 We are here, we have always been here. This is a little bit of a reaction to the unicorn thing. We know we're not mystical creatures, right? So I kind of wanted to unpack that a bit, and that's where this talk came from. My notes and my background thinking are up on an etherpad at pad.cc.com.au slash hexon2011. If you wanna have a look at those, if you wanna add questions or notes or thoughts or reflections, please feel free to do so. Who am I, and why am I talking to you? Really? I mean, it doesn't really matter who I am. This is me, that's me, right? Lovely photograph by Stuart Smith, thank you very much. I run my own small business. I feel myself as a citizen of the community. I'm not a hacker, although, no, you know, I wouldn't call myself a hacker. I am a geek, though. I'm also a feminist, and I have been for a very long time. In about grade three, I was quite concerned to know why it was the boys were being asked to salute the flag at assembly, and the rest of us were not. So we said, okay, blah, blah, blah, assembly stuff. Now, boys salute the flag, and I went, what's up with that, you know? So, you know, this is a long time thing, and one of the things that's kind of, I've found curious over the time, is a number of conversations I've had with friends and colleagues who say, oh, no, no, no, I'm not a feminist. I think that women should be treated equally, but I'm not a feminist. And it's always kind of perplexed to me slightly. So that's kind of some of the background and behind this talk as well. So what I wanted to do was go through some of the history of feminism, and it's only a 15-minute talk, so I don't actually have time to do all that. So it's kind of like some choice sort of faces. Anyone know who this is? No? Yes! I should have a chocolate front to give you now. Okay, so what did Christine, what did she do? Why is she in my slides? She was a writer. She wrote the city of women. She wrote the city of women. So she's also considered by some to be the first feminist before we kind of really had the term feminism. So as I said, I don't have time. She's got a Wikipedia page. It's mixed, middle, but there's stuff about her. She's cool. Look at this woman. Who knows who this is? Thinking, thinking. Oh, yeah, I think I'll give you a frog as well. A virtual chocolate frog. She wrote this famous book in which she says, I do not wish women to have power of a man but over themselves. I mean, really, can we argue with her? Probably some people could. Don't flatter me. What about this woman? We've actually had her quote mentioned in Melissa's talk, but we generally probably don't know her face. And I think that's one of the issues that I have. There's a invisibility to these women. Yes? Sorry? No. No. Nope. She said, our prostitute gets left off quite a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of my faves. Yeah. Yeah, and I think I've actually been accused more often. I mean, I tend to not behave like a dormant and people don't notice that. It's when I start behaving like a prostitute that I get into trouble. But anyway, Pete's not here right now, so I can say that. So I want to kind of then sort of wanted to shift gears a little bit into the kind of her story stuff. And for those of you not familiar with that, it's like history is the story of men and has been told by him. So now we need to unpack her story as told by her. So specifically in information technology, I kind of wanted to wind this back. We get hung up on computers and it opens up software and all this kind of stuff. But actually this has been going on a long time and women have always been involved in this stuff. So let's pull out some of those stories. I couldn't find a photograph of this woman, which is a shame and I have not given up yet. When I was out there, I will find it. But it goes back to sort of pre-Facebook days in the 1900s, so it might be tricky. She started this organization. And I think this is really interesting because women's rights and women's work have been tied together as kind of process. People want to say, women don't get paid as much as men and that's one of the reasons why Louisa started this organization because women were increasingly being employed as telegraphists because they were cheaper. And because that meant that then this great new information technology called the Telegraph, they could then send those telegraphs more cheaply. And she went, boy, that's not on. And there was gonna be a national gathering of telegraphists and postmaster generals. And so she started this and she went off and she lobbied for equal rights. And this is like, we're talking 1900s. This is early stuff. She didn't quite get there, but she did get a significant increase in pay and conditions and the right to work as the chief telegraphists or something. Anyway, really cool story. And I actually stumbled across, just as I was doing the research for this talk, and it was like, this goes to the heart of my, something's not right with all this stuff. This is not of that time. This is later. This is in World War II. Women teletypists, right at the heart of information technology. And most of us would be familiar with the women who worked at Bletchley and ENIAC and all those sorts of things. Women have always been working in technology. Anyone who knows who this woman is. She had her own printing business. She was a publisher. She published a magazine called The Dawn, and it is widely recognized as, the first major publication owned by a woman, written by women, for women, about women's issues. It was very much tied up with the suffragette movement. The Dawn is incredible, and it ran from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. She's more famous for being Henry Lawson's mother. That's wrong. Some of you may be familiar with The Trove Project that the National Library have been running, where they've been digitizing newspapers. I contacted them a few weeks ago to say, please digitize The Dawn. And they went, oh, it's not on our schedule, and it's gonna cost some money. And I said, how much money? About that much. That's not much. That's a challenge. That's not much. No, that's a challenge. Who wants to help? Thought so. So I'll do some kind of webby thing and either chip in or Kickstarter or whatever. Anyway, also there are women, there's a women's archiving project who I've contacted and they've also indicated that they'd be interested in assisting with that. So I'd like to see that happen. I don't know if we can get the money together by International Women's Day. That could be kind of cool. That's only like a month or two away, but $7,000 is not a lot. And when it's something like this, which is kind of important, anyway, I sort of have, that's a bit of a tangent. We can do it. It's not a lot of money. So shame the Australian dollar is so high at the moment because other dollars might help, but maybe euros. Should have done. What about this woman? Is Kay Thorn. Does anyone know why I would have Kay Thorn's name in my slides? She worked on an interesting little Australian project that not many people will have heard of called Cyrac. And she said, she was talking about her work there and someone had asked her about the role of women in technology and she sort of said this that she was talking about kind of, I don't know if it was an interview, but it sits on the web and I've got the URL at the end. Women operated calculators and these women were often called computers. But he is, it was an actually skilled and demanding occupation. And this comes back to one of my own kind of pet theories that I don't have any data on. It's just a gut feeling. And at some point I should do some research and see if it's kind of true or false. And that is there used to be a lot more women in technology than there actually is now. At least you're now kind of Western, like Australia type thing, because these broad generalizations are all bogus. But I've kind of got this feeling that in the olden days of computing, computers were large and expensive and owned by corporations, organizations, educational institutions. And smart women were cheaper to hire than smart men. This goes back to the telegraphists. Cat is nodding in a very, does this resonate for you? Yeah, yeah. Computing became more personal, like the personal computers. There is, you know, the other research, like unlocking the clubhouse, talks about the fact that young men or boys get given computers as toys to learn from and tinker with and less so do girls get these. And of course all of us are exceptions and unicorns and whatever, but it became a kind of personal thing. And then so that ability to get up to speed, I think is at Clay Shurkey's 10,000 hours stuff of the, no, it's not Clay Shurkey. Anyway, someone talks about the fact that, you know, 10,000 hours is what you need to master something. And if you've had that time as a child just playing, that still counts. So that experience is sort of less, you know, about hiring cheaper people and about saying these people have these instant skills. So let's make the most of it. I don't know. It's all just sort of theoretical kind of gut feeling stuff, but I think there's something there that I want to investigate further. So again on Syrac, there's this, because there's been quite a bit of work done to try and unpack that history and get it out there. There's this article in the Museum Victoria website, which is where Syrac lives now, called A Woman Programmer's View. A Woman Programmer's View of Working on Syrac, which I found really fascinating. But what the fuck's her name? It's not on the article. So I rang them and I asked and they went, oh, that's a good question. And so I sent an email. And then that got sent on to someone and someone emailed me back and said, that's her name, Belinda Pearson. Now, I don't have a photograph of her. I don't know anything more about her, but the Museum have said they will put me in touch with her and she may be willing to speak to me. So guess what? Belinda Pearson just became my candidate for Ada Lovelace Day. Does everyone here know about Ada Lovelace Day? Okay, let me do the, does anyone not know about Ada Lovelace Day? Okay, so this is really important because I think this goes to the heart of what my whole talk has been about and which is uncovering this her story and actually celebrating those women who are working in technology. We are not fucking unicorns. Oh, that took me to a strange place. Oh, I should come back, shouldn't I? Okay, sorry. All right, so Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated on the date of Ada Lovelace's birthday. She is widely recognized as the first programmer, not the first woman programmer, the first programmer. And talking about her story and talking about women in technology and science in general is about uncovering our stories of being women in tech. And I think that's kind of cool. So the thing is that a bunch of them are told about the same women and there are actually very few Australian women in that list of usual suspects. And we're out there, you know? Where are those stories? Where are they? Help me find them. I've found Belinda Pearson. Who are you gonna find?