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Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018)
- downerending 7y agoThat's pretty interesting. Only knew of two, myself. Would love to see a similar list of relatively prolific women open source programmers.
- jeffadotio 7y agoI went to a bootcamp that had a room named after Lovelace, a room named after Hamilton and a room named after Hopper. Those were the only rooms aside from the open floor plan. There were no women on the staff.
- Craighead 7y agoSeems like it was memorable enough for you to post about it.
- asebold 7y ago“There were no women on the staff” - says it all
- allovernow 7y agoWhat exactly are you implying?
- asebold 7y agoThey wanted to seem like they cared about diversity with out actually doing anything to support diversity. Such as, finding at least one female staff member.
- api 7y agoThese two come to mind. They're technically more math but they've had a significant impact on CS in certain areas like cryptography and data compression: Ingrid Daubechies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies Tanja Lange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Lange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Lange
- dpiers 7y agoHarriette Kollman went to work for Boeing while her husband was fighting in World War II. She would later go on to become their first female computer programmer. Unfortunately I don’t know more about her achievements in the field. I know the name because we get letters addressed to her sometimes, but she passed away a few years ago.
- frostyj 7y agoFei-Fei Li deserves to be on this list too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li
- fortyrod 7y agoIt seems like there used to be a lot more women in computing. In my first job out of college (late 80's), I worked in a group of software developers with 12 women and two men. It was not considered odd.
- RandomGuyDTB 7y agoThe explanation I've seen a lot is that once men realized computers could be used for more than trivial math they took over the field. It's obviously more nuanced but I do think it's mostly out of sexism, which is why organizations like Girls Who Code are so valuable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- perl4ever 7y agoI wonder if anyone has ever surveyed women programmers from days of yore, and found out why their sons became programmers and their daughters didn't.* It might be more productive than sharing prejudices and assumptions. *I could describe what I'm aware of first hand, but that would only be "anecdotal evidence"
- anonymfus 7y agoThat is a basic feminism that in a patriarchal society as soon as a profession becomes more prestige and/or well paid it also becomes more male dominated.
- BurningFrog 7y agoIt's also basic human nature that men will chase high paying jobs with far more intensity than women. There... may not be a conflict here. Just different ways of saying the same thing.
- jhrowajay 7y agoThe human nature understander has logged on I see.
- cryptozeus 7y agoWang Xiaoyun Broke MD5. Broke SHA-0. Broke SHA-1. Awesome !
- risho 7y agoKinda sad to not see Joanna Rutkowska in the article or in the comments anywhere. She's contributed a lot to computer science generally, but the biggest thing is probably her work on qubes os, which is an awesome project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Rutkowska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Rutkowska
- wyldfire 7y ago> ... or in the comments anywhere You fixed that particular problem ;) From the article: > I left a lot of qualified people out because there were a lot of people and I got lazy. Consider this a sampler rather than an exhaustive list.
- zeta0x10 7y agoAlthough I recognized the name I did not know she did qubes os. It is a really cool idea, thanks for the link, she did and does inspiring stuff. edit: apparently she now works on the Golem project: https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/
- ryanlol 7y agoWouldn’t Qubes be more software engineering than CS?
- marklacey 7y agoGlad to see Fran Allen on the list. I remember reading (in the early 90's) several papers authored or co-authored by "F.E. Allen" and having no clue "F.E." was a woman until a few years later. I was in a compiler workshop several years ago and when I looked up I realized she was sitting directly in front of me at the workshop. I believe she was retired at the time but still attending conferences out of personal interest.
- ggm 7y agoSally Floyd? did heaps of work on TCP/IP Alison Mankin? head of the IRTF, also big in networking. RFCs Elise Gerich? ran NSFnet, Was IANA for many years. RFCs Susan Hares? does BGP stuff. RFCs
- not2b 7y agoAdele Goldberg of Xerox PARC / Smalltalk fame.
- rewq4321 7y agoLeslie Kaelbling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_P._Kaelbling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_P._Kaelbling Interview on AI podcast: https://youtu.be/Er7Dy8rvqOc https://youtu.be/Er7Dy8rvqOc Maybe doesn't meet the "sound-bite" condition, but a really impressive human none-the-less.
- jakear 7y agoWild. She taught me about partially observable Markov decision processes, didn’t know she invented them.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago> Radia Perlman - Invented the Spanning-Tree Protocol. Thanks for posting this. I've even read the STP poem before, but I never had any idea about the person behind it.
- _wldu 7y agoShe came up with STP over a weekend. A friend of mine calls her the "Mother of the Internet".
- Kassandry 7y agoAudrey Tang as well. She's awesome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
- henry_bone 7y agoFirst off, yes, Aurdrey is awesome. I followed the early perl6 implementation that she did in Haskell, back when she was known as Autrijus Tang. But possibly not suitable for inclusion on the list due to being in possession of a Y-chromosome.
- KerrickStaley 7y agoTin Kam Ho (who introduced the random forests ML technique) should be on the list too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Kam_Ho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Kam_Ho
- asebold 7y agoAm a woman. Fucking thank you. So tired of hearing about the same people over and over again.
- tuke 7y agoNeed to add Ann Wollrath to this list. (Primary author of the RMI whitepaper.)
- bunchOfCucks 7y agoSexist
- robertbmenke 7y agoTo Betty Holberton, inventor of breakpoints, thank you. Sincerely, everyone.
- whalesalad 7y agoWhen I got to that line I thought to myself... wow imagine inventing breakpoints. Like, hey guys this debugging is a monumental pain in the ass what if we did this thing here. BOOM.
- roca 7y agoJeannette Wing was my PhD (co)advisor. She is absurdly brilliant. Another CS woman I know who is ridiculously brilliant is Dawn Song (Berkeley). In my years in academia, IBM Research and Mozilla I mostly worked with men, and many of them were outstanding, but no more than one or two of them could compete with Jeannette or Dawn in terms of sheer intellectual firepower.
- whalesalad 7y agoAfter reading the post I was exploring some of the other content on this site. Hillel (the author) does consulting work to help teams design better software systems using a tool called TLA+ I had never heard of TLA+ at all until this point. I am going to reserve my opinion on it seeing as I have about 10 minutes of experience with it -- but I am super curious if others here have anything they'd like to share on TLA+?
- dwohnitmok 7y agoIn short: it's great, learn it. Slightly longer, it may seem useless at first given that TLA+ doesn't verify code you write, but is rather better thought of as a formal design language for designing abstract state machines. However, it is extremely useful for clarifying thoughts and serving as a concrete design artifact for other engineers to examine. Also because its apparent weakness that it doesn't verify code you write is in my opinion a strength because it means you don't incur a dependency on it if you or your team doesn't like it and wants to throw it away. You lose no more time than what you put in.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoMy mom started as a data entry operator, who then became an accountant who had to pickup COBOL and FORTRAN programming on punch-cards for a time as part of her job. In the early days of computing, women were only allowed to operate computers that were designed and programmed almost exclusively by men. To be a female programmer in the early days was rare, and to be an African-American programmer in the times of segregation would seem to be that much more difficult. The film Hidden Figures (2016) seems like a pertinent fictional-recreation/parable lesson in these barriers that were more prevalent in the past, but it's important to be mindful that biases are a constant of human nature and never disappear.
- michelpp 7y agoI'd add Ingrid Daubechies, more mathematician, but has had an enormous influence on signal processing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies
- bane 7y agoHere's an idea that we've implemented where I work: when coming up with working names for projects or whatever, go out of your way to name them after notable women in STEM. Bonus, purposely retire the example women that everybody knows -- that means no "Project Lovelace" or "Ada", no "Grace Hopper" network optimization effort, none of that. Make it a rewarded challenge for people to spend time finding out, bringing forward, and celebrating the contributions of amazing women. Feel free to be expansive in what you consider technology and STEM. For example, women who've written music on music synths: Wendy Carlos, Imogen Heap, etc. Or videogame designers: Carol Shaw, Dona Bailey, Joyce Weisbecker,...actually here's a list [1] Cryptography: Dorothy Denning, Margaret Rock, and so on. [2] Make it a point to explain the history of the person you named the project after as part of your project charter and when you onboard new people onto your project, explain the history of the name to them and why you are making it a practice to name projects in order to celebrate the contributions of women in technology. It doesn't have to be a long, drawn out affair. But I can tell you that (from first hand experience) this type of celebration can have amazing effects on mixed gendered teams. I've never seen so many talented women staff suddenly get so supercharged. It's honestly amazing and incredibly humbling and it will absolutely become a continued practice wherever I go. The number of times I've also heard from women staff "if I had only known about so many of these women growing up, I might have made different choices in life"....you can feel the unfed hunger for recognition. You can do variants on this approach for many underserved and underrepresented groups of people. It actually becomes kind of fun for people to spend time learning about what people other than Turing, or Babbage, or some mythological God figure (or Star Wars/Trek character) and how they contributed to where we are as a species today. Get cheeky with it. Instead of "Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave" turn it into "Project Brown Square Cave" and have a designer make a cool logo design, or "Pamela Hardt-English" into "The Angled Heart Project" and make an 8-bit pixel art version of a heart or something. Make memes out of Margaret Hamilton's smiling face and send it around as a local meme when somebody does something really cool. Keep all references to women associated with positive/cool/etc. things. Never use them as a degrading joke, or to make fun or somebody or something. Pick women who are currently in STEM, e.g. Katie Bouman is a great name for an effort to add better visibility into the workings of a tech stack. Meet these women. Many of them are still alive. I know that the ANTIC podcast [3] has many dozens of amazing interviews as does Matt Chat [4]. Even though these are mostly about games and computing, many of the women featured went on to some pretty great careers. (ha! The most recent interview as of this comment on Matt Chat is Annie VanderMeer, a game designer) Make this an official policy. There's enough recognition for men already -- we're good. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_game_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_gam... 2 - https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women-in-cryptology.html https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women... 3 - https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ 4 - https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8 https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8 5 - and some more if you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
- drfuchs 7y agoSetting the record straight: Cynthia Dwork, not Latanya Sweeney, (co-)invented Differential Privacy. And Proof Of Work (later used by Bitcoin and HashCash). And Lattice-based Crypto (resistant to quantum computer attack). And Nonmalleable Cryptography. But I'm admittedly biased.
- Isamu 7y agoIf we include the theory of error correcting codes, add Jessie MacWilliams and Vera Pless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Pless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Pless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_MacWilliams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_MacWilliams
- BadMrFrosty 7y agoNo mention of Sr. Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M., a Catholic religious sister and the first woman with a PhD in CS? She helped develop FORTRAN and BASIC.