I started my career as a systems engineer at a large multi-national financial and healthcare corporation. I identified a vulnerability in how one of the major back office systems was designed and had an idea for how to mitigate it. I went to my new manager at the time, described my idea and sketched it out on the whiteboard in his office. He wasted no time telling me that it was a horrible idea, that none of the business unit heads would ever agree to do something so drastically different that had never before been done, and that they would likely view it just as more work for them. So I explained how it would actually be less work for them, after which he literally yelled at me, “Stop! Your idea is bad! Quit wasting my time!” I considered quitting that day, but didn’t. Two months later at the IT-wide quarterly meeting the IT Director announced a great new innovative idea that my manager had proposed to the business heads, who embraced the idea and were already doing actions to get it implemented. They also announced my manager had been promoted and would be moved to a different department for his fabulous idea, which they described…and turned out to be my idea, right down to the drawings I made on his white board. I learned many valuable lessons from that situation. I have often wondered since then how often similar types of situations have occurred.
Some Overlooked Outstanding Women Technology Innovators
Upon reading the book The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution it is clear many women’s contributions to technological innovations have been overlooked or often mis-attributed to others throughout history, in much more profound ways than when my boss stole my idea, and disappointingly it is still going on today.
The book itself was interesting, but unbalanced. And with the exception of the discussion of Ada Lovelace and some mention of Grace Hopper’s contributions, it completely omits in-depth (to the same degree as the men it covers) coverage of the many women who were involved in all the territory of the “digital revolution.” For example here are just a few omissions:
- Hedy Lamarr isn’t mentioned, but she was a pioneer of wireless communications. She had a patent for a “Secret Communications System” in 1941 she created with George Anthiel to use during World War II (but it wasn’t actually used until the Cuban Missile Crisis). Wi-Fi is a pretty darn significant innovation in the evolution of all things digital! But the term Wi-Fi wasn’t even used at all in the main text of the book, and only referenced in passing one in a footnote. The term “wireless” was completely absent.
- Yvonne Brill isn’t mentioned in the book. In the 1970s Brill invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from going out of orbit. Her invention enabled digital communications to go global. I’d say that is a pretty important innovation leading to our global use of the Internet today!
- “Mrs. BB” and Joan Clarke who worked with the Bletchley Park codebreakers were not mentioned in the book. 8,000 of the 12,000 codebreakers working to break the German Enigma code, along with all the other codes being used during World War II, were women. “Mrs. BB” wasn’t even mentioned in the book (and sadly not even history bothered to record her full name). She actually had the correct answer (years before Turing was given credit) that broke the German Enigma machine code, but her answer was dismissed a being too simple of a solution by the other male codebreakers with whom she worked. Joan Clarke joined the code breaking team later. Her task was to break the navy ciphers (other than the German codes Turing was working on) in real time. The messages Clarke decoded resulted in some military action being taken almost immediately, saving thousands of lives. No mention of her in the book either.
- Margaret Hamilton was not mentioned in the book. In the 1960’s Margaret created the concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and man-in-the-loop decision capability, such as priority displays, which became the foundation for ultra-reliable software design. Such reliability is mandatory as a foundation for the many critical computing infrastructures we depend upon today.
- Evelyn Boyd Granville was not mentioned in the book. Granville developed computer programs that were used for trajectory analysis in the Mercury Project (the first U.S. manned mission in space) and in the Apollo Project (which sent U.S. astronauts to the moon). Her computer coding innovations supported our early space travel!
- Karen Spärck Jones was also not mentioned in the book. Jones’ innovations included creating techniques that allowed people to work with computers using words instead of equations or codes, and also creating a statistical method for evaluating the importance of words in a set of documents; basically establishing the search engine capabilities we have today. Generally everyone on the Internet depends upon search engines to find what they’re looking for.
- Judy Malloy was not mentioned in the book. In 1986 Malloy wrote and programmed the first hypertext novel, “Uncle Roger.” However, history credits Michael Joyce with doing this…a year after Malloy had already done it.
- Radia Perlman was briefly mentioned as assisting in creating the Internet. However, she did much more than the one sentence in the book glosses over. Perlman is known by many in the technical profession as the “Mother of the Internet.” She developed the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), an innovation that made today’s Internet possible.
And the list could go on beyond these brilliantly innovative women for many pages. In fact, here’s a nice list of 54 women who made significant technology contributions. And there are indeed many more to acknowledge and remember.
So the Isaacson book is heavy on testosterone and very light on the estrogen that contributed to the digital revolution and continues to provide important innovations. Some other notable women, such as Grace Hopper and Betty Holberton Snyder, were mentioned, but their contributions were not discussed with the same enthusiastic celebration of their innovations as other non-technical parts of their lives, but seemed in many places to imply (erroneously by many accounts) that their contributions were inspired by men. Most of the men in the book certainly needed to be included, but why omit most of the women who have made contributions, and generally lightly gloss over most of the women that were mentioned? It seemed the author only included the few women that have had acknowledgement of their accomplishments, and no digging was done to point out the many others whose contributions to technology innovation significantly impacted the technology we enjoy today. It overlooked a large majority of women in tech innovation.
Optimism for Change Going Forward
Did you know that in the late 1890’s 58 percent of science, technology, engineering and math students were female? Women have long demonstrated solid aptitude for STEM areas of work (after all, Ada Lovelace was the founder of scientific computing in the early 1800’s), but culture, not natural ability, guided them away from making more contributions than could have been possible, supported by the many clear gender discrimination actions in the early 1900s.
March is Women’s History Month. This is a great time to reflect upon the many, mostly unacknowledged, innovations that women have made to technology. I hope the information provided so far is inspiring you to do so.
I’m also hopeful that we are finally seeing the tide turn for women entering the STEM areas. In recent years there have been more significant pushes to open more doors to women that have been previously all but closed based on the gender bias that reared its ugly head in the 1900’s and continues to discourage and move women into other roles than those many want to pursue in STEM. Let’s hope that discrimination beast gets slain sooner rather than later.
This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. To learn more about tech news and analysis visit Tech Page One (http://techpageone.dell.com/). Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.
Tags: ada lovelace, cybersecurity, Dell, grace hopper, hedy lamarr, Information Security, innovation, privacy, privacy professor, privacyprof, Rebecca Herold, technology, toprank, walter isaacson