Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018)

hillelwayne.com

232 pointsmumblemumble55 comments

Kinda 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

> ... 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.

Although 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/

Wouldn’t Qubes be more software engineering than CS?

Am a woman. Fucking thank you. So tired of hearing about the same people over and over again.

Glad 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.

To Betty Holberton, inventor of breakpoints, thank you. Sincerely, everyone.

When 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.

Sally 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

I 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.

These 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

Tanja Lange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Lange

Harriette 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.

Fei-Fei Li deserves to be on this list too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li

Leslie Kaelbling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_P._Kaelbling

Interview on AI podcast: https://youtu.be/Er7Dy8rvqOc

Maybe doesn't meet the "sound-bite" condition, but a really impressive human none-the-less.

Wild. She taught me about partially observable Markov decision processes, didn’t know she invented them.

It 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.

The 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.

I 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"

That 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.

Not true. There are more and more female physicians and the trend is that females will progressively take over that profession, percentage wise.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-doctors-better-...

Which doesn't dispute what the parent said: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over...

They said that high paying jobs are sought after by men. Doctors are highly paid and women are taking over that job. Sounds like the opposite of what was claimed.

That is purely a self inflicted problem. There is a reason why this happens and both women and men are equally to blame.

NPR had an excellent piece on this a while back. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

tldr: home computers were gendered male (because video games) and cs 101 curriculums started presupposing extensive computer exposure.

I've heard that argument, but I'm not convinced by it. I think the shift to being male-dominated was well underway by then. The Algol-60 committee was all male, for example.

You can't deny the drop in women entering the field. The touchy feely "oh it's man's field, something something society" explanation isn't really supported by data (or by other similar fields). I'd say the shift in education is the biggest factor in why we see so few women in CS today. For sure a myriad of other shifts were pushing women out 5 decades ago, but it's telling how absolute the demographic shift has been despite not seeing the same shift in other white collar professions.

Yes, I agree that the number of women entering the field has continued to drop as the field has continued to gain in prestige. My friend Ann, who wrote an operating system in assembly which for several years provided the bulk of the revenue for the cloud computing startup where she worked, has explained that when she got started with programming, it was because IBM was trying to convince its customers that computer programming was so easy that even women could do it. In an environment that sexist and in that particular way, it was inevitable that the dawning recognition of the intellectual challenge of programming would be accompanied by women being excluded from the field by unjustified prejudice.

I don't think law and medicine have a similar stereotype of being purely for geniuses (which fortunately is starting to soften for software), and certainly haven't newly acquired it since the 1960s. Fields that do have such a stereotype, such as math, physics, aeronautical engineering (“rocket science”), and medical subspecialties such as neurosurgery, continue to have very few women. You can readily verify this; one book that goes into some depth about the mechanisms of exclusion is my friend Linley’s Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie.

I have no idea where you're from that computer science has a "stereotype for geniuses". And I'd also go so far as to say computer programming still isn't a high prestige position. My best friend's mother still asks if "I'm still doing IT", this article was written in 2011 talking about how bad for your career calling yourself a programmer is[0]. .

What this industry does benefit from is exposure and general tool knowledge, which, what do you know, is easiest to get when you're a bored teenager with too much time. The idea of the "missing semester[1]" is so prevalent mit put a whole thing together. In the states at least, we've built a self fulfilling system that excludes highly qualified people for no good reason. There's nothing natural about this state of affairs, and imo, nothing good about it.

[0]https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... [1]https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

Without taking a position on the rest, it seems like madness to expect a novice to walk into CS101 at 18 and become a master programmer. It's like learning to play a musical instrument or learn a foreign language. If you're not already well into by 18, you're never going to be really great at it and certainly won't catch those that started early.

It's because it used to be considered "womens work", similar to clerical work. Then companies did research and found that the best programmers were usually introverts, so they started advertising and pushing to get more men into the field because women tended to be more social, or would want to leave school/work to start a family. So it shifted and became "mens work", and women naturally assumed it wasn't for them because there weren't many people saying that anyone can do it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/women-onc...

Women were not pushed out of CS or discouraged. Just go look at the evolution of degrees by gender and pay close attention to the absolute, not relative numbers.

What happened is that as personal computing took off in the 80s, men's interest in the field soared permanently while women temporarily showed interest and then dropped off again. The same happened with dotcom.

The article you linked is a giant exercise in selling the same tired old narrative, even as it debunks itself. They even spell it out: when Grace Hopper "invented the compiler" it was actually what we'd call a linker today, and the work was in fact mostly clerical and rote because there were no abstractions to compile.

As soon as tooling for that came around, that changed, and we started architecting something we would now consider code. Which men appeared to enjoy more.

I have a much more convincing argument though. 15% of CS degrees are given to women, a number that has remained mostly flat for two decades (but only because men dropping out of college during that time, otherwise it'd be lower). Half the top 25 programming languages on stack overflow's survey were created in that time.

None of them have female creators. Not one. Where are all those genius female programming language designers we keep hearing about? If women are just as capable, are they just too lazy then? Or is creating a good programming language and making it successful such a stubborn gamble of both abstraction skill and confidence that women fall out of the distribution?

Oh no it must be because people tell them they can't do it. Nevermind that gender orthodoxy has sung only one song for the last 40 years, while being amply funded, and they all prefer to go study third rate sociology instead of getting a real STEM degree...

Here is a book on this topic - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality - “How Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women.”

One of Britain’s first contract software companies was founded by Steve Shirley after she was pushed out of her job when she got married (which was normal at the time). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley

I recall that as well. I think part of the reason was that programming was far less technical then. There were a lot of programming teams where it was "you do the balance screen, and you do the deposit screen, and you do the help screen, etc". I can think of quite a few episodes of (usually) women coming up to me and asking for me to peel off small tasks for them to work on. These days that just doesn't fly as much.

I do recall plenty of sharp women, but they tended to do math, EE, physical sciences, or even CS proper (i.e., math). Not really any advanced programmers, though. Seems understandable--programming is a rather tedious and solitary activity. Maybe a bit like music composition. I wouldn't do it myself if I wasn't driven by it (and from a very young age, with absolutely no assistance from anyone around me).

Tin Kam Ho (who introduced the random forests ML technique) should be on the list too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Kam_Ho

Wang Xiaoyun Broke MD5. Broke SHA-0. Broke SHA-1.

Awesome !

Adele Goldberg of Xerox PARC / Smalltalk fame.

Jeannette 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.

Setting 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.

My 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.

Audrey Tang as well. She's awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

> 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.

She came up with STP over a weekend. A friend of mine calls her the "Mother of the Internet".

After 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+?

In 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.

If 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/Jessie_MacWilliams

That's pretty interesting. Only knew of two, myself.

Would love to see a similar list of relatively prolific women open source programmers.

I'd add Ingrid Daubechies, more mathematician, but has had an enormous influence on signal processing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies

No 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.

Need to add Ann Wollrath to this list. (Primary author of the RMI whitepaper.)

Here'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_gam...

2 - https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women...

3 - https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

4 - https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8

5 - and some more if you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

This seems quite patronizing. Better: Make sure everyone is paid right and that any jerks are removed from the team.

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