Women & Computing at LA Ruby Meetup

women & computing Thursday, April 11, 13

Jessica Lynn Suttles @jlsuttles Thursday, April 11, 13

I want to tell you a little about myself and
how I became a software engineer Thursday, April 11, 13

Thursday, April 11, 13

I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I made a
fan website Thursday, April 11, 13

In college I was determined to major in Fine Arts
but I took a Computer Science class to fulﬁll my Quantitative Reasoning Requirement™ and I really liked it, so I majored in both. Thursday, April 11, 13

I studied a lot of C++ and Scheme, but I
didn’t make things outside of class. Then the summer before my senior year I landed a development internship. Thursday, April 11, 13

women & computing Thursday, April 11, 13

tl;dr women made programming what it is today despite many
inequities Thursday, April 11, 13

1800s Thursday, April 11, 13

1801 Jacquard Loom Thursday, April 11, 13

the Jacquard Loom simpliﬁes the process of manufacturing textiles with
complex patterns Thursday, April 11, 13

it is controlled by a chain of cards, or punched
cards laced together into a continuous sequence, but it did no computation Thursday, April 11, 13

1801 Jacquard Loom Thursday, April 11, 13

1837 Analytical Engine Thursday, April 11, 13

the Analytical Engine was designed by Charles Babbage as the
ﬁrst general computer Thursday, April 11, 13

it was controlled by punch cards, it was Turing Complete,
and it included integrated memory Thursday, April 11, 13

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron and a
genius mathematician Thursday, April 11, 13

Ada Lovelace described an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to
compute Bernoulli numbers Thursday, April 11, 13

Recursive Deﬁnition Explicit Deﬁnition Generating Function Thursday, April 11, 13

the Analytical Engine was not completed in Ada’s lifetime, and
she never got to run her algorithm Thursday, April 11, 13

ﬁrst-wave feminist fought for voting rights and property rights Thursday,
April 11, 13

the World War II draft depleted the male labor force

1942 Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service Thursday, April 11,
13

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service means women were only
accepted because of the labor force shortage Thursday, April 11, 13

computer historically means “one who computes” Thursday, April 11, 13

during World War II many computers were women and these
women went on to program computers Thursday, April 11, 13

the world's ﬁrst professional computer programmers were the women programmers
of the ENIAC Thursday, April 11, 13

` Thursday, April 11, 13

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper Thursday, April 11, 13

Grace Hopper had graduate degrees in math and physics and
was a professor at Vassar Thursday, April 11, 13

she took a leave of absence to participate in the
war effort Thursday, April 11, 13

she joined the Navy Reserves and started out as a
Lieutenant after graduating ﬁrst in her class Thursday, April 11, 13

after the war Hopper permanently resigned from teaching at Vassar

she was denied entry to the Navy Thursday, April 11,
13

She served on the Mark I computer programming staff and
focused on improving efﬁciency relentlessly Thursday, April 11, 13

Grace Hopper wrote the ﬁrst compiler Thursday, April 11, 13

"I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it.
They told me computers could only do arithmetic." Thursday, April 11, 13

Grace Hopper did a lot more for programming than coin
the term bug Thursday, April 11, 13

Grace Hopper is the Mother of COBOL Thursday, April 11,
13

COBOL is one of the ﬁrst high-level languages Thursday, April
11, 13

before high-level languages everyone wrote in assembly language Thursday, April
11, 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 Thursday, April 11, 13

MAIN-LOGIC SECTION. DISPLAY "Hello, world" STOP RUN. Thursday, April 11,
13

puts “Hello, World” Thursday, April 11, 13

The space race, like World War II, lead to a
man power shortage Thursday, April 11, 13

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Lefﬂer_-_WomensLib1970_WashingtonDC.jpg Thursday, April 11, 13

50th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, the
culmination of the ﬁrst-wave feminist movement Thursday, April 11, 13

second-wave feminist fought for reproductive rights and equality in the
workplace Thursday, April 11, 13

1973 Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade and constitutionalized
right to abortion Thursday, April 11, 13

1972 Equal Rights Amendment passed in both houses of congress

the feminist movement increased women’s interest in having a professional
career Thursday, April 11, 13

the feminist movement increased interest in having careers in traditionally
male-dominated ﬁelds Thursday, April 11, 13

large numbers of women were entering Science Technology Engineering Mathematics
ﬁelds Thursday, April 11, 13

Adele Goldberg Thursday, April 11, 13

Adele Goldberg was a researcher at Xerox PARC where she
participated in the design & development Smalltalk-80 Thursday, April 11, 13

Smalltalk is an object- oriented, dynamically typed, reﬂective language Thursday,
April 11, 13

Ruby has a lot of Smalltalk-like features Thursday, April 11,
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. Thursday, April 11, 13

Goldberg’s team developed concepts that became the basis for GUIs

GUIs replaced earlier command line based systems Thursday, April 11,
13

Apple eventually used many of these ideas as the basis
for their Macintosh desktop Thursday, April 11, 13

personal computers were still really expensive Thursday, April 11, 13

the golden age of the video arcade game Thursday, April
11, 13

a lot of ground gained by the second-wave feminist movement
in the 60s and 70s was lost Thursday, April 11, 13

1972 Equal Rights Amendment failed to receive the requisite number
of ratiﬁcations Thursday, April 11, 13

in an effort to disassociate marital status from name and
title women started using Ms instead of Miss or Mrs and women started to keep their maiden names Thursday, April 11, 13

personal computers experienced explosive growth and the Commodore 64 became
the best selling computer Thursday, April 11, 13

Elizabeth Feinler Thursday, April 11, 13

From 1972 until 1989 Elizabeth Feinler was directory of the
Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute Thursday, April 11, 13

Her group operated the Network Information Center for the ARPANET
as it evolved into the Defense Data Network and the Internet Thursday, April 11, 13

In 1982, an Internet protocol was deﬁned by her group
to access the online directory of people, called Whois Thursday, April 11, 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 Thursday, April 11, 13

Adele Goldberg Thursday, April 11, 13

1984-1986 Adele Goldberg served as president of the Association for
Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientiﬁc computing society Thursday, April 11, 13

in the beginning computer science programs arouse out of diverse
departments but as computer science matured it found a home in engineering departments (see bottom line of graph) Thursday, April 11, 13

video games become more engrained in every day life Thursday,
April 11, 13

video games also become gendered Thursday, April 11, 13

there is a reoccurring trend of male protagonist rescuing damsels
in distress Thursday, April 11, 13

video games are often children’s ﬁrst and most frequent interaction
with computers and a lot of ﬁrst computer programs are games, or attempts at games Thursday, April 11, 13

an image of the stereotypical nerd appears in popular culture

a third-wave of feminism rises ProTip™: feminism waves are not
about popularity, they are driven by philosophically different ideas Thursday, April 11, 13

1992 was the Year of the Woman because a record
number of women are elected to high ofﬁce in the US Thursday, April 11, 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 doesn’t happen with third-wave feminism Thursday, April 11, 13

Jane Margolis is a social scientist studying gender and education
Allan Fisher is the founding dean of the undergraduate program in computer science Thursday, April 11, 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 Thursday, April 11, 13

they made some changes to admission standards Thursday, April 11,
13

kept high GRE scores Thursday, April 11, 13

added emphasis on leadership qualities Thursday, April 11, 13

dropped requirement for prior programming experience Thursday, April 11, 13

added some catch-up courses to level out background differences Thursday,
April 11, 13

Fran Allen Thursday, April 11, 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 Thursday, April 11, 13

Barbara Liskov Single responsibility Open/closed Liskov substitution Interface segregation Dependency
inversion Thursday, April 11, 13

Barbara Liskov was awarded the Turning Award from the ACM
for her work in the design of programming languages Thursday, April 11, 13

the nows Thursday, April 11, 13

as technology becomes more ingrained & common place in our
daily lives software engineers are playing a larger role in shaping our future Thursday, April 11, 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.” Thursday, April 11, 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.” Thursday, April 11, 13

Thank you for your time. @jlsuttles Thursday, April 11, 13

Women & Computing at LA Ruby Meetup

Women & Computing at LA Ruby Meetup

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