in Tech THEY WERE THE VERY EARLY PIONEERS If you look at the history of computing, women have been there right from the start, even though most of the times they don’t get that much publicity, which usually go to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. There was a time you would have thought there was no-one else in technology other than these two bigwigs, if you go through the media coverage at that time. A look at both underplayed and well-known women in technology down the ages...

Sunil Rajguru [email protected]

Hedy Lamarr: of the earliest computer Frequency-hopping languages. For that she was spread spectrum (FHSS) called the Grandmother of enables Code-Division COBOL. The Cray XE6 “Hopper” Multiple Access (CDMA) supercomputer was named mobile communications. after her. She retired as a Rear Way back in 1942, Admiral in the US Navy and Lamarr was one of they named a destroyer after the patent holders her: The USS Hopper. for an early version of frequency hopping. Women computers: That technology was In the very early eventually used on US days, computing naval ships and also in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, though and calculating used her contributions were recognized much later. She to be a long-drawn was only posthumously inducted into the US National tedious process and Inventors Hall of Fame. Of course there’s also the fact the people doing it that she was a Hollywood bombshell and acted in were called human many movies! computers. The earliest computers were by and Ada Lovelace: If the rst ever science ction large women. They were numerous in places like writer was a woman (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley) Bletchley Park (where they cracked codes that helped then it’s interesting to note that the rst writer of an defeat the Nazis), Harvard and NASA. The last was algorithm was also a woman. While Charles Babbage popularized in popular culture by the lm Hidden came out with the Analytical Engine (proposed Figures, which showed how women played a key role in 1837), it was Lovelace who was ready with an in the space mission of the 1960s. Bollywood also algorithm which could be used by the machine, had it came out with Mission Mangal, which highlighted the been built. She was the daughter of poet Lord Byron role of women in India’s space programme too. and a countess. She talked of the complexity of future computers beyond mere calculating devices. Karen Spärck Jones: Every time Grace Hopper: Hopper was a computer scientist you do Google and a PhD in mathematics. She was part of the search, you lean team that developed UNIVAC I (the rst large-scale back on the electronic computer to go on sale) and was also concept of IDF responsible for the development of COBOL, one (Inverse Document pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] MARCH 2020 PCQUEST 25 in Tech

Frequency), something Karen introduced way (Spanning Tree Protocol)was based and that’s key back in 1972.More precisely today it is TFIDF(term to the operation of network bridges and also TRILL frequency–inverse document frequency), a (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). numerical statistic that is used as a “weighting factor Perlman is a PhD in mathematics from MIT. in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modelling”. She also did research in NLP (Natural Language Processing), which is really a hot topic today. Karen was Professor of Computers and Information at Cambridge University.

Joan Ball: Online dating became huge in the modern age but did you know that Joan started the St. James Computer Dating Service way back in 1964? They matched up pairs via a computer, which was a revolutionary thing at Carly Fiorina: She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard and that time. fought with her board to make the merger with Compaq happen and also oversaw subsequent Margaret Hamilton: massive layos and a change in HP’s work culture. Director of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory’s Fiorina also had failed bids at a US Senate race and Software Engineering Division of when it developed also the Presidential one, where Republican hopeful ight software for America’s Apollo space program Ted Cruz, who eventually lost to current US President she was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Donald Trump, had picked her as his probable Freedom. Hamilton wrote software for satellite running mate. tracking and was part of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project which began in the late Meg Whitman: Like 1950s. Fiorina, billionaire Whitman was the CEO of H-P and she also dabbled in politics, running for the Governor of California. Whitman was the President of eBay for 10 years, during which time it grew from $4 million to $8 billion. She is currently CEO of Quibi and on the board of Dropbox.

MarissaMayer: Mayer’s Stanford University Carol Shaw: One of the earliest game designers, major combined philosophy, cognitive psychology, she created 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, River Raid and Video linguistics and computer science. She also specialized Checkers for the Atari 2600 back in the late 1970s and in Articial Intelligence. Mayer was one of the earliest early 1980s. employees of Google (on the AdWords team) and later became President and CEO of Yahoo!, during Radia Perlman: Big in the world of communication which time it acquired Tumblr. She then co-founded networks, she invented the algorithm on which STP Lumi Labs.

26 PCQUEST MARC H 2020 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] Ginni Rometty: She joined IBM as a system analyst in 1981 and rose to become the head of the company Getting a raw deal in science in 2011 (She was President, CEO and Chairperson). Under her, IBM had many tie-ups: Apple, SAP, Twitter and Box. She was recently replaced by Arvind Krishna.

Sheryl Sandberg: After Mark Zuckerberg, she is the most famous face of Facebook. This billionaire is the Chief Operating O cer and before that was a Vice President at Google.

Susan Wojcicki: She is the CEO of YouTube and one of the founding members of Google and was associated with the iconic Google Doodles and also Historically women in science Google Images and Google Books. She was in charge have been sidelined even if they of acquisitions of both YouTube and DoubleClick. overperformed. The best example of that is Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Elizabeth Holmes: Probably the most infamous of all Burnell, who noticed an anomaly women in technology. Health tech company Theranos was founded by a 19-year-old Holmes who managed while looking through observations to get VC funding of a whopping US$700 million for on a radio telescope. Bell stubbornly a company valuation of US$10 billion. In the end pursued it despite being told not to Theranos went bankrupt and Holmes’ net worth do so. The anomaly was a Pulsar and became zero. she had discovered it. But it went downhill from there. Five people’s But how are they on the decline? name appeared on the paper and While there were many women technologists early Bell was second on it. Finally her on and many women tech CXOs o late, one curious supervisor and somebody else won thing is a decline in the US. According to one survey, the Nobel Prize for Physics for women being awarded computer science degrees peaked in 1984 at about 37%. That just fell below the discovery of the Pulsar! That 30% by the end of that decade and a mere 10% at outright misogyny led one newspaper the decade beginning in 2010. Why are there so less headline: The No-Bell Prize! women coders? People talk of biological dierences, sexism in One latest survey puts the latest STEM women Silicon Valley and there have been many attempts at graduates in India at 43%, the highest in the world. diversity and eorts to bridge the digital divide, but it This is not surprising as at least till school, girls usually hasn’t led to many lasting breakthroughs. This when outperform boys and form a good chunk of the there are so many elds where women have started toppers. However in terms of actual employment of dominating at various levels. The number of women STEM women, another survey puts it at a lowly 14% tech billionaires is also quite miniscule when you leaving a lot to be desired. compare to their male counterparts. So here’s hoping that the 2020s see a lot more But India leads the way in STEM (Science, women in technology, in all elds and at all levels all Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) at least. across the world! pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] MARCH 2020 PCQUEST 27