the history of
women in
computing
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Jessica
Lynn
Suttles
@jlsuttles
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Jessica Suttles LA
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I want to tell you a
little about myself and
how I became a
software engineer
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I grew up in Ohio
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I loved
Buffy the
Vampire
Slayer
so I made a
fan website
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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
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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
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farmhouse.la
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how big is la?
st. louis
milwaukee
cleveland
minneapolis
boston
san francisco
boston
pittsburgh
manhattan
/via @veganstraightedge
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the history of
women in
computing
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tl;dr
women made
programming
what it is today
despite many inequities
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1800s
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1801
Jacuard
Loom
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the Jaquard Loom
simplifies the process
of manufacturing
textiles with complex
patterns
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it is controlled by a
chain of cards, or
punched cards
laced together into a
continuous sequence,
but it did not computation
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1801
Jacuard
Loom
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1837
Analytical
Engine
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the Analytical Engine
was designed by
Charles Babbage
as the first
general computer
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it was controlled by
punch cards,
it was
Turning Complete,
and it included
integrated memory
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Ada Lovelace
was the
daughter of
Lord Byron
and a genius
mathematician
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Ada Lovelace
described an algorithm for
the Analytical Engine
to compute
Bernoulli numbers
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the Analytical Engine was
not completed in Ada’s
lifetime, and she never got
to run her algorithm
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1920s
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first-wave feminist
fought for
voting rights
and
property rights
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1940s
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the World War II
draft depleted the
male labor force
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1942
Women
Accepted for
Volunteer
Emergency
Service
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Women Accepted for
Volunteer Emergency
Service means
women were only
accepted because of the
labor force shortage
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computer
historically means
“one who computes”
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during World War II many
computers were women
and some of these women
went on to program
computers
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the world’s
first professional
computer programmers
were the
women programmers
of the ENIAC
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`
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the idea that
the development of
hardware was the real
business of computing
was prevalent
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John von Neumann said
coding was a “static”
process–one that could be
performed by a low-level
clerical worker
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Maurice Wilkes said,
“It had not occurred to me
that there was going to be
any difficulty about
getting programs
working.”
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Admiral
Grace
Murray
Hooper
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Grace Hopper
had a graduate degree in
math and physics
and was a
professor at Vassar
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she took a
leave of absence to
participate in the war effort
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she joined the
Navy Reserves
and started out as a
Lieutenant
after graduating
first in her class
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after the war Hopper
permanently resigned
from teaching at Vassar
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she was
denied
entry to
the Navy
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she served on the
Mark I computer
programming staff and
focused on improving
efficiency relentlessly
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Grace Hopper wrote
the first compiler
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Grace Hopper wrote
the first compiler
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“I had a running compiler
and nobody would touch it.
They told me computers
could only do arithmetic.”
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Grace Hopper
did a lot more for
programming than
coin the term bug
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1950s
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Grace
Hopper is
the Mother
of COBOL
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COBOL is one of the
first high-level languages
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COBOL is one of the
first high-level languages
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before high-level languages
everyone wrote in
assembly language
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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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the space race,
like World War II,
lead to a
man power shortage
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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
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Leffler_-_WomensLib1970_WashingtonDC.jpg
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1970s
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50th anniversary
of the passage of the
19th amendment, the
culmination of the first-wave
feminist movement
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second-wave feminist
fought for
reproductive rights
and
equality in the workplace
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1973
Supreme Court
ruled on
Roe v. Wade
and constitutionalized
right to abortion
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1972
Equal Rights
Amendment
passed in both
houses of
congress
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the feminist movement
increased women’s
interest in having a
professional career
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the feminist movement
increased interest in
having careers in
traditionally
male-dominated fields
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large numbers of
women were entering
Science
Technology
Engineering
Mathematics
fields
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Adele
Goldberg
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Adele Goldberg
was a researcher at
Xerox PARC
where she participated in
the design & development
of Smalltalk-80
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Smalltalk is
an object-
oriented,
dynamically
typed,
reflective
language
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Ruby
has a lot of
Smalltalk-like
features
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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.
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Goldberg’s team
developed
concepts that became
the basis for GUIS
to replace earlier
command line systems
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Apple
eventually used many
of these ideas as
the basis for their
Macintosh desktop
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personal computers
were still really expensive
but it was
the golden age of the
video arcade game
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1980s
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a lot of ground gained by
the second-wave feminist in
the 60s and 70s was lost
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1972
Equal Rights Amendment
failed to receive the
requisite number of
ratifications
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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
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personal computers
experienced explosive
growth and the
Commodore 64 became the
best selling computer
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Elizabeth
Feinler
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Elizabeth Feinler
was director of the
Network Information
System Center
at the
Stanford Research
Institute
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Her group operated the
Network Information
Center for the ARPANET as
it evolved into the Defense
Data Network and the
Internet
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In 1982, an Internet protocol
was defined by her group to
access the online directory
of people, called Whois
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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
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Adele
Goldberg
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1984-1986
Adele Goldberg
served as president of the
Association for
Computing Machinery, the
world’s largest educational
and scientific computing
society
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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)
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video games
became more
engrained in
every day life
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video games also
become gendered
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there is a reoccurring trend
of male protagonist
rescuing damsels in
distress
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video games that do
include a woman
protagonist tend to
objectify said women
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video games are often
children’s first and most
frequent interaction with
computers
and a lot of first computer
programs are games
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an image
of the
stereotypical
nerd
appears in
popular
culture
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1990s
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a third-wave of feminism
rises
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1992 was the
Year of the Woman
because a record number
of women are elected to
high office in the US
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
Madeline Albright
Janet Reno
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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second-wave feminism
correlated with an increase
in the number of women in
computing, but this didn’t
happen with third-wave
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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
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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
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they made some changes
to admission standards
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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lower
the
entry
barrier
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2000s
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Fran
Allen
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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
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Barbara
Liskov
Single responsibility
Open/closed
Liskov substitution
Interface segregation
Dependency inversion
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Barbara Liskov
was
awarded the Turning
Award
from the ACM
for her work in the
design of programming
languages
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the nows
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as technology becomes
more ingrained & common
place in our daily lives
software engineers are
playing a larger role in
shaping our future
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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.”
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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.”
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Thank you
for your time.
@jlsuttles
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