Women & Computing at JS.LA

the history of women in computing Friday, April 26, 13

Jessica Lynn Suttles @jlsuttles Friday, April 26, 13

Jessica Suttles LA Friday, April 26, 13

I want to tell you a little about myself and
how I became a software engineer Friday, April 26, 13

I grew up in Ohio Friday, April 26, 13

I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I made a
fan website Friday, April 26, 13

In college I was determined to major in Fine Arts
but I took Computer Science to ﬁll a requirement I really liked both, so I majored in both Friday, April 26, 13

I studied a lot of C++ and Scheme, but I
didn’t make things outside of class The summer before my senior year I landed a development internship Friday, April 26, 13

Friday, April 26, 13

farmhouse.la Friday, April 26, 13

how big is la? st. louis milwaukee cleveland minneapolis boston
san francisco boston pittsburgh manhattan /via @veganstraightedge Friday, April 26, 13

the history of women in computing Friday, April 26, 13

tl;dr women made programming what it is today despite many
inequities Friday, April 26, 13

1800s Friday, April 26, 13

1801 Jacuard Loom Friday, April 26, 13

the Jaquard Loom simpliﬁes the process of manufacturing textiles with
complex patterns Friday, April 26, 13

it is controlled by a chain of cards, or punched
cards laced together into a continuous sequence, but it did not computation Friday, April 26, 13

1801 Jacuard Loom Friday, April 26, 13

1837 Analytical Engine Friday, April 26, 13

the Analytical Engine was designed by Charles Babbage as the
ﬁrst general computer Friday, April 26, 13

it was controlled by punch cards, it was Turning Complete,
and it included integrated memory Friday, April 26, 13

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron and a
genius mathematician Friday, April 26, 13

Ada Lovelace described an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to
compute Bernoulli numbers Friday, April 26, 13

the Analytical Engine was not completed in Ada’s lifetime, and
she never got to run her algorithm Friday, April 26, 13

ﬁrst-wave feminist fought for voting rights and property rights Friday,
April 26, 13

the World War II draft depleted the male labor force

1942 Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service Friday, April 26,
13

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service means women were only
accepted because of the labor force shortage Friday, April 26, 13

computer historically means “one who computes” Friday, April 26, 13

during World War II many computers were women and some
of these women went on to program computers Friday, April 26, 13

the world’s ﬁrst professional computer programmers were the women programmers
of the ENIAC Friday, April 26, 13

` Friday, April 26, 13

the idea that the development of hardware was the real
business of computing was prevalent Friday, April 26, 13

John von Neumann said coding was a “static” process–one that
could be performed by a low-level clerical worker Friday, April 26, 13

Maurice Wilkes said, “It had not occurred to me that
there was going to be any difﬁculty about getting programs working.” Friday, April 26, 13

Admiral Grace Murray Hooper Friday, April 26, 13

Grace Hopper had a graduate degree in math and physics
and was a professor at Vassar Friday, April 26, 13

she took a leave of absence to participate in the
war effort Friday, April 26, 13

she joined the Navy Reserves and started out as a
Lieutenant after graduating ﬁrst in her class Friday, April 26, 13

after the war Hopper permanently resigned from teaching at Vassar

she was denied entry to the Navy Friday, April 26,
13

she served on the Mark I computer programming staff and
focused on improving efﬁciency relentlessly Friday, April 26, 13

Grace Hopper wrote the ﬁrst compiler Friday, April 26, 13

“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it.
They told me computers could only do arithmetic.” Friday, April 26, 13

Grace Hopper did a lot more for programming than coin
the term bug Friday, April 26, 13

Grace Hopper is the Mother of COBOL Friday, April 26,
13

COBOL is one of the ﬁrst high-level languages Friday, April
26, 13

before high-level languages everyone wrote in assembly language Friday, April
26, 13

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 Friday, April 26, 13

MAIN-LOGIC SECTION. DISPLAY "Hello, world" STOP RUN. Friday, April 26,
13

puts “Hello, World” Friday, April 26, 13

the space race, like World War II, lead to a
man power shortage Friday, April 26, 13

software projects expanded in scope to encompass not only data
processing but also management and control & computer personnel began to encroach on the domains of operational managers Friday, April 26, 13

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Lefﬂer_-_WomensLib1970_WashingtonDC.jpg Friday, April 26, 13

50th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, the
culmination of the ﬁrst-wave feminist movement Friday, April 26, 13

second-wave feminist fought for reproductive rights and equality in the
workplace Friday, April 26, 13

1973 Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade and constitutionalized
right to abortion Friday, April 26, 13

1972 Equal Rights Amendment passed in both houses of congress

the feminist movement increased women’s interest in having a professional
career Friday, April 26, 13

the feminist movement increased interest in having careers in traditionally
male-dominated ﬁelds Friday, April 26, 13

large numbers of women were entering Science Technology Engineering Mathematics
ﬁelds Friday, April 26, 13

Adele Goldberg Friday, April 26, 13

Adele Goldberg was a researcher at Xerox PARC where she
participated in the design & development of Smalltalk-80 Friday, April 26, 13

Smalltalk is an object- oriented, dynamically typed, reﬂective language Friday,
April 26, 13

Ruby has a lot of Smalltalk-like features Friday, April 26,
13

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. Friday, April 26, 13

Goldberg’s team developed concepts that became the basis for GUIS
to replace earlier command line systems Friday, April 26, 13

Apple eventually used many of these ideas as the basis
for their Macintosh desktop Friday, April 26, 13

personal computers were still really expensive but it was the
golden age of the video arcade game Friday, April 26, 13

a lot of ground gained by the second-wave feminist in
the 60s and 70s was lost Friday, April 26, 13

1972 Equal Rights Amendment failed to receive the requisite number
of ratiﬁcations Friday, April 26, 13

in an effort to disassociate marital status from name and
title women started using Ms instead of Miss or Mrs and keep their maiden names Friday, April 26, 13

personal computers experienced explosive growth and the Commodore 64 became
the best selling computer Friday, April 26, 13

Elizabeth Feinler Friday, April 26, 13

Elizabeth Feinler was director of the Network Information System Center
at the Stanford Research Institute Friday, April 26, 13

Her group operated the Network Information Center for the ARPANET
as it evolved into the Defense Data Network and the Internet Friday, April 26, 13

In 1982, an Internet protocol was deﬁned by her group
to access the online directory of people, called Whois Friday, April 26, 13

her group became the overall naming authority of the Internet,
developing and managing the name registries of the top-level domains: .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .com Friday, April 26, 13

Adele Goldberg Friday, April 26, 13

1984-1986 Adele Goldberg served as president of the Association for
Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientiﬁc computing society Friday, April 26, 13

computer science programs rose out of diverse departments but as
computer science matured it found a home in engineering departments (see bottom line of graph) Friday, April 26, 13

video games became more engrained in every day life Friday,
April 26, 13

video games also become gendered Friday, April 26, 13

there is a reoccurring trend of male protagonist rescuing damsels
in distress Friday, April 26, 13

video games that do include a woman protagonist tend to
objectify said women Friday, April 26, 13

video games are often children’s ﬁrst and most frequent interaction
with computers and a lot of ﬁrst computer programs are games Friday, April 26, 13

an image of the stereotypical nerd appears in popular culture

a third-wave of feminism rises Friday, April 26, 13

1992 was the Year of the Woman because a record
number of women are elected to high ofﬁce in the US Friday, April 26, 13

Hillary Rodham Clinton Madeline Albright Janet Reno Ruth Bader Ginsburg

second-wave feminism correlated with an increase in the number of
women in computing, but this didn’t happen with third-wave Friday, April 26, 13

Jane Margolis is a social scientist who studies gender and
education Allan Fisher is the founding dean of the CMU undergraduate program in computer science Friday, April 26, 13

they began a study at Carnegie Mellon University to understand
the gender imbalance and interviewed 100 computer science students of both genders over a period of 5 years Friday, April 26, 13

they made some changes to admission standards Friday, April 26,
13

- 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 Friday, April 26, 13

lower the entry barrier Friday, April 26, 13

Fran Allen Friday, April 26, 13

Fran Allen, already the ﬁrst woman IBM Fellow, was the
ﬁrst woman in 40 years to win Turing Award from ACM, which is considered the Nobel Prize of computing, for her work in high performance computing Friday, April 26, 13

Barbara Liskov Single responsibility Open/closed Liskov substitution Interface segregation Dependency
inversion Friday, April 26, 13

Barbara Liskov was awarded the Turning Award from the ACM
for her work in the design of programming languages Friday, April 26, 13

the nows Friday, April 26, 13

as technology becomes more ingrained & common place in our
daily lives software engineers are playing a larger role in shaping our future Friday, April 26, 13

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.” Friday, April 26, 13

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.” Friday, April 26, 13

Thank you for your time. @jlsuttles Friday, April 26, 13

Women & Computing at JS.LA

Women & Computing at JS.LA

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