 Just because not a lot of time and a lot to go through so sorry to cut conversation short. I'm Hilary This is we've always been here women change makers in tech I work as a full stack developer at 10 forward consulting in Madison, Wisconsin And I'm on Twitter at Hilary SK So I'm 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 knowledge changed from clerical to cool or how the excuse me how Working in tech changed from being clerical to cool We'll get the change makers. We're 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 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 tiny URL comm slash women dash change makers So if you want to look that up Want to give a quick disclaimer there are hundreds of women that I could have included in this talk so This isn't supposed to be like the best if they're just ones that that interested me or that I happened 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 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 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 It weren't for women in the past who contributed to the technology and the programming that brought them here So we're gonna 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 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 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 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 homogeneous 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-sized 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 with the product as it currently stood There was a one of those same studies. I think it was a harvest Harvard Business Review from 2017 found that if there is a Software team that has at least one member of the team that shares the ethnicity of the client They understand those clients needs a hundred and fifty two percent more so It's just like these are these are real impacts that are measurable and quantifiable Mentors and role models, so it's it's kind of a cyclical 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 with the technology 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 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've all of these citations at the end 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 percent and In terms of real dollars, that's twenty eight point four trillion dollars That we are losing out on because we do not have Women in these in these economic positions and working and contributing in this way so Also, you know like apart from from these sort of statistical reasons. I mean these are good jobs Right working in tech is it's a good life Yeah, right. I've talked to a couple people even just here at rails comp 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 two and we're 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 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 gonna look at how Tech jobs went from being seen as clerical to cool pretty 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 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 ends Manger said When 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, I don't know what you're doing So they hired women they thought well women have been secretaries women have been typists women shall be programmers They started to change For various reasons One of them was when World War two ended suddenly there were a lot of men coming back who needed jobs Programming what people are starting to realize. Hey, actually 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 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 just I thought was fascinating they crafted the profile of what they thought a good programmer was based on existing programmers and they specifically looked for people who Had a disinterest in people and disinterest in close interactions So we see the origins of the anti-social programmer stereotype Again, this is going to rule out a lot of women especially this time when women were Were you know socially conditioned to be more nurturing work here being there were seen is that you know That was a 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 on the nerds all of those. It's these like 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 are seen as toys and they were marketed primarily to boys and then the last one as The percentage 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 have tracked this across numerous industries Teaching you know used to be all male dominated 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 this cyclical issue as more men went into programming It got the prestige went up the pay increase They were picky 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 This two 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 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 gonna look at women who sort of defied the odds and did it anyway And we're gonna 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 computer program her big thing was that she saw that 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 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 mathematical 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 gonna seem a lot of people have heard of Grace Hopper show of hands Yep She had a PhD in mathematics. 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 Help create cobalt Retired at age 79 as a real animal. She actually was aged out of the Navy 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 when she was she signed up for the war effort with I don't remember the acronym, but it's waves It was like it was basically a women's unit for World War two and She was too physically small to meet the requirements But she had these math skills which were desperately needed. So again, they made it they Made an exception for her Dorothy Vaughn, if anyone's seen hidden figures, you know who Dorothy Vaughn is. Oh, yep. Yeah, raise your hands. That's fine So she was at NASA and then its predecessor at NACA for almost 30 years She was the first black supervisor She became an expert in for a trend basically when they switched from using human computers to using Electronic computers she saw this coming and instead of letting her become obsolete. She was like, okay, great Well, I used to do the math and now I'm going to do Fortran but She was also a huge champion for other women, which I think you're you're gonna see that occurring in a lot of the women that we're gonna talk about today and That's that's white women and black women Basically, if she saw someone that she thought deserved a raise or deserved a promotion 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 and they refused to promote her back to supervisor Women of any act have people heard of them? Yeah So this was the first all electronic digital computer ever It was six women who were we're pulled to program it and so at this point We were we were still in the mindset that the hardware 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 three thousand 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 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 gonna be towards the middle like go check that one Which is just mind-blowing to me Plus I really like this quote. This is from Betty Jennings. She said I had a fantastic life Everything I did was the beginning of something new so again this 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 had press conferences lots of attention The night after they revealed it. They had this this sort of celebratory ceremony And it was a candlelit dinner full of dignitaries and luminaries and all of you know, who's who in science 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 candle at dinner All right, we're gonna look at some people that maybe haven't gotten quite as much of attention So Marjorie Lee Brown, she was one of the first women to get her PhD in mathematics Her first woman of color. I think she was maybe the third She also secured one of the first computers I was ever used in an academic setting So that was for what was then North Carolina? Century University she taught there and she secured a grant to purchase them a computer 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 Perlman Known as the mother of the internet which apparently she hates that title She did a spanning tree protocol if people know what that is I was in 1985 So basically saying we're going from a few nodes that have to be pretty closely 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 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 prodigious author like 20 or 30 books or something like that, which just makes me tired thinking about All right, Margaret Hamilton. So she worked again worked at NASA She did on-board flight control software for the Apollo and Skylab missions coin the term software engineer Developed or helped to develop a synchronized 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 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 to overload the system 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 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 and she I mean that that innovation saved the astronauts lives. So any easily so She worked again with with NASA there's a big 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 brilliant brilliant woman and again this sense of like you know Again, 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 and this was right around Jim Crow in the 1960s are 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 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 This concept for which she received this patent. 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 love that 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 it's used in search engines to rank Pages and documents based on what your search term is 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 with a man 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 But she helped develop basic I think she was the only woman on the team and if I remember correctly it was it was an area of Harvard that was like They it was like off limits to women because they 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 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 so again just seeing like Having this vision of what could be based on what was available at the time We're gonna look at some women that are still doing awesome stuff So Korean you 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 too. 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 one in 1979. It was a micro computer and it had 512 bytes of memory I looked this up the other day and the modern MacBook Air has eight gigs of working memory It's like super tiny And she built this when she was still getting her undergrad degree 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 this arm processor core more than 30 billion have been shipped which is for for every human on earth and Sophie Wilson did that Windows Snyder literally wrote the book on threat modeling has been described as sheriff for the internet She's worked for Microsoft fire, you know Mozilla Apple right now. She's at Fastly which relays data all over the world for places like yelp Kickstarter strike Pinterest So she Works with security for like things that we use all the time every day and kind of keeps keeps our information safe Tracy Chiu who was and I might be saying some of these things wrong. I apologize if that's the case 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 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 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 it's a spreadsheet. 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 And She had a 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. They are more than 500 engineers at Pinterest so She she picked a winning horse there. Okay, I think you're actually in the room Seemed appropriate for rails come so Who's heard of a rails bridge? Some people cool. Yeah, they are doing amazing things. I Can't remember how many how many students have you guys had now? Do you know? That's what I was gonna say ten thousand. Yeah, which is just insane and awesome Prolific speaker and has been an organizer for rails company really comp and just doing really really great stuff. So thank you Erica Baker senior engineer at Slack used to work at Google Kind of the same thing. She you know as Tracy we looked at a few people ago. She created a spreadsheet That's all of us. It was a spreadsheet. It was an internal salary spreadsheet and Because she was talking with friends at 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 we need a way to to have more control over our salaries and in the US It is 100% legal to talk about your salary. You cannot be punished for that. It is illegal It didn't really matter. She still was She had been at Google for six years She received ton of a ton of praise from her her colleagues and co-workers. I 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 I mean, it was just if you look up this whole debacle. It's it's fascinating and scary and angry and but Yeah, now she's doing great things at Slack and actually I think 25 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 to do diversity work 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 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 doing anyone here use that? Yeah, some people Pretty neat literally a genius Want to make our third genius award and I think she's not what Apple so Prisa Tabriz. I Love her like style. She She calls herself a browser boss and I'm trying to think of what her title was before this it was like security princess or something Yeah, basically just You know calls it what it is and claims it for herself She heads up a team of about 30 like hackers who basically try to find bugs and issues and vulnerabilities in Google Chrome So how many people use Google Chrome here? That's what I figured so Have her to think 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 All right, so we just talked about a whole bunch of women doing awesome things, but There are so many more that I couldn't get to or new ones are gonna come up all the time And so how you know if you're interested in this, how do you how do you stay woke? How do you you know keep following this? A couple of ways I created a curated Twitter list That's always growing of women in tech on Twitter that I think are doing awesome things 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 gonna be doing is You basically Dedicate an afternoon you have a you know 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 And I can tell you from researching for this talk that there are a lot of them And so basically just contributing 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 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. 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 bunch of citations So, yeah, we've got a little bit of time for questions. I know