 The purpose of this lecture is to celebrate the contributions of diverse groups to available mathematics. And we're very fortunate to have Dr. Jettrop up here with us tonight. So, I'm going to be doing some of the highlights for a long list of accomplishments here. Dr. Carpenter is an associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of Engineering and Science at the UCM Tech University. She's directly office for Women in Science and Engineering. She is a PI at Louisiana Tech's MSF Advanced Grant. President-elect of the Women in Engineering Proactive Network, first vice president of the Mathematical Association of America. And she serves on the MAACU PM curriculum guide student committee. She's the chair of the MAACU Committee on Professional Development. And she advises on diversity and metric programs for thriving MSF-funded programs and women serving in staff organizations. So, we're very pleased to have Dr. Carpenter with us. I was very happy with her. She responded to my email and said that she would come. So, I would ask you to give her a warm welcome before we leave tonight. Thank you. Can you hear me all right in the back? Is that good? Great. So, today I want to talk a little bit about really a story that for many decades was secret. It was really a women's role in ushering in the modern computing age. So, that's why my talk is entitled Top Secret. It really was something that was kept classified for a long time. And when I talk about the history of computing, we're going to start off using that word probably in a way that you don't anticipate. When we get to the end, we're going to be talking about computing probably in the way that you have in your mind. But how that evolved and actually the central role that women played is really pretty interesting. So, we're going to talk a bit about the early role of women in computing to really appreciate the story during World War II. We kind of need to put that in context. So, we'll talk a bit about the early role. Look at women in computing in World War II. Look at really the introduction of the first modern computer, the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or Calculator. And then kind of looked what's happened since World War II. So, early role of women in computing. So, women really have been at the center of computing since the beginning. And the beginning really started with Ada Loveless. She was born and lived in the early 1800s. She was actually Ada Byron Loveless, the daughter of the famous British poet Lord Byron. Her parents sort of had a falling out about the time that she was born. And her mother did not want her to study silly emotional things like poetry, like her dad did. And so, her mother wanted her to study math and science. I guess that was the farthest thing she could think of from poetry. Kind of odd for the early 1800s. So, Ada in fact did study mathematics and science and was very talented in those areas. She wrote to an inventor and mathematician of the time, Charles Babbage, whom you may have heard of. Really somebody who was sort of early, an early pioneer in the area of computing. He had come up with a plan for something called a differential engine and then later an analytical engine. He didn't build them, but he had the ideas. And there was an Italian mathematician that had written a memoir about this analytical engine. Apparently it was pretty complicated. Kind of hard to understand how it worked. And so he suggested that Ada take that memoir and do something with it. So that's what she did. She took this memoir in Italian, translated it, but she also added to that. She explained how this complicated analytical engine worked. And more than that, she really got it. She said, you know, you could use this to do some computing. And by computing, I mean calculating, mathematical calculations. So she wrote what is now regarded as the first computer program. It was a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using this analytical engine. And apparently her work was well received. Michael Faraday, among others, were fans of her writing. So she apparently knew what she was doing and did a good job. So the first computer program written by the daughter of a poet. If you've ever been to London, if you go to the British Library, you can go to King's Cross Station, for those of you who are Harry Potter fans. Yes, there is a platform nine and three quarters there. You can get off there and go to the British Library a couple of blocks away. And they actually have her original program on display and you can see that. So again, women from the very beginning, very central part of computing. So by the late 1800s, there were applications such as astronomy and weather that really required large amounts of complex mathematical calculations or computations. So you see, oh, I'm using this word computing. I don't mean like a computer. I mean physically doing computing like in your math homework, right? Computing and calculating things. There were large problems that took a lot of time to solve. Now what they would try to do is get a team of people to work on the problem and divide it up into pieces and people would sort of work in tandem. I might do some work, pass my information up to you. You might do some work, pass it back to me to try to shorten the time frame to complete these calculations. And this particular picture, I'm hoping you can see the pictures maybe fairly well, actually shows a group of human computers, people who did computations at the Harvard Observatory in 1881 and all nine of them are women. Stunningly, this is not something that I was aware of. At this point in US history, computing by hand was actually a viable and respected career path for women that had mathematical talent. I had no idea that in the late 1800s computing, mathematical computing, complex calculations were something that not only women could do, but it was considered an okay career path, something for you to do. But it was. But still, late 1800s, people were doing things by hand. But that was about to change. So Charles Babbage had some of those ideas but never built any of those things. But in 1887, a man by the name of Dore Felt came up with an electromechanical computing machine. Now I want you to remember electromechanical. Hold on to that idea because they're going to play a central role in computing for a long time, decades. He called it the copstometer, not the best name, kind of hard to say. Really it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. So you might think of it like an adding machine, right, early adding machine. A couple years later, a man by the name of Herman Hollerith patented the Hollerith mechanical tabulator. So it was mechanical, not electromechanical. And it was based on punch card technology. Now I hate to say this, but when I started college in 1980, this was 1880 something, right? A hundred years later, we were still using punch card technology. The first class I took was a Fortran class. You had to type it up on a punch card machine, speed it into the computer or mainframe and it would spit it back out. So we used that technology for quite a long time. They used a pantograph to punch the cards and then fit it into the Hollerith machine. And this is one of Dorfelt's computometers, courtesy of IBM. So some machines. On this picture here, on the left, you see a lady and a man operating those Hollerith machines. This is 1890s. Remember he invented it, 1888 was when he patented it. So again, something that women did, right? Considered a viable job, viable career path. Here's someone in the 1920s, 30 years later, still using this pantograph punch card machine. Now, just an observation. So how much of an advance were these computing machines? In 1880, remember these two machines were invented in 1887 and 1889. In 1880, the US census was calculated by hand. Do you want to guess how long it took to do the 1880 census? This is the reason they only did these over 10 years. Anybody want to guess? Eight years. It took eight years to tabulate the 1880 census by hand. With the Hollerith tabulator, they used it for the 1890 census. Anybody want to guess how long it took? One year. So major improvement, absolute major improvement. So these early mechanical and electrical mechanical machines really helped advance computing, calculating dramatically. Now, by the 1920s and 30s, half of all college students were women. I did not know that. I know that today women now number over half, but back in that day women were half of all college students. However, there was a quota system that kept women out of hard sciences like mathematics. They were not allowed to major in mathematics. But computing largely mathematical was fine. So kind of odd, right? That computing was considered an okay thing for women to do, even though it involved complex hand and sometimes machine-assisted calculations. That was okay. So it was an entry, something that was open to women in that day and age. By the 1930s, computing machines like the pantograph and desktop electrical mechanical calculators were pretty common business machines. They were often run by women. Here's an IBM version of a tabulator with a well-dressed lady. And one reason they were run by women is while women couldn't go to college and take courses in math, couldn't major in math, they could take courses in business machines, and these were regarded business machines, kind of like a typewriter, right? Even though, again, complex mathematical calculations often involved in this. So that's early years. Then comes World War II. World War II started, at least the United States entered the war in December of 1941, December the 7th of 1941. And with World War II came a huge need for women computers, people who computed by hand to work on a variety of classified military projects. Now somebody tell me, why was there a huge need for women computers? Anybody? Yeah, any able-bodied guy got drafted and sent off to the front lines. My dad turned 21, two days after Pearl Harbor. Always told me that was lousy timing, but so, yeah, the men were gone. Besides, who had been doing a lot of this computing? We've seen the history of who was doing the computing. Women, it was the thing that women did. So it was a real need for many more of these computers, and they did a lot of things. You're probably familiar with Rosie the Riveter, right? Women also went and worked in manufacturing plants, but there was also a huge mathematical need. They served as waves, right? The waves, one of the military branches for women. Served as code-breaking mathematicians for the signals intelligence service, the SIS, during World War II. They decoded the Japanese purple code. This is a picture of two waves working on the Japanese purple code, and the German enigma code in the middle and right picture. You'll notice there's a large machine here and several of them here. Working particularly on the enigma code, they used a machine developed by Polish, British, and Americans called a bomb, B-O-M-B-E. You can't see it, but it's written there on that particular photograph. And it was built by NCR, National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio. So these women, these waves are using one of those bombs to help do decoding on the enigma code. So that was one thing that women did. But one of the most pressing needs was for women to calculate ballistic calculations because they were needed for U.S. weapons on land, sea, and air. Let's stop and think about why was there such a huge need. First of all, it was reasonably advanced. You had to know how to solve complex sets of differential equations, which had as many as a thousand calculations, can you imagine? I wouldn't want to do that by hand, but that was what was involved. So you had to be really good. You had to be accurate, you had to be good, you had to be fast, and you had at least differential equations, which is post-calculus kind of material. So we're not talking about high school type content for the most part. And the reason that there was such a huge need to develop these ballistics data, the trajectory of a projectile, this ballistics data was highly localized, very dependent on local conditions, things such as the atmosphere, the wind, how much it was blowing and the direction it was blowing from, the weight of your projectile, you'd change pieces of equipment or machines, that would change powder magazine, the type of ground the weapon rested on. So if you're today fighting here, you haul up and move 30 or 50 miles away, you may need an entire new set of ballistics data. Or if the weather changes from yesterday, you may need an entire set of ballistics data, right? Obstacles, trees, tanks, whatever might be between you and the target, and even the curve of the earth. And here are some actual photographs of work that women did who did this competing. So again, highly localized, stop and think about how many places U.S. forces were in the world, very geographically different, even if in the same location, weather and things changed during the year. So huge, huge needs for ballistics data. So the U.S. assembled large teams of human computers to do these calculations, calculate these ballistics tables. They were trained to solve these differential equations both by hand and with these electromechanical calculators. And we're going to see why they had to be able to do them by hand. This particular photograph shows a group of computers at Aberdeen. That was really the first group they had. And if you can see the picture, there are about four men and five women. So certainly women carrying their weight here, an equal, maybe even a little bit bigger part, doing these ballistics calculations. And each one of them has an electromechanical calculator on their desk, right? But, you know, the war escalated, more and more people were sent overseas, fighting expanded. So the group at Aberdeen simply wasn't enough. They needed to add another computing center. So they added a second one, a second unit of human computers, this time at the Moore School of Engineering in University of Pennsylvania. We're going to see why they picked the Moore School. And it was called the Philadelphia Computing Section. They actually went for women and only women here as young as 17. And they recruited them from all over the United States to work at this facility. Here's a class at the Philadelphia Computing Section, so it's a ballistics class. Again, teaching these women how to do these complex hand calculations for this ballistics data. But it was tiring work. This is stunning, I think. One woman with the advantage of a desktop calculator needed 40 hours to compute one 60 second shell trajectory. Wow. Can you imagine how many people you would need if it took a week to do one 60 second trajectory? An enormous need, right? You could have ever so many people and not make much progress. And this is actually some of their work, some of the notes that they took. It says a solution for simultaneous equations using the marchant method. And marchant was a type of desktop calculator. Step one, it says if you've got a system of equations, alter it so that all the coefficients are between 0.1 and 1. And then if you get it in that mode and fashion then, here's how you proceed. So these were the types of classes they were taught and had to practice and do. So hand calculations or even with this calculator is not going to get it, right? Too many things to calculate, too many variables, too much work to do. So one of the reasons that this group was located at University of Penn, the Moore School was because they had a differential analyzer. A differential analyzer was a mechanical calculator invented by Vannevar Bush in 1925 at MIT. Only five of them in the world, one of them was at the Moore School. So that's why they located this second computing group there. It was state-of-the-art in 42, right, beginning of the war. It was 35 feet long, which means we're only looking at the very end here, right? We'll have another picture where you can see more of it. But 35 feet long, supported by steel I-beams, very heavy, housed in the air condition, pretty stunning in 1942 basement of the Moore School. The integrators, and I believe that this is one of the integrators, were won by mechanical gears. You can imagine the issues that might provide. And they had to have three operators to set up ballistics calculations. Here's another picture. You can see all 35 feet. There are three women. They're kind of small, so those pictures are blown up for you. The differential analyzer, remember to take one woman at a calculator, 40 hours. Differential analyzer could do that 60-second shell trajectory in 15 minutes. Wow, major improvement. But there were some hang-ups. The results that came out weren't exactly ready to be used. The women kind of had to do some smoothing before the output was viable and usable. And because it's mechanical, operated with gears, solutions would drift over time. The gears would slip or miss a gear. And so the machine would get off. So they still had to have humans computing things on the side. And they had to check what the computer was doing, the differential analyzer was doing. And when it got too far off, they had to stop. So it didn't eliminate the need. It sort of changed what the women did. The women had to learn how to operate this, how to program it, if you will, how to run these problems. And they still had to continually do things on the side. So some of the women ran the differential analyzer. Some of the women were continuing to do ballistics calculations by hand. And they would have to continually spot check. Again, because it ran on gears, it had to have constant maintenance. You can imagine running this all day long every day. Joe Chaplin, who's pictured here, was a graduate student engineering at the Moore School. He was hired to be the mechanic of the differential analyzer. And on a given day, the women would work two shifts. 8 to 4, 4 to midnight. Poor Joe from midnight to 8 a.m. got to repair the thing so it was up and ready to go the next day. There is a nice movie about the women in their lives here. They talk about sleeping kind of in bunkers, maybe in the basement. They would kind of go sleep, get back, and come right back to work. Again, huge pressure, huge need for the data they were generating. They were paid extremely well for the day. Some of these women were as young as 17. So a pretty remarkable experience for them. And I do want to show you a little video that highlights a little bit of that. So we'll hope this works. The Moore School of Engineering owned a Bush differential analyzer, one of only five in the world. This huge mechanical calculating machine was invented by Van Raar Bush at MIT in 1925, and was state-of-the-art technology at the Moore School in 1942. Jonas was one of six female computers assigned to run realistic problems on the machine. A typical shell trajectory involves thousands of individual calculations. Using the differential analyzer, Jonas's team could compute a 60-second shell trajectory in only 15 minutes, while human computers, such as Shirley and Marlon, worked 40 hours to complete the same trajectory. We're all sort of working in there yesterday, and we had two shifts up. And there were about three girls that worked each shift. So the company set up a new run. It was a run down the line. So all eight integrators to the initial conditions. And then the pair of fingers crossed you up, and pushed the button and started the time-booker. And then they, this whole machine, started grinding. It was one by years, a year to get news. And Joe Chappell would climb on it. He'd been typing the years. He would say, hey, Joe, the two mental mistakes coming out of this machine. He would go on to be typing the years and figure out what was wrong with it. So pretty interesting. The lady you saw was one of those women computers. And I'll talk just a little bit more about her in a few minutes. So it kind of gives you an idea of what it looks like, how it ran, some of the details and challenges involved in running the differential analyzer. But the Army wasn't patient. I mean, you can imagine how much ballistics data they needed, how challenging this was, because, you know, you could run the analyzer, but if it was messing up, you had to throw all that away. And the only other thing you had to back it up was hand calculations, which took a whole week, right? So still wasn't fast enough. They needed more ballistics data, and they needed it faster. So Joe, the man we saw in the picture, and the guy whose picture we saw was a young man who was a mechanic, he mentioned to the Army supervisor at the computing section, who I think is this guy right here, that there was a physics professor there, John Mochley. John was doing weather calculations. Now, you remember, we saw that weather calculations back in the 1800s, right, took a lot of time to calculate, used teams of people. So John was doing these weather prediction calculations, still highly mathematical, and he was using the differential analyzer, but he was getting impatient. He said, you know, I've got an idea for an electronic calculator that could do this faster than the differential analyzer. And so Joe was aware of that. So knowing that the Army was interested in trying to speed things up, he mentioned this to the supervisor, and so the supervisor took John Mochley, who is right there, and a graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, and they went to Aberdeen, remember where the other computing school was, and pitched this idea to the Army, and the Army decided, in fact, that they would fund the construction of this electronic numerical integrator and computer, or ENIAC. They commissioned it, I think, in 43 to try to help with this ballistics data in World War II. But we'll see in a minute, it took a long time to build the ENIAC. By May of 45, they were getting close, just about to have it finished. Wasn't quite ready, was still a few months out, but getting close. Now, with our hats on, we're thinking, May of 45, it's too late, the war is fixed to be over. Of course, they didn't know that, right, but it was. By May of 45, they were going to get close enough, fixed to be a reality, and it dawned on that they needed somebody to run this new computer. Well, who were the most expert people that they had? Well, the women that ran the differential analyzer, right? It was the closest thing that existed. They'd been running it for several years. They knew more about it than anybody on the planet. So they went to these women computers and asked if they were interested in serving as programmers for the ENIAC. Now, they point out that nobody had ever done programming before. I mean, there wasn't a computer, so there was no need for a programmer. So when they interviewed the women, they really weren't sure what to ask them. I mean, they didn't really know what skill sets were going to be needed. But it was electronic. So what they ended up asking the candidates was, are you afraid of electricity, right? So that was the marker question. If you were afraid of electricity, you're out. If you weren't, you were in. So what they did, they ended up hiring six women for the job. I guess they weren't afraid of electricity. But stunningly, they didn't let them see the ENIAC. Now, it was in the room right next to the differential analyzer. That's where they built it. So it wasn't like it was far away. And these women had been doing top-secret, classified calculations for the military for two or three years. I think they probably were safe bets. But, you know, they were really careful. They had to upgrade their security clearance. They took several months. So they said, okay, we want you to program it. We're not going to show it to you. Remember, nothing like this had ever existed? They said, what we're going to do is to give you some very helpful paper diagrams. And you're going to have to figure out how to calculate and compute and program on that thing from these paper diagrams. So they did. They spent the summer of 45 teaching themselves to program this thing that they had never seen that didn't actually yet exist using paper diagrams. So how complex it is, pretty impressive that they were able to figure it out and teach it to themselves, which they were. It was a modular computer. It had individual parts that performed different functions, not unlike the women working in tandem back at the Harvard Observatory. So you can see these ideas colored or influenced how they designed it. Here's what took so long. It weighed 30 tons, it contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, and 5 million hand-soldered joints. So that's why it took two or three years to build this thing, right? Absolutely huge. Input and output, there you go. There's the card machine, right? The card reader, you put information on cards, punched it in, fed it to the machine. It did the calculators to spit the answers out on cards as well. And here are two of the programmers. This is Ruth Lichterman and Marilyn Westcoff, two of the six programmers. So here's an example of what they had to do. So to install a problem on this computer to program, if you will, they physically had to plug things in, right? Connect pieces. Remember, it was all modular. They had to connect this piece to this piece, and this piece to that piece, and this piece to that piece. So the work could flow through the system, right? And of course, you can see there's about nine zillion places you could plug things in. So it mattered, right? You had to know really, know what you were doing, understand what you were trying to calculate, how it was working, so you could get it to do this. And there were also lots and lots of dials, and you had to have all those set to the appropriate settings. So a pretty complex operation, especially if you were teaching it to yourself from paper diagrams. But the program is here. This is Betty Jing Jennings and Francis Billis. And in addition to trying to run a program, they had to do debugging, right? We all have to do that if you program. Debugging here meant finding the one, now remember there were 18,000 of them, the one vacuum tube that was causing your issue, right? Yeah. So again, you really had to know what you were doing. You had to understand the system, how it worked, how to program things. So pretty technical skill sets that they had to have. So the war ended in August of 45. The NEAC was still not ready. Finally, in October of 45, they were ready, and they let the women in the door and said, here, program this thing. Again, never having seen it, right? They had the problem. There were a couple of scientists in California that came up with the first problem that they programmed. It was a nuclear trigger for hydrogen bomb. That makes sense in October of 45, right? And so they had to program it without ever having seen it. And they did. They programmed it, and it was successful. There's a little bit better paper diagram, and I've got that circled because it says John Mockley and J. Press for Eric, the two guys that developed it. So in February of 46 was the first time they publicly unveiled it. So they tried it out in October. It worked. By February of 46, things were calm enough in World War II, they felt confident, revealing to the world that they had this new electronic calculator. And I've got them circled because it's a little bit hard to see, but Betty Jean Jennings that we saw earlier and Betty Snyder actually came up with the problem. So remember the first problem, some people in California, but these women came up with the problem themselves and programmed the computer for the unveiling. It was a success. It worked flawlessly. It was great. A lot of reporters, officials, important people. And after the demo, they all went to dinner only they forgot to invite the women programmers. They were not included. It was their problem. They did the programming and nobody bothered to invite them. Now, I want you to take a good look at this picture. So the Army had invested a ton of money and a ton of time in developing the INEAC. The war was over with. And what happened when all the soldiers came home? Did they want to sign back up and stay in the military? Heck no. My dad was overseas in the South Pacific for 38 straight months. No way. They tried. He said, no thanks. So they were having problems of recruiting. And so they thought, you know, this INEAC is cool. It's hip. It's, you know, technical. We'll use this to recruit men for the military because we need somebody to stay in the military. So they developed an ad featuring the INEAC and indicated that, you know, this was just indicative of the kinds of benefits that a career in the military could give you. So everybody's looked at this picture carefully because I want you to see the ad. What did they do? They cut the women out. The man standing there was just standing there for show. They did a lot of photo shoots and they brought men and had them stand in front of the machine and took pictures. The men weren't doing squat. The women designed the program. They programmed it. They cut them out. So this is what the U.S. public sees. The U.S. public knows nothing of what these women had been doing for years. It was top secret. It was classified. They were told to tell no one, which is why even after they got out of the war they told no one, right? So the public sees this. I think men are programmers, right? And two men did design and create this computer. And so the public perception was that this was a guy thing, right? Not a woman thing. Not something that women could do, or had any involvement with whatsoever. So while women were largely denied access to math and science in the early 1900s, they were on the ground floor very much so in computing all the way through ushering in the modern computing era. They worked their first computer program, worked in computing for decades, learned how to operate on the machines, did the very first programming on the ENIAC. But again, operated all of these machines. It was considered a viable thing for them to do. But at the end of World War II, they were shoved out. When they were pushed out of the room and the door was essentially closed. And because it was classified again, their role, the story I have just told you about their role in World War II, really was totally forgotten until about five to eight years ago. There was a documentary film producer by the name of Leanne Erickson, who was producing a film about downtown revitalization of real estate and property in the Philadelphia area. And there were some sisters, twins. Well, not twins, there were sisters. One of them was a lady you saw in the video earlier. And they had been real estate agents in Philadelphia for many years. And they kind of ushered in this revitalization. So this documentary was about their work. And one day between filming, the sisters were chatting. And one of them said, well, you remember when we used to calculate that ballistics data back in World War II for the army? And the documentary film producer was like, what? And they said, yeah, yeah, we spent about three or four years doing this. She did some quick research and realized this was an unknown story. And post 2000, an unknown World War II story is about like finding a diamond or something in your backyard. So she quickly moved, she realized that these women were old. And if you look at the video, there are three women that they found. They've all since died. In fact, they died, I think almost all of them died before the video actually ever came out. So she had access to wonderful materials, pictures, drawings, a lot of this material that we saw today. So truly a last minute save, if you will. But again, this story was one that was lost for many, many years, only come to light in the last few years. And unfortunately, women really have never regained that central role that they had in computing. About the time that I finished my undergraduate degree, 1985, we still had 37% of computer science graduates were women. I tell you, if that were the numbers today, we'd all be dancing in the streets. By 2010, it was 18%, and that's only if you add in information, science, information technology graduates, which is often housed in a college of business, right? Maybe in a college of science or something like that. Between 2000 and 2011, there was a 79% decline in the number of freshman women who said they were interested in computer science. At the high school level, look at 2011, only 19% of advanced placement computer science test takers were women. And even today, even with larger numbers in the past, these numbers are going down. 25% of computing professionals are women, and with graduation rates like this, it's going to only go down, right? People say, well, why? What happened? Some of it has been kind of the change in the character of computing. In some sense, it sort of developed a gamer identity, not necessarily accurate. Really very few computing professionals are going to be designing games. But that's not the perception of this out there. And perception is reality. So it's not one that is attractive to women in general. But huge, huge needs in computing in my part of the world, Louisiana. Fourth largest telecom in the U.S. is 30 miles from my campus. We have another huge company moving 70 miles away. They promised we're going to quadruple our number of computer science graduates. So that's going to be interesting. But huge needs. I could place six to eight times as many computer science graduates as I'm graduating in my college. I could place them all absolutely no trouble at all. So huge, huge needs. We're just not meeting the workforce demand. And we'll pay for that. If you're interested in learning more, the website where I got a lot of this material is Top Secret Rosies. Again, that's Leanne Erickson's website. And I do want to thank her. I contacted her and asked for permission to use a lot of this great material. She's more than happy for me to do so. So I want to thank her for that. Lots of great materials here. Again, a lot of material. There's study guides, educational materials, a PowerPoint, a DVD. There's some great things that talk about the history of computing and women's roles in that. If you're interested in working on the problem of attracting more women to CS and IT, there are a lot of organizations that really focus on that pretty heavily. NCWF, Center for Women and Information Technology was started by a lady from Louisiana, Lucy Sanders. Got her CS degree from LSU in Baton Rouge. Worked for AT&T for many years. Was a fellow, a technical fellow there. That's absolutely the highest, most prestigious level you can achieve. When she retired, she started this organization trying to address this issue. They have lots of industry support. They have some fabulous materials. They sponsor a computing, a statewide computing contest. We host the Louisiana awards event for that. Started doing that last year. Prior to that, nobody was holding an awards event in the state of Louisiana. So if it's something that you're interested in, you should check that out. They have some great brochures, materials, lots of things. WePAN, John mentioned that I've been very active in WePAN. Really focused on making sure that we have a program that supports the success of all students. Society of Women Engineers also does a lot, particularly in industry to try to support the success of women. I do have a lot of references. If you're interested in any of that, I can give you more details there. Any questions? The thought is that if you really want young girls to avoid some of the selection lines that they experience, it's going to be great. I haven't seen much of the way of computing and coming up or anything about the program. There's a group called Code.org and you can look them up. They've got a really cool video Will I Am is one of their big proponents. He's actually a big proponent of coding. I actually heard him speak in London last March. Code.org is trying to get computing in every K-12 classroom like Lego League, if you've ever seen the Lego League robotic stuff. It's drag and drop programming. My daughter is a second or third grader who could do that. By all means, the logic skills that you need would be fabulous. We would be far better off in math class if kids were doing some coding. Looking forward, the odds of you having any kind of job where you don't have to know anything about programming is going to be pretty slim. I think it's just absolutely exploding. Great question. Anybody else? If you go back to the very first picture this is a picture of the women or at least some of the women at the Philadelphia Computing Section. I don't know for sure if it's all of them and notice there was an African American woman in the group stunning for the early 40s absolutely stunning. It really was. This may have been everybody at so I think there were two themes of three maybe some doing hand calculations. That may have been everybody at Philadelphia and the Aberdeen maybe had similar groups. If you'll look at the video the Top Secret Roses video the little snippet we saw was from then. There's some more. You might find a little bit more information about that. Great question. Let's get to the program. What many of you were discovering is that I'm waiting to choose that and for that experience they're already inclined to be both and maybe choose. Let me ask you to try this one. There's a reasonable number of women in the group. If you were to try to give them a one-cent sales sketch not to talk about the great contributions that have been given for the selfish why they should consider computing what would that man feel to be? I'm going to play off of Maria Klave who's the provost at Harvey Mudd a computer scientist and done a phenomenal job of attracting women to computer science. What she tries to help women see is the enormous breadth of reach of computing. Name the area that you're most interested in. Sociology, K-12 education there are applications that involve computing and programming in all of those. In fact, you can use computing to solve problems that are not accessible by hand right? The whole point of the things in the movie were so it gives you a chance to help and do good to make the world a better place to make a difference in virtually any area that you're interested in and don't think that you have to do something technical and boring if you're going to do computing. One of the things she does at Harvey Mudd all students must take a computer literacy class. She's taken that computer literacy class and students do projects and they're in every kind of a major in the whole university and students get to pick. If I like sociology and I'm thinking about majoring in that I can do a computing project that relates to sociology. If I want to be a K-12 teacher and what she's found is that 40% of the people who take that class decide to become computer science majors. It's pretty stunning. Again, heavily women. So, helping people understand the breadth of things you can do with it right? That's key. Again, a lot of it is this gamer culture very narrow, very unappealing so if they understand the breadth of things that you can do. And there's a lot of computing that programs like or languages like Python are pretty forgiving. If you've got a Mac it comes on it so there's some languages that you can use where the bar is not so high, it's not so technical and you can still do a lot of good. If you know how to program in Python you can go get a job. That's actually a remarkable skill. All of those sorts of things are good ways to help introduce more students to computing. Does that help? Great question. And nothing is wrong with gaming. I've got a son and a husband. We own at least two of every game system on demand. This event was co-sponsored by Department of Liberal Studies of Brooks College of Interdisciplinary at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of History, the Honors College Division of Inclusion and Equity and the Women's Center. So thank you to all of them. Outside along the wall over to the right here there are some goodies. Cookies and brownies and rice crisps treats and little tarts and all sorts of delicious things to eat. So I hope you'll stay around and Dr. Partner will be around and also my tradition to have you talk to so let's thank Dr. Partner.