lot of them show up
* image: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jessicaspacekat/8424859890/in/set-72157632631292315

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* the turn out for coaches was great to, so teams were small
* image: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jessicaspacekat/8424858432/in/set-72157632631292315

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http://workshops.railsbridge.org/
“RailsBridge is an organization that
works to increase diversity in tech by
putting on a variety of awesome free
events. Our most well-known efforts are
free weekend workshops where women
learn Ruby on Rails from volunteers.”
* very similar to Rails Girls
* there was one here on Wednesday, I hope you went
* I was working :(

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* GDI is another great program with a wider focus
* there are LOTS of these programs springing up
* get involved

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we all know that
software engineers
are shaping the future

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* image: http://feministsunitedoncampus.tumblr.com/post/19678539655/radicalxstitch-today-we-made-a-revolutionary

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The History of Women in Computing at Ruby on Ales

The History of Women in Computing at Ruby on Ales

Jessica Lynn Suttles

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