We've always been here: Women Changemakers in Tech
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RailsConf 201725 / 86
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00:00
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Just because not a lot of time and a lot to go through, so sorry to cut conversation short. I'm Hillary, this is We've Always Been Here, Women Change
00:27
Makers in Tech. I work as a full stack developer at 10 Forward Consulting in Madison, Wisconsin, and I'm on Twitter at HillarySK. Alright, so I'm
00:42
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 being clerical to cool. We'll look at the change makers. We're
01:01
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
01:22
came today, but how can you kind of keep that going in the rest of your life in your tech career. If you want to follow along, there is a got the slides online tinyurl.com slash women dash change makers, so if you want to look that up. I want to give a quick disclaimer. There are hundreds of women
01:43
that I could have included in this talk, so this isn't supposed to be like the best. These are just ones that that interested me or that I happen to learn about or that I thought had had neat stories, so plenty more plenty more where this came from. So who needs women anyway, right? We've had a lot of dudes
02:03
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
02:21
how the attitude has really changed since the early days of programming. So these are all things that we either wouldn't have or that 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 going to 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
02:44
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,
03:00
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
03:21
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 shoddy products. So airbags back in the 80s that killed women and children because they were tested on sort of your standard male
03:44
size 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 have taken was one person who was not a, you know, presumably white male on the team to realize that there were severe issues
04:03
with the product as it currently stood. There was one of those same studies, I think it was the Harvard Business Review from 2017 found that if there's a member of the team that shares the ethnicity of the client, they understand
04:24
those clients' needs 152% more. So these are real impacts that are measurable and quantifiable. Mentors and role models. So it's kind of a cyclical
04:40
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 continuing technology or to advancing within technology.
05:02
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. So, you know, 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,
05:21
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
05:41
if you want to look this up later. But if we eliminated worldwide gender gaps in labor participation, hours worked, productivity, etc., the world economy would grow by 26%. And in terms of real dollars, that's $28.4 trillion that we
06:03
are losing out on because we do not have women in these economic positions and working and contributing in this way. So, also, you know, like apart from these sort of statistical reasons, I mean,
06:20
these are good jobs, right? Working in tech, it's a good life. Yeah, right? I've talked to a couple of 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 attitude from during World War II
06:47
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,
07:01
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 going to look at how tech jobs went from being seen as clerical
07:22
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
07:46
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 their historian, Nathan Endmanger,
08:01
said when we were first building computers and doing programming, it was seen as a, quote, 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? No one? Oh, really? I don't know what you're doing.
08:24
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 II ended, suddenly there were a lot of men coming back who needed jobs. Programming, people were starting to realize, hey, actually,
08:42
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 were aptitude tests and personality profiles. So aptitude tests were very heavily math-based. And, you know,
09:00
back in the 60s, men had more access to education. Even then, math was seen as more of, you know, 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.
09:22
And they specifically looked for people who had a disinterest in people and disinterest in close interactions. So we see the origins of the antisocial programmer stereotype. Again, this is going to rule out a lot of women, especially this time when women were, you know, socially conditioned
09:43
to be more nurturing, more caring, they were seen as that, you know, that was the stereotype. So these all serve 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, you know, weird science, revenge of the nerds, all of those. It's these, like,
10:04
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're seen as toys and they were marketed primarily to boys. And then the last one, as the percentage
10:24
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 attract this across numerous industries. Teaching, you know,
10:41
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, you know, kind of again, this cyclical issue, as more men went into programming, it got, the prestige went up, the pay increased, they were more picky
11:00
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?
11:24
This too shows that even as more, 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. This is not, they don't follow the general trend of women's labor force participation. Right, so we're going to look at women
11:45
who sort of defied the odds and did it anyway. And we're going to 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 the first, what's considered the first
12:00
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, you know, the 1830s. I love this quote. She said,
12:21
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, you know, the 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
12:42
mathical model to help them bet better. It didn't work. She actually was heavily in debt. But still, you know. All right, Grace Hopper. I'm also going to assume a lot of people have heard of Grace Hopper. Show of hands. Yep. She had a PhD in mathematics.
13:03
She wrote the first compiler. So she basically, 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 animal. She actually was aged out of the Navy.
13:20
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, which 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 II. And she was too physically small to meet the requirements.
13:44
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? Oh, yep. Yeah, raise your hands. That's fine.
14:02
So she was at NASA and then its predecessor, 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
14:23
now I'm going to do Fortran. She was also a huge champion for other women, which I think you're going to see that occurring in a lot of the women that we're going to talk about today. And that's white women and black women. Basically, if she saw someone that she thought deserved a raise or deserved a promotion,
14:41
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, she was – and they, you know, combined a bunch of departments and stuff, and she was demoted, and she never became a supervisor again. I think she was at NASA another, like, 15 or 20 years,
15:00
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
15:21
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 kaput. So I was watching a documentary about these women, and they ended up
15:40
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 6, row 12. It's going to be towards the middle. Like, go check that one. Which is just mind-blowing to me. I also really like this quote. This is from Betty Jennings. She said, I had a fantastic life. Everything I did was the beginning
16:01
of something new. So, again, this foresight, realizing that this was going to be really something different. 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 it in 1946. Great fanfare, you know,
16:24
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, you know, who's who in science.
16:41
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. All right, we're going to look at some people that maybe haven't gotten
17:01
quite as much of attention. So Marjorie Lee Brown. She was one of the first women to get her Ph.D. in mathematics. Her 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
17:24
for the students to use and learn to work with. And she also, you know, again, encouraged women and students of color to pursue math and to pursue computing. Radia Pearlman, known as the Mother of the Internet, which apparently she hates that title.
17:42
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 like 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,
18:02
but her mom never really talked about it to her. So I think, again, this importance of like celebrating women who've done great things in tech. Also, a prodigious author, like 20 or 30 books or something like that, which just makes me tired thinking about. All right, Margaret Hamilton.
18:22
So she worked, again, worked at NASA. She did onboard flight control software for the Apollo and Skylab missions, coined the term software engineer, developed or helped to develop asynchronous software, priority scheduling, and testing. And one of the ways that this really paid off, this focus on testing, was I can't remember which flight it was,
18:43
but they were starting their descent, and the astronaut put the wrong sequence in. You know, and at that time, computers could only handle so much at one time, and so that was basically going to overload the system. And 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,
19:03
it's not the ideal scenario. So, but she had written a check for human error that basically said, if you get, you know, 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.
19:21
And she, I mean, that innovation saved the astronauts' lives. So Annie Easley, so she worked again with NASA. There's a big NASA scene here. They actually did a lot of, had a lot of opportunities for women at that time. She worked on one of the first computer programs for navigation in space.
19:43
Brilliant, brilliant woman. And again, this sense of like, you know, I can't remember the exact phrase, but it's the idea of like, 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.
20:00
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 tests so that they could still vote in elections. Erna Schneider Hoover, she received one of the first ever patents for software
20:25
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,
20:41
she thought of it while she was in the hospital recovering from the birth of one of her daughters. Karen Spark-Jones. Computing is too important to be left to men. I just love that.
21:01
So we saw earlier, you know, I had the three images of products or technologies that we have women to thank for helping develop. And Karen Spark-Jones, she created the city 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.
21:20
So, I mean, 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,
21:43
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 like,
22:01
it was like 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.
22:20
So again, just seeing like having this vision of what could be based on what was available at the time. We're going to look at some women that are still doing awesome stuff. So Corinne Yu, I feel like is a superhero. I mean, just look at this list of things that she's done. She was a game programmer for Apple II.
22:41
She worked in 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. Sophie Wilson. So she designed the Acorn System 1 in 1979.
23:00
It was a microcomputer and it had 512 bytes of memory. I looked this up the other day and the modern MacBook Air has 8 gigs of working memory. So this is like super tiny. And she built this when she was still getting her undergrad degree.
23:21
She also developed the ARM processor core. And that is used still today in like smartphones, tablets, digital TVs. I mean, 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.
23:41
And Sophie Wilson did that. Windows Snyder literally wrote the book on threat modeling. It 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.
24:06
So she works with security for like things that we use all the time every day and kind of keeps our information safe. Tracy Chu, who was a, and I might be saying some of these things wrong, I apologize if that's the case.
24:25
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.
24:42
And she was like, it was a joke, but then I realized, you know, it's kind of true. And there was all this talk about, you know, we need more diversity and we're making efforts 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.
25:03
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 are improving or not. And there's 268 companies that are on it as of the last time I checked, including GitHub, Wells Fargo, Tinder.
25:21
And she had an uncanny ability to recognize companies that were going to be successful. So she worked at Core 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.
25:42
So she picked a winning horse there. Okay, I think you're actually in the room. Seemed appropriate for RailsConf.
26:01
So who's heard of RailsBridge? Some people, cool, yeah, they are doing amazing things. I can't remember, how many students have you guys had now, do you know? That's what I was going to say, 10,000, yeah, which is just insane and awesome.
26:22
Prolific speaker and has been an organizer for RailsConf and RubyConf and just doing really, really great stuff. So thank you. Erica Baker, senior engineer at Slack, used to work at Google.
26:41
Kind of the same thing. She, you know, 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. Like there should be, you know, we need a way to have more control over our salaries.
27:04
And in the US, it is 100% legal to talk about your salary. You cannot be punished for that. It is illegal. 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.
27:23
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 up 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.
27:43
I mean, it was just, if you look up this whole debacle, it's fascinating and scary and angry. But yeah, 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, you know, is paying her to do diversity work.
28:05
I can't turn off my black. And I thought that was a really powerful statement. Yoki Matsuka. 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.
28:25
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, do anyone here use that? Yeah, some people. Pretty neat.
28:40
Literally a genius. Won a MacArthur Genius Award. And I think she's now at Apple. Parisa DeBries. I love her style. She calls herself a browser boss.
29:00
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 it 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?
29:20
That's what I figured. 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.
29:41
But there are so many more that I couldn't get to or new ones that are going to come up all the time. And 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.
30:01
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 going to 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.
30:29
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.
30:43
Volunteer to boot camp. So the current percentage of women students at universities in the US in computer science is like 17 to 20 percent, but for boot camps it's 38. So they're doing something right. Support them. And then lastly, hire women, especially women of color, because they deserve it.
31:01
They will make you more money. They will understand your clients better. And, you know, why not? So, 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.
31:21
I know.
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