Pioneering Women in Tech
Technology has reached the point where it is ubiquitous within our lives. Yet, we don’t take the time to understand the creators of it and the influential people who helped shape it into what it is today. With March being the start of Women’s History Month, I thought it would be fitting to look at some of the trailblazers that forged the path to where we are today.
Joanna Hoffman: The Original Mac Team
Few can debate the Macintosh’s impact on the world today. Over winter break, I picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography and read it. One of the things that stuck out to me was the hard working and dedicated team that created innovative products while dealing with Job’s “Reality Distortion Field”. In case you’ve never heard of RDF, it was Steve Job’s ability to make the people he was working with believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Joanna Hoffman was one of those team members who worked on the team that brought the original Macintosh to market in 1984. One antidote from the book that stuck out was that beginning in 1981 the team began to give out an award to the person who did the best job of standing up to Steve and his RDF. While it was partly a joke, and partly real, Joanna was the first person to receive the award. Joanna would go on to follow Steve to NeXT, and eventually General Magic until retiring in 1995.
Margaret Hamilton: NASA’s Apollo Programmer
I have to admit, I had seen the picture of Margaret standing next to the stack of printed code that her and her MIT team had produced for the Apollo project, but did not quite understand that context or the gravity of the accomplishment. Margaret started working in labs at MIT during the 1960’s with a background in mathematics. At the time, computer science and software engineering were not yet established disciplines but rather skills that were learned on the job. In fact, Hamilton was one of the first to popularize the term “software engineer” as a discipline. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s when Margaret joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT and began working on the Apollo Space Mission that her role as a software engineer became more profound. She quickly moved into system design and eventually became in charge of the Command Module software that was used for navigation and lunar landing guidance. Margaret and her team’s accomplishment of safely landing a man on the moon find an obvious place in the history books. This Smithsonian article is definitely worth the read for more details on what went into their accomplishments.
Karen Spärck Jones: Search Engine Innovations
Born in the 1930’s, Karan Spärck Jones began working in the Cambridge Language Research Unit by the time she was in her 20s. Her PhD in Synonymy and Semantic Classification was ahead of its time in Natural Language Processing. Despite her early accomplishments, it wasn’t until the 1960’s that she began working on Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Her Inverse Document Frequency weighting and numerical statistics system allowed for more efficient retrieval of information. Crazily enough this system is still used in search engines today. To be honest, you could write an entire paper on Karen’s accomplishments and advancements in the field of search.
“I think it’s very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men.”
– KAREN SPÄRCK JONES
The world of technology has slowly been morphing over the years to include a more diverse and inclusive culture and I think the pioneers mentioned in this post have a lot to do with that trend. I think the world is finally waking up to the fact that being diverse and inclusive allows for more perspectives that matter to be heard. Sometimes it’s our job to listen.
I challenge you to find a woman in your life that is making a difference and thank them for all that they do.
