So it’s Ada Lovelace Day today and I pledged to make a post. I have been thinking about this since I made the pledge to post “about a woman in technology whom I admire” and I have to say that finding a single female in technology to blog about is particularly hard. SO I am cheating more than a little…
Growing up in the 80’s the BBC TV Show Tommorow’s World was one of the main sources on technology and science and for me Judith Hann played a large part in making technology accessible and interesting and encouraging my own interest. It is my view that we need better TV and more presenters like Judith to get the British public( and the next generation of innovators and inventors) more interested in technology and science.
The first female recipient of the BCS Lovelace Medal, Karen Spärck Jones, is also worthy of mention for her work on natural language processing and information retrieval and became Emeritus Professor of Computing and Information at the University of Cambridge. I particularly like her slogan that “Computing is too important to be left to men” and agree that women often add a different perspective to computing. Lets hope that other women are encouraged by her example to do great things and win the medal.
In the end, however, I am coming to the conclusion that gender should be non-issue. Raven Alder the Computer Security Consultant and “hacker” seems way ahead of me here and the whole gender debate seems to cheese her off. Over my 12 years of employment so far I have had the pleasure of working with a female Head of IT, one or two engineers, several systems administrators and developers and they all share the characteristics of Ada Lovelace being extremely driven, very bright, resourceful and determined. What makes these women tick is the intellectual challenge of working in computing and doing the best job they can. These characteristics are not exclusive to female technologists - I have found that the most capable female directors and “career women” have similar drive and also have to compete with men in environments and circumstances that are not entirely condusive to encouraging women to succeed.
Finally, I have to say, that if I had to credit those who encouraged me to persue my study of Computer Science or indeed my career in IT it would be my male university friends (including my husband) many of whom studied computing. They helped to convince me that computing provided a whole range of interesting and creative career options and this was why I chose to study an MSc in Computer Science (where I actually learnt some Ada and first became familar with the legend of Ada Lovelace) rather than an MPhil and Possible Phd in English Literature. The fact that many of my female friends thought this was difficult or strange only helped to convince me to prove them otherwise.
