Women in Tech

Her 1843 notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine ran three times longer than the paper she was translating and contained Note G, a step-by-step method for computing Bernoulli numbers that is generally read as the first published algorithm. More striking is that she argued the machine could act on things other than numbers, which nobody else did for a century.

Wrote the A-0 system in 1952, the first compiler, against a field that told her computers could only do arithmetic. Drove the design of FLOW-MATIC and then COBOL, which put business programming into something close to English and ran the world’s finance for decades. Rear Admiral, and the reason anyone says a program has a bug.

Led the team that wrote the Apollo onboard flight software at MIT, including the priority scheduling that let the guidance computer shed lower-priority work during the 1202 alarms three minutes before the lunar landing rather than fail. She coined the term software engineering, partly to get the discipline taken seriously.

Computed trajectories for Alan Shepard’s flight and the Apollo missions at NASA Langley. When the agency moved to electronic computers for John Glenn’s orbit, Glenn asked for her to check the machine’s numbers by hand before he would fly. Co-authored a 1960 report on orbital calculation, unusual for a woman at Langley then.

NASA’s first Black supervisor, running the segregated West Area Computing unit. Seeing that the arriving IBM machines would make human computers obsolete, she taught herself FORTRAN and then taught her staff, moving the whole group into programming rather than out of work. That is a rarer kind of technical foresight than the usual sort.

One of the six women who programmed ENIAC by physically rewiring it, working from logic diagrams because no programming language or manual existed. They were called operators and left out of the 1946 press photographs. She went on to help convert ENIAC to a stored-program machine and to work on BINAC and UNIVAC.

ENIAC programmer who went on to write the sort-merge generator for UNIVAC, an early instance of a program that writes a program. She argued for the UNIVAC console being grey rather than black on human-factors grounds, worked on the C-10 instruction set, and later contributed to the COBOL and FORTRAN standards.

Wrote what is generally considered the first assembly language, for the ARC2 and later APE(X)C machines at Birkbeck, and the assembler to go with it. Co-wrote some of the earliest books on how to program and design these machines, and did early work applying neural network ideas to character recognition in the late 1950s.

Wrote LAP6, the operating system for the LINC, one of the first interactive personal computers. In 1965 she took a LINC home and used it there, which makes her plausibly the first person to have a computer in their house. LAP6 supported real-time text editing on a machine with two kilowords of memory.

At Bell Labs she designed a computerised switching system that monitored incoming call rates and prioritised work to stop exchanges collapsing under peak load, holding one of the first software patents for it. She reportedly sketched the design while in hospital after giving birth, and became the first woman supervisor of a technical department there.

Ran the Network Information Center at SRI, which was the ARPANET’s directory, help desk and registry, publishing the Resource Handbook and maintaining the HOSTS.TXT file that every machine on the network relied on. Her group proposed the domain naming scheme that gave us .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org.

Founded Freelance Programmers with six pounds, staffing it almost entirely with women programming from home around their children, decades before remote work had a name. Signed her business letters Steve because Stephanie was not getting replies. The company wrote the Concorde black box flight recorder software and she later gave much of her wealth away.

One of the very few women doing cryptanalytic rather than clerical work at Bletchley Park, in the Hut 8 team attacking naval Enigma, and a practitioner of Banburismus. She was initially classified as a linguist because the pay grades had no category for a woman cryptanalyst. The work stayed secret for decades, so the record of it is thinner than it should be.

Broke the ciphers of rum-runners during Prohibition and testified about it in court, then during the war ran the unit that broke the Enigma traffic of a Nazi spy ring in South America. The FBI publicly claimed those results. Her files stayed classified until 2008, which is why her husband William is the famous Friedman.

With composer George Antheil, patented a frequency-hopping scheme in 1942 to stop radio-guided torpedoes being jammed, synchronised by a mechanism borrowed from player pianos. The Navy shelved it. The underlying idea is an ancestor of the spread-spectrum techniques used in later secure and wireless communication, and the patent was allowed to lapse unpaid.

Spent a career at IBM building the theory and practice of compiler optimisation: control flow analysis, data flow analysis, the interprocedural work that every modern compiler still does. Her 1966 paper on program optimisation is foundational. In 2006 she became the first woman to receive the Turing Award, thirty-nine years after the award began.

Designed CLU, which introduced abstract data types, iterators and a serious treatment of exceptions, and which shows up in the ancestry of most modern languages. The Liskov substitution principle is the L in SOLID. Also did foundational work on Byzantine fault tolerance with Miguel Castro. Turing Award, 2008.

With Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, introduced zero-knowledge interactive proofs, and with Micali the definition of semantic security that made modern encryption provable rather than merely unbroken. Two-time Godel Prize winner and Turing Award, 2012. Every zk-rollup and privacy protocol shipping today is standing on that 1985 paper.

Her 1972 paper introduced inverse document frequency: rare terms tell you more than common ones. TF-IDF underpinned search engines for thirty years and is still the baseline every ranking system is measured against. She argued throughout her career that computing was too important to be left to men, and said so in those words.

Co-invented differential privacy, which gave a mathematical definition to the amount of information a data release leaks about any one person, replacing a field of ad-hoc anonymisation that kept being broken. It is now in the US Census, Apple’s telemetry and Google’s. She also co-authored early work on proof-of-work and on algorithmic fairness.

An OS researcher who built a fault-tolerant Unix and a memory architecture analysis tool, and who in 1987 started Systers, the first email network for women in computing. Co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration and the Institute for Women and Technology. The conference now draws tens of thousands a year.

Invented dynamic instruction scheduling at IBM in the 1960s, was fired when she transitioned, and rebuilt her career from scratch. At Xerox PARC she and Carver Mead created the VLSI design methodology and the textbook that let universities teach chip design, then set up MOSIS so students could actually fabricate. Modern semiconductors are organised the way she said they should be.

Wrote BBC BASIC, then designed the original ARM instruction set with Steve Furber, a RISC architecture so efficient the first silicon ran on leakage current when its power was accidentally disconnected. There are now more ARM cores in the world than any other processor architecture, by a wide margin. Later designed the FirePath processor at Broadcom.

At Xerox PARC she developed Smalltalk-80 with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and wrote the books that let anyone else learn it. She objected to demonstrating it to Steve Jobs and was overruled by management; the Macintosh interface followed. Smalltalk is where object-oriented programming and the modern IDE both actually come from.

Designed the original Macintosh icons, fonts and cursors on graph paper, inventing a visual grammar for direct manipulation that nobody had needed before. The Command key symbol, the trash can, the watch cursor and the Happy Mac are hers. Later did the same work for NeXT, Microsoft and IBM. Her bitmaps are in MoMA.

Founded Adafruit from an MIT dorm room and built it into a substantial manufacturer that publishes its schematics, board files and firmware openly, alongside thousands of free tutorials. Leads CircuitPython, which put a REPL on microcontrollers and made embedded programming approachable. Proved open hardware can be a real company rather than a gesture.

Wrote the Mozilla Public License and led the Mozilla project through the open-sourcing of Netscape, the years when it looked dead, and the rise of Firefox, which broke Internet Explorer’s monopoly and dragged web standards forward. Chaired the Mozilla Foundation for two decades of arguing that the browser should answer to users.

Worked on Pugs, the first usable Perl 6 implementation, and on Haskell and Perl tooling, then became a central figure in g0v, the Taiwanese civic hacking community that forks government websites into working versions. As Taiwan’s digital minister she published transcripts of essentially every meeting she took, and used participatory tooling like vTaiwan on real policy.

Executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides the legal and financial home for a long list of open source projects and does the unglamorous work of GPL enforcement. A lawyer with a heart condition, she has made the argument for auditable code concrete by asking to see the source of the defibrillator implanted in her chest, and being refused.

Ran open source at Sun during the OpenSolaris and OpenOffice years, then at Intel, PayPal and Wikimedia, and chaired the Node.js Foundation through the io.js reconciliation. Served on the OSI board. Much of what a corporate open source program office does was invented by her arguing with lawyers, repeatedly, for twenty years.

Led the Parrot virtual machine and worked on the Perl 6 design, then served as president of the Perl Foundation, chair of the Open Source Initiative, on the board of the Python Software Foundation, and at Canonical and HP on OpenStack. One of the few people equally credible on a language runtime and on licence text.

Worked on Linux filesystems including ext4, ChunkFS and union mounts, and wrote a long-running series on filesystem design for LWN. Co-founded the Ada Initiative, whose example anti-harassment policy was adopted across a large part of the conference circuit and materially changed what open source events tolerate.

Wrote the Contributor Covenant in 2014; it has since been adopted by well over a hundred thousand projects including Linux, Rails and Kubernetes, and it is the reason most repositories have a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at all. Also created the Hippocratic License and the Organization for Ethical Source, and took a great deal of abuse for both.

Led the successful grant-funded work to replace pip’s dependency resolver, a change every Python user benefits from and almost nobody noticed. Has worked on Wikimedia engineering community, Zulip and MediaWiki, and writes seriously about the unglamorous parts of open source: release management, funding, and how maintainers burn out.

Showed that 87 percent of Americans could be uniquely identified from ZIP code, birth date and sex, then demonstrated it by re-identifying the Massachusetts governor’s medical records in a public dataset and mailing them to him. Proposed k-anonymity in response. Later served as chief technologist at the FTC and published work on discrimination in online ad delivery.

CPython contributor, Python Software Foundation director and Twisted maintainer who did a large amount of the outreach work that widened who shows up to Python: Boston Python’s beginner workshops moved the local user group to roughly a third women, which nobody had managed before. Co-wrote a book on Twisted and taught a great deal for free.

Project Jupyter steering council member and CPython core developer who has done a great deal of the work on JupyterHub and Binder, the pieces that turn a notebook from a file on someone’s laptop into shared, reproducible infrastructure. Served as a Python Steering Council member and does the release and mentoring work that keeps both projects running.

Writes hand-drawn zines and a long-running blog that explain strace, tcpdump, DNS, containers, git internals and networking better than the manuals do, mostly by working through her own confusion in public. Wrote a Ruby profiler and various debugging tools. An enormous number of engineers learned how their machine works from her drawings.

CSS Working Group invited expert and the person who did more than anyone to get CSS Grid understood and adopted, through Grid by Example, years of writing and a great deal of patient explanation. Later editor in chief of Smashing Magazine and now on the Chrome developer relations team writing the platform documentation.

Coined intrinsic web design for the layout approach Grid and Flexbox actually enable, and spent years demonstrating it in public so designers would stop rebuilding 2010 in a modern browser. Worked on Firefox developer tools including the Grid inspector, and is now an Apple evangelist and CSS Working Group member shipping the features in Safari.

Wrote Prism, the syntax highlighter running on a very large share of technical sites, and a run of small widely-used libraries. CSS Working Group invited expert who has driven several specs including colour functions, wrote CSS Secrets, and researches end-user programming at MIT. Nearly everything she makes is MIT licensed and on GitHub.

Vue core team member who wrote much of the animation documentation and a well-regarded book on SVG animation, then led developer experience at Netlify, Google and Azure. Her writing on animation performance and on running engineering teams is widely read, and she has published a large amount of demo code for free.

A blind engineer who has served on the W3C Board of Directors, co-chaired the Web Applications Working Group and worked on the accessibility of HTML, ARIA and the Web Audio API from inside the specs rather than filing bugs from outside. Runs TetraLogical and has spent years teaching developers what their markup actually sounds like.

Co-founded Honeycomb and made the case that dashboards of pre-aggregated metrics cannot answer questions you did not think to ask, which reframed monitoring into observability and high-cardinality events. Co-wrote Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering, and has been relentlessly, usefully rude about the idea that you can avoid testing in production.

Was a Google SRE for over a decade, then principal developer advocate at Honeycomb, pushing OpenTelemetry and publishing a great deal on SLOs and reliability practice that teams actually adopt. Also one of the more visible organisers in the tech worker movement, which cost her something and which she has been candid about.

A core Docker maintainer during the years containers took over, known for running absolutely everything in one including desktop applications, and for the seccomp and AppArmor work on container isolation. Later worked on Kubernetes and GitHub, then co-founded Oxide Computer to build servers with an open firmware stack, which is a much harder version of the same argument.

Apache ZooKeeper committer and project chair, and CTO of Rent the Runway, then head of platform engineering at Two Sigma. Wrote The Manager’s Path, which is the book most engineers are handed when they first lead a team, and which is unusually honest about the parts of the job that are not fun.

Co-authored Gender Shades with Joy Buolamwini, measuring commercial face recognition error rates that reached 34 percent for darker-skinned women against near zero for lighter-skinned men, which forced public changes from IBM and Microsoft. Co-led Google’s ethical AI team until her exit over the Stochastic Parrots paper, then founded DAIR to do the research outside a company.

Found as an MIT student that face detection would not see her face until she put on a white mask, and turned that into Gender Shades, a systematic audit of commercial classifiers by skin tone and gender. Founded the Algorithmic Justice League. The work fed directly into moratoria on police use of face recognition in several US cities.

Founded and co-led Google’s ethical AI team, and first-authored Model Cards for Model Reporting, which proposed that a released model should ship with a document stating its intended use, its evaluation data and where it performs worse. Hugging Face made model cards a default. She was fired alongside Gebru and is now chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.