(triumphant music)
- I'm gonna get started just
'cause not a lot of time
and a lot to go through, so
sorry to cut conversation short.
Hello, I'm Hilary.
This is We've Always Been Here:
Women Changemakers in Tech.
I work as a full-stack developer
at Ten Forward Consulting
in Madison, Wisconsin and
I'm on Twitter @hilarysk.
Alright, so I'm gonna look
at four basic sections
for this talk.
The first is Who Needs Women, Anyway?
Then we're gonna go
looking at how women's role
in technology changed
from clerical to cool
or how working in tech
changed from clerical to cool.
We'll get the Changemakers,
we're gonna start
with women you might have heard of before,
so that have been more celebrated.
Then we're gonna look at
women more from the past
who have kind of stayed
a little bit more unsung.
Then we're gonna move on to
women that are doing things
currently that are really exciting
and I think are worth paying attention to.
Last section is How to Stay Woke.
So it's great that you
came today, but how can
you kind of keep that going in the rest
of your life and your tech career?
If you wanna follow along,
we've got the slides online
at tinyurl.com/women-changemakers.
So if people want to look that up.
Wanna give a quick disclaimer.
There are hundreds of women
that I could've included
in this talk, so this isn't
supposed to be like the best.
These are just ones that interested me
or that I happen to learn
about or that I thought
had neat stories, so plenty
more where this came from.
So Who Needs Women, Anyway?
Right, we've had a lot of
dudes doing computer science,
doing programming, and it
seems to have been fine
so what's the big deal?
So I really like this quote.
"It really amazed me that
these men were programmers,
"because I thought it was women's work!"
This was a woman who was hired in 1953
and I think that just kind of shows
how the attitude has really changed
since the early days of programming.
So these are all things
that we either wouldn't have
or would look very different
if it weren't for women
in the past who contributed
to the technology
and the programming
that brought them here.
So we're gonna look at each
of the individual women
who did this throughout the presentation,
but I just want you to kind
of have this in your head.
So Who Needs Women, Anyway?
Well, money is a good reason.
So there were reports from
2015 and 2017 that looked
at the financial output of
companies that were more diverse
and so that's ethnic
diversity, gender diversity,
experience diversity, all kinds.
And they found that diverse
companies are 35% more likely
to outperform non-diverse
companies, they're 45% more likely
to report market share growth,
and they're 70% more likely
to report that they captured a new market.
So that's pretty impressive.
Basically if you have
a more diverse company,
you make more money.
Everyone likes that, yeah.
It leads to better software.
So I'm sure we've all heard about examples
of homogenous engineering teams
resulting in shotty products.
So airbags back in the 80s
that killed women and children
because they were tested on your standard,
male-sized passenger.
Facial recognition that
couldn't see people of color,
vocal recognition software
that couldn't hear women.
These are all real things
and all it would've taken
was one person who was not
a presumably white male
on the team to realize that
there were severe issues
with the product as it currently stood.
There was one of those
same studies, I think it
was a Harvard Business
Review from 2017 found that
if there's a software team
that has at least one member
of the team that shares the
ethnicity of the client,
they understand those
client's needs 152% more.
These are real impacts that are measurable
and quantifiable.
Mentors and role models.
So it's kind of a cyclical thing, right?
We don't have a lot of women in tech
and part of the reason we don't
have a lot of women in tech
is because we don't have
a lot of women in tech.
So there was this global
study that was just released
this past March of women
currently working in technology
and they asked them what
their biggest barriers were
to continue in technology or
to advancing within technology
and 48% of them said a lack of mentors
was their biggest barrier or
one of their biggest barriers
and 42% said lack of female role models.
There's a lot of studies
that have been done
about retention with women in
tech and how it's a big issue
and part of the reason is
again because there aren't
a lot of women in tech.
And then finally, when we
raise women, we raise everyone.
So there are way too
many statistics to cite
in this talk today about
how this is impacted,
but one of the big ones is,
this is from a 2014 report,
and I have all of these
citations at the end
if you want to look this up
later, but if we eliminated
worldwide gender gaps in labor
participation, hours worked,
productivity, et cetera, the world economy
would grow by 26% and in
terms of real dollars,
that's $28.4 trillion
that we are losing out on
because we do not have women
in these economic positions
and working and contributing in this way.
Also, like apart from these
sort of statistical reasons,
these are good jobs, right?
Working in tech, it's a good life.
Yeah, right.
I've talked to a couple people
even just here at RailsConf
who transitioned from different
careers into technology
because they wanted to make more money
and so women, people of
color, like deserve access
to these good jobs.
So this is an edit from
during World War Two
when we were first starting to
do computing and programming.
"Because of the male shortage
and the added attractiveness
"of paying women less, they
rather reluctantly began
"to hire women as computers.
"It seemed that the more
physically attractive
"a woman was, the more
likely she was to get hired."
And this isn't talking
about private companies.
This is the precursor to
NASA, that women who worked
at NASA at this time,
this was their impression
of the hiring process.
So we're gonna look at how
tech jobs went from being seen
as clerical to cool.
Pretty different from the origins.
"As late as the 1960s,
many people perceived
"computer programming as
a natural career choice
"for savvy young women."
So I think a lot of
people are probably aware
of the fact that the original
computers were women,
who did computing, were called computers.
How many people have seen Hidden Figures?
Excellent, if you haven't you should.
So historian Nathan Ensmenger
said when we were first
building computers and doing
programming, it was seen
as a "low-skill, clerical function akin
"to filing or typing."
How many people think that what you do
is akin to filing or
typing and is low-skilled?
Really? (laughs)
I don't know what you're doing, but...
So they hired women.
They thought, "Well, women
have been secretaries,
"women have been typists,
women shall be programmers."
This started to change
for various reasons.
One of them was when World War Two ended,
suddenly there were a
lot of men coming back
who needed jobs.
Programming, what people
were starting to realize,
"Hey, actually this programming
thing is kind of hard."
So they started instituting
ways to test people's skills
before just throwing
them into these slots.
Two of the ways they did
this was aptitude tests
and personality profiles.
So aptitude tests were
very heavily math-based
and back in the 60s, men
had more excess education.
Even then math was seen
as more of a man's field,
so if you're requiring people
to have solid math skills,
men are more likely to have those skills.
Personality profiles, this
I thought was fascinating.
They crafted the profile
of what they thought
a good programmer was based
on existing programmers
and they specifically looked for people
who had a disinterest in
people and disinterest
in close interactions. (audience laughs)
So we see the origins of the antisocial
programmer stereotype.
Again, this is gonna
rule out a lot of women,
especially at this time when
women were socially conditioned
to be more nurturing, more
caring, they were seen as that.
That was the stereotype,
so these all served
to help exclude women
from the tech workforce.
We move up to the 80s and the
rise of the personal computer,
gaming, the tech genius
trope, weird science,
Revenge of the Nerds, all of those.
It's these nerdy,
bespectacled teenage guys
who are super geniuses and
saving the world with computers.
Like most toys, the marketing was gendered
and personal computers, video
games, they were seen as toys
and they were marketed primarily to boys.
And then the last one,
as the percentage of men
in a field increases,
the prestige and the pay
likewise increase.
When the percentage of
women in a field increases,
pay and prestige decrease
and they have tracked
this across numerous industries.
Teaching used to be all male-dominated,
it was seen as this very good profession.
The more women that were
in there, I don't know
if anyone has any teacher friends who talk
about how they don't get paid
anything, because it's true.
It's just been seen over and over again.
So as kind of again this cyclical issue.
As more men went into
programming, the prestige went up,
the pay increased, they were more picky
about who they chose,
and it just kept on being
more and more men.
So a couple graphs.
This one shows how in these
other STEM-related fields,
the percentage of women getting degrees
continually increased from the 1970s,
except for computer science.
See that sharp decrease?
This too shows that even as
a greater percentage of women
was entering the workforce,
fewer women were entering IT.
And so we see that computer
science and IT are an outlier.
They don't follow the general trend
of women's labor force participation.
Right, so we're gonna look at women
who sort of defied the
odds and did it anyway
and we're gonna start with ones
that you might have heard of.
Ada Lovelace, who's heard of Ada Lovelace?
A lot of people.
Good, yeah.
She's pretty badass.
She wrote what's considered
the first computer program.
Her big thing was that she saw that binary
could be more than numbers, right?
She envisioned computing
machines that could create
musical compositions.
So she basically saw
iTunes back in the 1830s.
I love this quote.
She said, "The science
of operations, as derived
"from mathematics more especially,
is a science of itself,
"and has its own abstract
truth and value."
So kind of seeing this whole
field of computer science
before we even had computers.
Also, fun fact, she was a big gambler
and she got together with
some of her math buddies
and they wrote a mathematical
model to help them bet better.
It didn't work.
She actually was heavily in
debt, but... (audience laughs)
But still.
Alright, Grace Hopper.
I'm also gonna assume a lot of people
have heard of Grace Hopper, show of hands.
Yep.
She had a PhD in mathematics.
She wrote the first
compiler, so her big thing
was that you shouldn't have
to have a PhD in mathematics
to program a computer, right?
You should be able to use English.
Helped create COBOL, retired
at age 79 as a rear admiral.
She actually was aged out of the Navy,
like the Naval rules, she was
too old to be in the Navy,
but she was so important and so vital
that they kept just giving
her this special extension
so she could stay in.
She was also too small, when she signed up
for the war effort with, I
don't remember the acronym,
but it's Waves, it was
basically a women's unit
for World War Two and she
was too physically small
to meet the requirements, but
she had these math skills,
which were desperately needed.
So again, they made an exception for her.
Dorothy Vaughan.
If anyone's seen Hidden Figures,
you know who Dorothy Vaughan is.
Yep, raise your hands, that's fine.
So she was at NASA and then
its predecessor at NACA
for almost 30 years.
She was the first black supervisor.
She became an expert in Fortran.
Basically when they switched
from using human computers
to using electronic
computers, she saw this coming
and instead of letting
herself become obsolete,
she was like, "Okay, great.
"Well, I used to do the math
and now I'm gonna do Fortran."
She was also a huge
champion for other women,
which I think you're
gonna see that occurring
in a lot of the women that
we're gonna talk about today.
And that's white women and black women.
Basically if she saw someone
that she deserved a raise
or deserved a promotion,
she fought for them
to make sure that they
got what they deserved.
She did not get what she deserved.
She was the first black
supervisor, but when they moved
to electronic computers and they combined
a bunch of departments
and stuff, she was demoted
and she never became a supervisor again.
I think she was at NASA
another like 15 or 20 years
and they refused to promote
her back to supervisor.
Women of ENIAC, have people heard of them?
Yeah?
So this was the first all-electronic
digital computer ever.
It was six women who
were pulled to program it
and so at this point we
were still in the mindset
that the hardware was the hard part
and the software was easy.
So men did the hardware,
women did the software.
And if we think our job is hard now,
they had 3,000 different switches
and 18,000 different vacuum tubes
and if one of those vacuum tubes went out,
the whole thing would go caput.
So I was watching a
documentary about these women
and they ended up basically memorizing
where all of these switches
and vacuum tubes were
so it got to the point
where if something went out,
they were like, "Oh, that's
like column six, row 12.
"It's gonna be towards the
middle, go check that one."
Which is just mind blowing to me.
Plus I really like this quote.
This is from Betty Jennings.
She said, "I had a fantastic life.
"Everything I did was the
beginning of something new."
So again, this foresight,
realizing that this
was gonna be really something different.
A sad story about this though.
So this was a classified
project, it was through the Army.
They finally revealed it to the public.
They were using it to calculate
ballistics calculations
and they revealed in 1946.
Great fanfare, had press
conferences, lots of attention.
The night after they revealed it,
they had this sort of celebratory ceremony
and it was a candlelit dinner.
It was full of dignitaries and luminaries
and all of who's who in science
and none of the women
programmers were invited.
They literally talked about
trudging through the snow
in the bitter cold in
February to take the train
back to their homes while all of the men
who had worked on it were
at this candlelit dinner.
Alright, we're gonna look at some people
that maybe haven't gotten
quite as much of attention.
So Marjorie Lee Browne.
She was one of the first women
to get her PhD in mathematics
or first woman of color.
I think she was maybe the third.
She also secured one
of the first computers
that was ever used in an
academic setting, so that
was for what was then North
Carolina Central University.
She taught there and she secured a grant
to purchase them a
computer for the students
to use and learn to work with.
And she also again
encouraged women and students
of color to pursue math
and to pursue computing.
Radia Perlman, known as the
"Mother of the Internet",
which apparently she hates
that title. (audience laughs)
She did a spanning tree protocol,
if people know what that is.
That was in 1985, so
basically saying we're going
from a few nodes that
have to be pretty close
to each other interacting
to these giant networks.
So basically the Internet.
Her mother was actually a programmer
and she talks about how
that might have influenced
her decision to go into computer science,
but her mom never really
talked about it to her.
So I think again, this
importance of like celebrating
women who have done great things in tech.
Also, prodigious author, like
20 or 30 books or something
like that, which just makes
me tired thinking about.
Alright, Margaret Hamilton.
So she again worked at NASA.
She did on-board flight control software
for the Apollo and Skylab missions,
coined the term software engineer,
developed or helped to
develop asynchronous software,
priority scheduling, end-to-end testing,
and on of the ways that
this really paid off,
this focus on testing, I can't
remember what flight it was,
but they were starting their descent
and the astronaut put
the wrong sequence in.
And at that time,
computers could only handle
so much at one time and
so there was basically
an overload in the system.
In the past, it would have just overloaded
and it would have been like,
"I don't know what you want.
"I'm just shutting down
and not doing anything."
Which if you're in a space shuttle
trying to get back to Earth,
it's not the ideal scenario.
But she had written a
check for human error
that basically said, "If the
computer gets to the point
"where it can't handle
everything that's going on,
"don't do the last thing someone said.
"Finish your current tasks
and then take it on."
That innovation saved the
astronauts' lives, so.
Annie Easley.
So she worked again with NASA.
There's a big NASA theme here.
They actually had a lot of opportunities
for women at that time.
She worked on one of the
first computer programs
for navigation in space.
Brilliant, brilliant woman
and again, this sense of like,
I can't remember the exact phrase,
but it's the idea of when you
take a step up the ladder,
reach your hand back and pull
someone else up with you.
And so she lived in, I want
to say it was Missouri,
and this was right around
Jim Crow in the 1960s.
They're passing all of these
laws to try and prevent
African-Americans from voting
and so she used her education
and taught her neighbors how to pass
the Jim Crow voting
test so that they could
still vote in elections.
Erna Schneider Hoover.
She received one of the first
ever patents for software
and was the first woman
technical supervisor at Bell Labs
and what she did was created a system
that monitored the incoming
calls to Bell Labs.
So it automatically
adjusted the acceptance rate
again to avoid overload.
My favorite part of her story
though is that this concept
for which she received this
patent, she thought of it
while she was in the hospital recovering
from the birth of one of her daughters.
Karen Sparck Jones.
"Computing is too important
to be left to men."
I just love that. (laughs)
So we saw earlier, I had
the three images of products
or technologies that
we have women to thank
for helping develop
and Karen Sparck Jones,
she created this idea of
inverse document frequency,
which basically says it's
used in search engines
to rank pages and documents based on
what your search term is.
So it's used by I think the vast majority
of search engines today, including Google.
And kind of like Grace
Hopper, her big thing
was she wanted people to
interact with computers
using English instead of
having to use equations.
Mary Kenneth Keller has a
special place in my heart
because she with a man
received the first doctorates
in computer science in the United States
and she actually got it at
University of Wisconsin,
which is in Madison, where I live.
She helped develop BASIC.
I think she was the only woman on the team
and if I remember correctly,
it was an area of Harvard
that was off limits to women
because they'd never have women
there and they had to make
again all of these sort
of special arrangements so that she could
be part of the team and
again this idea of foresight.
So she said, "We're having
an information explosion
"and it's certainly
obvious that information
"is of no use unless it's available."
And this is pre-Internet
when she said this,
so again just having this
vision of what could be
based on what was available at the time.
We're gonna look at some women
that are still doing awesome stuff.
So Corrine Yu I feel like is a super hero.
Just look at this list of
things that she's done.
She was a game programmer for Apple Two,
she worked on the Space Shuttle program,
she's received patents for
game work that she's done,
and now she programs Amazon drones.
I mean, like you do. (audience laughs)
Sophie Wilson.
So she designed the
Acorn System 1 in 1979.
It was a microcomputer and
it had 512 bytes of memory.
I looked this up the other
day and the modern MacBook Air
has eight gigs of working memory,
so this is like super tiny.
And she built this when
she was still getting
her undergrad degree.
She also developed the ARM processor core
and that is used still today
in smartphones, tablets,
digital Tvs, pretty
much everything is built
on this technology that she created.
I read that items that contain
this ARM processor core,
more than 30 billion have been shipped,
which is four for every human on Earth
and Sophie Wilson did that.
Window Snyder literally wrote
the book on threat modeling,
has been described as
"sheriff for the Internet."
She's worked for
Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple.
Right now she's at
Fastly, which relays data
all over the world for places
like Yelp, Kickstarter,
Stripe, Pinterest.
So she works with security
for things that we use
all the time everyday and kind of keeps
our information safe.
Tracy Chou who was, and
I might be saying some
of these names wrong, I
apologize if that's the case.
She created a movement
to collect and publish
tech diversity data.
So she talked about being
on a plane to a conference
from, I think it was in Seattle
and she was in San Francisco
and she tweeted a joke
about how if the plane went down,
they would lose half of the women
who worked in tech in the Bay area.
And she was like, "It was
a joke, but then I realized
"it was kind of true."
And there was all this talk
about we need more diversity
and we're making effort and
things are getting better.
And she was like, "Where's the data?"
Right, like how do we
know that we're actually
improving anything?
And so she created, I
mean it's a spreadsheet.
It's not even complicated,
but she created a spreadsheet
and invited people to submit their data
so that they could actually track and see
if things were improving or not.
And there's 268 companies that are on it
as of the last time I
checked, including GitHub,
Wells Fargo, Tinder.
And she had an uncanny
ability to recognize companies
that were going to be successful.
So she worked at Quora
when it first started,
she was the number eight
employee at Pinterest,
number eight employee
total and the last time
I looked this up a couple days ago,
there are more than 500
engineers at Pinterest.
So she picked a winning horse there.
I think you're actually
in the room. (laughs)
(audience applauds)
It seemed appropriate for RailsConf, so.
Who's heard of RailsBridge?
Some people, cool.
Yeah, they're doing amazing things.
I can't remember, how many students
have you guys had now, do you know?
That's what I was gonna say, 10,000.
Yeah, which is just insane and awesome.
Prolific speaker and has been an organizer
for RailsConf and RubyConf and just doing
really, really great stuff so thank you.
(audience applauds)
Erica Baker, senior engineer at Slack.
Used to work at Google.
Kind of the same thing, she
as Tracy, who we looked at
a few people ago, she
created a spreadsheet.
That's all it was.
It was a spreadsheet, it was
an internal salary spreadsheet
and because she was talking
with friends over wine
and they realized they all
made vastly different amounts
of money and she was like,
"That's kind of ridiculous.
"We need a way to have more
control over our salaries."
And in the U.S. it is 100%
legal to talk about your salary.
You cannot be punished
for that, it is illegal.
It didn't really matter
because she still was.
She had been at Google for six years.
She received a ton of praise
from her colleagues and coworkers.
They thought it was a
great idea, they loved it.
It grew super fast, people
putting their information in,
and she left within a year of
this spreadsheet coming out
because the environment
became so negative for her.
Her managers were withholding bonuses
and they claimed that it
had nothing to do with this,
but that was the only
thing that had changed.
If you look at this whole
debacle, it's fascinating
and scary and angry, but
now she's doing great things
at Slack and actually
I think 20% of her job
is diversity work.
So she went from a
company that punished her
for trying to increase
diversity to a company
that is paying her to do diversity work.
"I can't turn off my black."
And I thought that was a
really powerful statement.
Yoky Matsouka.
She was one of the three
founding members of Google X.
So when most people at
Google didn't even know
what Google X was, they
brought her in specifically
to work on this project.
So Google X has done
self-driving cars, Google Glass,
just really groundbreaking work.
She left there and went
to Nest and worked on
the Nest thermostat.
How many people, anyone in here use that?
Yeah, some people.
Pretty neat.
Literally a genius, won
a MacArthur genius award.
And I think she's now at Apple, so.
Parisa Tabriz.
I love her style.
She calls herself a
browser boss and I'm trying
to think of what her
title was before this.
It was like security
princess or something.
Yeah, basically just calls it what it is
and claims her for herself.
She heads up a team of about 30 hackers,
who basically try to find bugs and issues
and vulnerabilities in Google Chrome.
So how many people use Google Chrome here?
That's what I figured,
so have her to thank.
Also, she grew up without a computer.
She didn't really start using a computer
until she got to college
and now she heads up
30 engineers for Google Chrome,
which is just really inspiring I think.
Alright, so we just
talked about a whole bunch
of women doing awesome things,
but there are so many more
that I couldn't get to or new ones
starting to come up all the time.
So if you're interested in
this, how do you stay woke?
How do you keep following this?
A couple different ways.
I created a curated Twitter
list that's always growing
of women in tech on Twitter that I think
are doing awesome things,
so you can look that up
and follow people if you
like what they're doing.
Organize a Wikipedia edit-a-thon.
So I organize a women in tech
group in Madison, Wisconsin.
This is something we're gonna be doing
is you basically dedicate an afternoon.
You have an experienced Wikipedia editor
and you find entries about women in tech
that are either not sourced
or don't have any information
or don't exist and I can
tell you from researching
for this talk that
there are a lot of them.
And so basically just
making it a lot easier
for people to find out about
these kinds of awesome women.
Support or attend your
local women in tech group.
Volunteer at a bootcamp.
So the current percentage
of women students
at universities in the
U.S. in computer science
is like 17-20%, but for bootcamps it's 38.
So they're doing something
right, support them.
And then lastly, hire women,
especially women of color
because they deserve it.
They will make you more
money, they will understand
your clients better, and why not?
Yeah, so that's all I've got.
I've got a bunch of citations.
So yeah, we've got a little
bit of time for questions.
(audience applauds)
