 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to New America. We have an hour, so I'm gonna move fairly quickly through the introductions, because I really wanna focus as much time as possible talking about this book. My name's Ian Wallace. I'm the co-director of the Cyber Security Initiative here in New America, and in this capacity, I'm speaking both for future tense and the Better Life Lab, two of our other programs here at New America. Future Tense is a partnership between New America, Arizona State University, and Slate Magazine, focused on exploring emerging technologies and their transformative effects in society and public policy. And for those of you, imagine most of you have come across future tense before, but events like this are very much part of what they do, but also have a fantastic blog on Slate, which, if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to check out. The other sponsor for today's event is the Better Life Lab program here at New America, which aims to find and highlight solutions of better ways of working to better define gender equity to include both the advancement of women and the changing role of men and to pursue policy solutions that fit the way people work and families work and live to enable all people to thrive, which is to say it's many of the things that I think we're gonna discuss when we're talking about this book. And so before we start, if I could ask you to silence your cell phones, and I don't imagine anyone will be tempted to slip away, but I've been asked to say, please hang around at the end because we're gonna have a reception. If you wanna follow the conversation on Twitter, the hashtag is hashtag code girls, and the tag follow is at future tense now, and I suspect 20 people will be tweeting if you want to follow that. Introductions. First off, let me introduce Liza Mundy. Liza is a New America Fellow. She was formerly the director of the Bread, Winning and Caregiving program, which was launched in 2013. It was the predecessor program, I think it's, I'd say, of the Better Life Lab. She is already a best-selling author and previously a staff writer for the Washington Post. Joining her to talk about this book, we have Courtney Imelman Wallace. She is the director of technology at Color of Change, and previously a veteran of the US Digital Service where she worked particularly in the Department of Veterans Affairs. I think there's some themes we can pick up there. And at the end, Erie Meyer, who is the senior director of the National Network at Code for America. She was herself a founding member of the US Digital Service, and she's also the co-founder of a listserv, which I encourage you to check out, called Tech Lady Mafia. Tell you more. So just in terms of structure of the conversation, I'm gonna ask Liza a few questions, give her a chance to tell you a little bit about the book, and then quickly we'll get into a wider discussion, and then as we get Tom open it up for people here in the audience to ask their own questions. So Liza, at risk of being cliche, tell us what the book is about, and why you decided to write it. So the book is about more than 10,000 women who were secretly recruited by the US Army and the US Navy after Pearl Harbor, which of course was a massive intelligence failure. It was the event that launched our country into World War II, and immediately after that, of course, the military realized that we had to ramp up our intelligence services, all of our intelligence services, but particularly our code breaking ability to penetrate enemy signals that were being transmitted in any number of systems all over the world. The men were fighting, the men were immediately enlisting and shipping off to the Pacific and the Atlantic and Europe, and so the decision was made, and in fact I saw the document in the National Archives where the US Navy literally wrote on a memo looking for communications intelligence officers, code breakers, news source, women's colleges. So somebody had the idea, okay, the men are shipping out, so let's give women a try, and there was a very secret recruiting program that the US Navy did where they actually tapped promising seniors at Wellesley, Vassar, Radcliffe, the Seven Sister Schools. Selected seniors were invited in by their professors and they were asked, do you like crossword puzzles and are you engaged to be married? And the correct answer to number one was yes, the correct answer to number two was no, a number of the women lied, they were engaged to be married, but whatever they were being invited to do sounded interesting enough that they denied their engagements and in some cases ended their engagements. So it was an extraordinary effort and a very, very large cohort of women who did this. The US Army, meanwhile, was competing for its own code breakers and their strategy was to send handsome young army officers to the South to recruit school teachers. The stereotype was that Southern women were particularly susceptible to the charms of a good looking man and they really did believe that the Southern women would sign on hoping that if they came to Washington they would meet a handsome young officer and marry him. And in fact, my central character from Lynchburg, Virginia was interested in getting out of an engagement and that's one of the reasons that she accepted it also paid better and sounded much more interesting than teaching school. Tell us a little bit about your central character because I think that's, I mean, one of the challenges I imagine of telling the story of 10,000 women is bringing it alive, not just her, but how did you go about trying to bring that story and make it personal? Right, it was personal to me because I actually grew up about an hour away from where she did. She's from Lynchburg, Virginia. I'm from Roanoke, Virginia. Many of the women recruited by the army were coming from small towns in the South. Generally they had never been to Washington. So I felt a kinship with her. The NSA actually put me in touch with her. The code breaking operations during the war ultimately became the NSA. So our surveillance and eavesdropping operation was born out of these efforts. They're very interested in recovering this history. I think, you know, for all the right reasons, but also because, you know, what would you rather have if you're the NSA? One more story about Edward Snowden or, you know, a book about heroic female code breakers. So they were quite willing and quite helpful in trying to put me in touch with people. So, and I've interviewed her probably about 20 times. I've spent a lot of time in her assisted living facility. I've eaten a lot of tuna fish and cottage cheese. And, but I was talking to her last night. She's actually, her name, excuse me, Dot Brayden. Well, her last name is Bruce now. She married a man she was corresponding with during the war. She was actually corresponding with five or six men during the war, but that was common also. And I talked to her last night. She's been listening to the book on tape. And she is listening very carefully, I must say. Which is to say, what reaction are you getting from the women and their families as they listen to the book, read the book themselves? Well, so far, I mean, the women, I'd say, are just very pleased as they should be that their story is coming to light. I mean, they were told to keep this secret. And they kept this secret for more than 70 years. And as a result, their contribution was almost forgotten. By history, it would have been forgotten, I think. And so we're still contending with some of the myths and stereotypes about women as a result. The idea that women maybe aren't biologically fit to work in the tech sector. And yet, we see from these stories that it was women who were pioneering the tech sector during the war. So apart from dots, which were the other women that you sort of picked out to follow and who else did you talk to as a result of it? So I talked to about 20 women. I also found more than 20 oral histories, or I filed declassification review requests with the NSA to get more oral histories. I mean, I felt like there was a southern thread to the story of the school teachers coming from Durham and Bourbon, Mississippi, and Linsburg, Virginia. So that was a thread. But the women coming down from the seven sister schools under these secret circumstances and coming to Washington and working the naval codes, both Japanese and German naval codes was incredibly interesting to me. I mean, the women who experienced the D-Day invasion by reading the messages of the Germans who were watching the invasion as it happened. I mean, that was to me an incredibly compelling story. So I had a hard time choosing. And in the end, I felt like I didn't, I mean, I shouldn't choose, that I should try to tell all the stories. And so I definitely interviewed some of the women who were picked out of those first classes at the Seven Sisters, a woman from Smith, class of 42, got that secret invitation, put aside her other plans, and she at 95 could still show me the math that she did to strip the additives out of the unsafe or Japanese naval code. She actually drew it. She got a little impatient with me because that was a little slow. I think one of my favorite parts about the book is weaving the stories. And I mean, it's self-evident when you think about it, but it really comes out in the stories that you tell, that everyone had a different experience, and some people loved it, and some people didn't enjoy it so much, and making it personal sort of brings that home. What most surprised you in some ways, what surprised me was that this story hasn't already been told before. But what else surprised you? I think the magnitude of the numbers. I mean, the fact that it really was more than 10,000 women. And I don't even think that the NSA quite fully appreciated the numbers of women involved because typically historians of the war, they tend to be looking either at sort of the Army code-breaking program or the Navy code-breaking program and the experts on one or the other. And it's not until you kind of add the numbers that you realize that it was more than 10,000 women. And do you get a sense that there's more to come from this? I mean, there are stories that could have been pulled out from that you wrote. Are there other stories that he yet to be told? Well, I would hope that, for example, at Arlington Hall, which was the girl's school that was commandeered by the U.S. Army over in Arlington, not far from where I live, that was a massive 7,000-person code-breaking operation. There was an African-American unit. It was a segregated unit. The facility was segregated. And that unit worked on commercial codes. So they were looking at encrypted messages being sent by companies to see who was doing business with Hitler or who was doing business with Mitsubishi. And the records on that were frustratingly slim. So I couldn't write about it as much as I would have liked. But it wouldn't surprise me if there was a family here in the Washington, D.C. area, maybe, who had some records or knew that they had a grandmother who was doing that work. So I think there could be more coming to light about that program, I would hope. I look forward to reading that book. Yeah, I would, too. Courtney, Erie, you've read this book. As people who are interested in history, but also as women who are working into the tech sector and who've been brought into government in some ways in a parallel way to the women co-breakers, what jumped out to you from this story and which were the bits that surprised, delighted, shocked you? Well, for me, some of the stuff that I thought was really interesting and maybe surprised and shocked me and maybe horrified me also a little bit is how parallel or how little distance we've actually made in how we treat women kind of in these spaces. There's a part of your book where you talk about pregnancy being a thing and how some women are getting secret abortions because if they become pregnant or they're found out, then they will basically get escorted out, right? They will lose their job, right? And there was one woman who wrote a resignation letter that was like, I'm resigning from my job as a mathematician to go home and stay with my baby. Right? It was after the war when they were expected. Right. And it's just, I think for me, some of the pieces of that hit home a little bit. My wife's in the front row. We're expecting in December. Yes. So I think for me that really resonated and hit home a little bit about how do we think about women in the workplace? When we talk about diversity and all of that kind of stuff, how do we make it a place that women, we're actually not that different actually from World War II. So I think some of that stuff really stuck out to me, but I agree the small amount of information about African-American units was also a piece that I was kind of shocked and horrified also by just the lack of information that we have about the work that they were doing. And I saw a lot of parallels in the work that we're doing a color of change about how we're doing corporate accountability, literally working with white, corporate companies working with white supremacists, so literally us watching companies work with Nazis. It was very kind of surreal. Yeah. Plus one call to that. I would say another thing that was sort of shocking, and this is on a very personal scale, was the similarities in the issues we have with recruiting technical people to serve the country. I think that part of what we've seen is the story of the code breakers and of World War II is remarkable because it was a time of war. I think about things like, lots of things in the American government that aren't going very well. And I would say that at the macro level, the famous stories are healthcare.gov, but the less famous stories are also really disastrous. Things like food stamp applications that will go down for months at a time and no one has any idea. They've never had a software engineer on staff. People don't, people are, the greatest technical minds of our generation working to make ads a little bit more effective for billionaires instead of making sure that families have enough food to eat. And sort of part of founding the United States digital service was approaching people like Courtney. She wasn't working on those ads. But approaching a technical mind like Courtney and saying, your country and your fellow residents of the country desperately need you. And I got chills reading about sending the letters out. When we had our first big recruiting event with the president, we weren't allowed to tell people what we were calling them about. And I remember it was email. I'm writing very cryptic emails to the toughest and the best engineers in the world, many of whom were women and saying, I need you to show up in Washington on the state for a thing I can't super tell you about. All the way up to, I know that there are engineers on our staff and some day we'll be able to tell stories but their records of their time are screenshots of the home page of newspapers for the day that horrible news didn't break because their work was successful. And so our team wasn't working on classified things that did not touch any spooky stuff. But other really important systems that the America functioning proper really depends on not going down or not totally breaking. We're still being held together by brilliant technical minds and are gonna be screwed if we don't have the benefit of women and people of color fully participating in those systems and in that work. To which point, I mean, one of the, it strikes me the great opportunities of this book is the inspirational opportunity. What do you think can be done to get this story to more people? I think there are obviously going out doing events like this. But how would you like to see the legacy of the women are reflected in a way that inspires others to go into technology on the one hand and devote their time to serving the country on another? Well, there is gonna be a young adult version of the book next fall. And so one can hope that girls will read it and feel inspired. When I was a teenager or a young adolescent and I was looking for, I remember going to the library and specifically looking for books about women and women's achievements. And it wasn't even a really conscious thing but I remember doing it. And all my library had was biographies The Wives of Henry VIII. And as we know, things did not turn out well for really any of them. And I read them because that's all that there was. And I do think, I mean, we spend a lot of time talking about the frustrations of trying to get more women in tech or the appalling treatment and things like that. And it's important to talk about that. But I do think it's important also to offer the positive and the inspirational stories to make people feel optimistic and empowered. That sounds like a clichéd word, but to make people feel excited about the work. And am I right? I mean, I shouldn't be telling you what you think, but is this helpful? So just speaking for myself, I would say it's deeply helpful on two fronts. On one front, and I sent an email to this effect, I found the book simultaneously lit me a fire with excitement to find out more about these women in this work. And also heartbreaking to hear their stories. So I am definitely inspired, and I was even saying, I was looking up on Google Maps, how I could get to the archives to see some of these records. And on the other side, part of what I hope it inspires and what I love that you have down in black and white is that World War II may have ended two years early because of the work done by these women. And when I think about two years of war, what I think about are the working class people who expired because of those, or could have expired in those two years. And what comes to mind and what I hope people take away from it in one part and what I hope managers across the country take away from it is what else are we not taking advantage of by having management practices that let abuse of people be the holders of money and power and promotions and equal pay? Whether it's in government or other industries, the talent we are losing out on with systemic racism and sexism are costing us more than we will ever know. And having that quantified just for that war, just for mostly white women, even that was to start, what else are we missing out on? And I hope that when people read that, that number sort of punches them in the gut because I know it punched me in the gut and says like, ah, we have to think about it. I plus one, everything. It's been too much time with you. I plus one, a lot of the things that Erie said. I also think that to your point, it is important for us to have these stories because sometimes it feels like we're constantly paving the way. And I think one of the things, especially when I saw Hidden Figures that was like great for me, is to be able to experience the people in front of me while trying to pull the young women behind me, right? And so I think for some of us that are like in this work right now, it is a good reminder that like, there were people before us who got through and that did some amazing work and like we are the next generation and we're standing on the shoulders. We are not necessarily like the foundation or the shoulders. I'm a huge proponent of like intergenerational life. I was telling my sister this morning, I love swimming in the pool in the morning because there's like older black ladies that I'm just like hanging out with and like that's my jam. But I feel like this work does some of that as well, right? Like this book helps bridge some of those intergenerational gaps that really help us to continue to build on the work that they did. And I just feel like we're out here trying to lay a brand new foundation. And just one other comment about that, I think Yale University has recently named one of its residential colleges after Grace Hopper. And I do think that statues and building names, and there are several women in this book whose achievements were so significant, Agnus Driscoll, Elizabeth Friedman, Ann Cara Christie. Some of them do have secret rooms named after them. There's an Ann Cara Christie room at the NSA. She was the first, she was hired onto the code breaking program as a 22 year old out of Russell Sage College and she helped break a major Japanese army code and rose to become the first female deputy director of the NSA. But I do think that's some public acknowledgement in terms of chiseling their names onto buildings and getting some, even just that kind of simple public recognition. Then you don't even have to read the book, although hopefully you will. Just before the panel, we were actually talking about this in the context of DC. How many circles do you think there are in DC named after women? One, and it was actually an academic professor, Anna J. Cooper, one of the first African American women in the entire country to get her PhD. And she helped start the intellectual practices that Howard that are still serving us today. And I think there's, just to your point, such a deficit of recognition for women who have made these incredible intellectual achievements. So I only learned recently that Elizabeth Friedman, who's featured in the book, who was one of the founding, in fact, the founding with her husband arguably, figures in US cryptanalysis, used to work in a building that is literally just next door to here. And having worked here a long time and been very interested in their history had absolutely no idea about that. And I'm sure that's true. One thing I'd like to talk about is the sort of positive examples in the book. And the book is chocked full of racism and sexism. And some of that is about the time. You kind of feel that some of it is, sadly, not just about the time that it was written in. But there are essentially some good examples of good practice that I think can be modelled to others. Can you talk to some of that? Well, I think that many of the women, when they came up here, they were young women, but they were working with older college professors, men. In fact, I did my graduate work at UVA and there was a Shakespeare bibliographer there, Fredson Bowers, who I had certainly heard of. And he came up and was working in the Navy operation. And many of the young women did feel quite mentored by some of the older college professors who were working there. And the Navy women were able to use the GI Bill to go on and get their graduate degrees in some cases. And there's a wonderful document that was, it was a morale survey done at Arlington Hall, which was the Army code breaking operation. There were 7,000 people working there. And it was mostly civilians. And in the summer of 43, after a major, major break in the Japanese shipping codes, they were still worried that people were sort of dissatisfied because it was really big, it was really hot, it was really stressful, it was really hard. So they went around, they did little interviews with everybody working there. And you could really see that no matter how important the work, there's this sort of stress of being in a bureaucracy and the stress of working with other people never changes. And so, you know, they were complaining, well, some people work really hard, some people don't work hard at all, some people are chomping gum, some people are smoking cigarettes. But you could also tell that talent was emerging in unexpected places. And there was a cryptographic unit, so they were encycling our own codes. And there was an older male professor who thought he was gonna head it up. But there was a young woman who was graduated, just graduated from University of Maryland, Miss Jane Pulliam. And she turned out to be incredible, just like one of those people who was an incredible manager. And everybody recognized it, including the older male college professor. And they all said, you lead it. And so at 22, she was leading the whole cryptographic unit because it was really a workplace based on merit. And I came, that point was made in the records over and over again. It didn't matter if you were a private or an officer or male, female, what age you were, it was how good you were at the work. And that seems like a pretty unusual workplace environment. And you... And you... And you... Clearly true from the reaction of the others. One of the other pieces, which for obvious reasons, doesn't get developed completely in the book, is the impact this had on women in the U.S. military. That, and quite apart from the fact that there were women working on these incredibly complex issues, the decision to sort of bring them into the military was itself historic. Can you just tell us a little bit more about sort of how that happened and some of the oddities of making that decision? Yeah, I mean, this was really important. This was the... The Navy had actually admitted women during World War I that it was just a loophole. There was no law that said a yeoman had to be male. And so in the First World War, they brought in women basically as clerks and secretaries just because they could. And Congress immediately closed that loophole after First World War and women were kicked out of the Navy. So World War II was the first massive entry well, not really massive, but significant entry of women into the Army and the Navy and as WASPs as well. But I really admired, it was a big deal and there was a lot of resistance, particularly in the Navy, to having women come in. There was a lot of concern, what if they get pregnant? What if they have abortions in order to be admitted? And should they be admitted at all? And so I really came to admire, you're talking about the women who came before us, the deans and faculty members and presidents of the Severance Sisters Colleges really orchestrated this and they were very savvy and they were very keen and they knew when they were being stone walled and they were on the watch for that in all sorts of places. So when the decision was finally made to admit women into the Navy, in part so that they could enlist women and not just have to secretly tap them but have more women coming in to do this work and other work, the Navy was still very skeptical. Some of the old admirals, and of course as you can imagine in Washington there were endless bureaucratic meetings about things like uniforms. What will the women's uniforms look like? What color will the women's uniforms be? And Virginia Goldersleeve, who was the Dean of Barnard was really paying close attention and the Navy wanted the women to not get the blue uniforms that the men had. They were gonna have gray or tan. And she was like, uh-uh, if you don't give us the blue uniforms then we're gonna be seen as a lady's auxiliary. We're not gonna be full-fledged members of the Navy. And she really pressed that point and dug her heels in to get the blue. And then, so then the Navy said, well, okay, you can have the blue uniforms but you cannot have our gold braid. We don't have enough gold braid. We have to keep it, we have to keep it for the men. And so she lost the gold braid. The women got dusty blue braid. But, you know, they were really watching to make sure that the women were admitted as full-fledged members of the US military and not as a lady's auxiliary. Also related to that, that one of the things that was remarkable to me was the seven sister Dean Mafia and these incredible senior women who were just like, absolutely not. And one of the instructions they were sent, I believe by the Navy, but correct me, was we want no one of any persecuted races, including no Jews. And they sent Jewish women anyway, which is brilliant because when you look at what World War II ended up deeply impacting, having those women actually on the ground and directly contributing was critical. That was just really striking to me that they banded together and were like, yeah, nope. And they understood, I'm sorry, that also they understood that this might, that this would be a way to get an entering wedge into graduate schools at MIT and Colombian places that were closed to women. That, you know, there was a surge of patriotism. They wanted to protect freedom and democracy, but they also wanted to get their women into graduate schools. Well, and the thing that I also thought was interesting was that there was like actually such a stark difference between the Army and the Navy. It was like seemingly the Army had it figured out. They were like, it's fine. Anybody can, you know, they were in some sort seen as the more liberal branch, which I don't know that we would say that now, but and seemingly had more advances potentially because of that. And the Navy having like such strict rules could in theory could potentially have created a situation in which they didn't have as great of advances, which is interesting. But then the women got military benefits. They got GI benefits because they were, the Army operation was more civilian. So the school teachers tended to stay civilians and then they ended up not getting the GI benefits that the women and the Navy did. Right. But I do think there's some interesting pieces there about how you shape the place that you come into, right? Cause I feel like there is like to a certain extent, like hints of gentrification that happened, right? When like people are all in Arlington and now you're able to have these people work because they're civilians. And so I think there's also an interesting piece there. It's like, well, maybe you couldn't get the GI bill, but like you were actually able to work and sustain your family and give people opportunity who didn't previously have opportunity, you know, so. To that point in picking up what you were saying, one of the bits, the book is all fascinating, but the real payoff is in some ways at the end where you sort of see what happens to the women going forward, which is both an inspiring story and a sad story in different ways. So both in terms of the people who you were talking to and following, and in terms of women in tech and both intelligence, I guess, and also more generally, what happened next? Where did it all go wrong and what can we directly kind of trace back to what happened in those war years in terms of bringing really fantastic women into the government and working in tech in general? Well, what happened after the war? I mean, you talked about how so much of it, you know, it seems the same in a dispiriting way, but in fact, we've moved backwards in some ways because there was childcare provided during the war and certainly the Navy women code breakers had to quit if they got pregnant, but in general, the Army civilian women didn't and quite a few of them were getting pregnant. So we were at least in the larger context enabling women to work during the war and then it was yanked away immediately after the war. So I think there were all sorts of mechanisms to shoe the women back into the home and some of them were baked in from the start. There was one quote that really struck me when there was all this recruiting going on during the war for women math majors and these deans and faculty members had to actually ask themselves, are we gonna expand our math department and actually create more women math majors? And they were very leery of that because they had a feeling that the rug was gonna yank out after the war and the president of Goucher College which also sent a number of women to the Navy operation was outraged when a company said, we want all your female math majors but give us beautiful ones for we don't want them on our hands after the war. So yeah, so even from the start, there was the attitude that this was gonna be a temporary state of affairs. Yeah, give us your math majors and then we're gonna send them back home. And I mean, I'd love to hear you all opine on this but I think these advances and innovations were made and all sorts of mechanisms came into place immediately after the war to get as many women out of the workplace as possible. Oh boy. You know. If you're interested in this, you should definitely come get a glass of wine with us some time as we eat when we're not recording. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, you're right. It has been, I think we are not as advanced as we would like to think. I think that pouring money into lots of these diversity programs and like all of these things don't move the needle as much as we hope. I think that we still, you know, expect women to kind of behave away. We were actually talking about this. Are we, I was saying, I don't know if we're expecting women to, with our diversity programs, are we expecting women to come in and be their amazing, brilliant selves and contribute in new and interesting ways? Are we expecting them to assimilate to the culture that we already have? Like, don't rock the boat, just be smart. Like bring your brain but don't bring all your lady stuff. Don't bring all your like pregnancy. Don't bring all your mad about a joke that somebody made. We're just kidding, you know? Like, and is, you know, are we, is that what we're expecting of women in tech? And a lot of other industries, quite frankly, check Twitter, you know? So I actually think that we need to maybe take a step back and reevaluate as a society how we are thinking about women in the workplace, not just in tech. I think we have a much larger conversation that we need to have with ourselves. Pretty usual, I agree. I would just like to add that the thing that stands out to me is that if we don't untangle this, someone is going to eat our lunch. And hopefully it's not in the context of a world war. It's definitely in the context of security engineering. This, to me, feels really urgent. Karisa Tabreetz, who, I don't know if folks know, but she's the head of security for Google Chrome. We asked her to come, consider being the federal chief information, like cyber securities are of the White House or the federal government. And she was like, no, I actually think I can keep more people secure at Google making sure that Chrome is secure. And I also thought of her when I read the line about persecuted racism, people who were native born, because she's Iranian of Iranian descent. And when she talks to me about security, she doesn't talk about being interested in particularly databases or hacking. For her, she was really interested in the concept of information security because information security was physical security for her family that was under an oppressive regime. And so it was an applied concept that was critical to the survival of people she loved. So my hope and what we have to make true is to set ourselves up so that the Parisa Tabreetz of the world can't wait to serve their country or their state or their county or their city that we cannot wait to serve in a place where you can really make people's lives better and really live up to their talent and live up to their vision. Because what I love about engineers is that they're not scared of hard problems. They're looking for the hardest possible problems they can find. And I think when we read about these women who are just not shockingly brilliant, but like, well, shocking to me because I'm not that brilliant, but what strikes me is I wanna live up to that. I want to create that energy, create that urgency and create that space for that to come true. And I'm an optimist because I can't see a future where we make it without doing that. I also was sort of struck by, one of the stories behind the stories is people serving in the government and choosing and volunteering to do that, which I think is recovering government bureaucrat sort of resonated with me a bit. You will have, I think picked up enough from this combination so far to understand there's a lot more questions that I could ask Liza and the rest of the panel. But I wanna give everybody else an opportunity to ask some questions. So if you have a question, please put your hand in the air and we will bring a mic around to you. So over on the middle right, please. And if you could say your name, any affiliation and- And your favorite tech stack. My what? And your question with a question mark. Yeah, I'm a stupid humanities person over here. But my name's Nina, I went to Smith College which actually has liberal graduation requirements because they had a Waves training school there and they wanted people to graduate early and enlist. So that's great. My question was, how did these women see themselves? Did they kind of see themselves as like, oh well, we're just the quirk girls, glad to be of use. If it helps me to push my pencil around, I'll be happy to. Or did they really think we're geniuses and we're not getting the recognition we deserved? Or did they really, because I think sometimes that's often the tragedy of women's history is we don't realize that what we were doing was important all along. Yeah, and I think it varied woman to woman. I think there were some women who said, I just did my part and it wasn't a big deal. When in fact it really was quite a big deal. But I remember one of the Wellesley women said to me, we came down to Washington and we thought we were such hot stuff and the mail officers really didn't want us and it took us a while to persuade them that we really were worthwhile, that we really did know what we were doing and that we were valuable. So I think it really varied person to person. I think in general they were quite modest about their contributions. I interviewed Ann Cara Christie who broke that important code at a very early age and became the deputy director of NSA and she also worked during the Cold War on East German codes and Soviet codes and she was so modest about her contribution and she kept poo-pooing what she had done during the war when in fact that code that she broke enabled military intelligence every day to construct what they called order of battle which was they could tell where the Japanese army troops were and where they were moving. I mean it was just crucially essential for the American Navy and army to anticipate Japanese troop movements and it was that code that she wrote and she was so non-lean-in-ish about it. My perspective also from this was that they were really coming to it with a frame of service. Right, like service over self. Right, like I think there was one woman that had a quote and I'm gonna misquote it but it was something along the lines of like I could serve and my country needed me and like that's where like the Venn diagram of that is like a perfect world and I mean I just think that like it was not about them, right? Like for many of them it was just about the ability to serve like everyone else and to use their talents that they particularly had to serve everyone else and it was about everyone else which is really beautiful. I'm sorry, I'm gonna mute that. Hello, I'm Dale, I've lived here 60 years. I am an Air Force Intelligence Office. I have two questions in a larger sense than what you're approaching here. So Washington had to give up most of its bureaucratic men to the military and women had to fill those jobs. So you're talking about 10,000 plus women just in code breaking. By the way, what did they call, what was their cover title, were they mathematicians? They were secretaries, they were to tell people that they emptied waste baskets to build inkwells and sharpened pencils and because they were women, people believed that that's all that they had. Okay, let me go on with this question. So the 10,000 that you mentioned were a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of women that came to Washington. They must have been more close to the 50,000 or maybe 100,000 and they've had to fill all these men's, so you're talking about a small set of those women that came here and made up enormous cultural difference in the United States because they did remain, they didn't go home. They had good jobs, they got promoted and we relied on them for years and years. The other big thing that you missed was when they moved to Washington, we had no capability of housing that number of women and it changed the whole housing formula for Washington and DC passed the law saying all these big homes that are down in the central part could rent to three people or four people and still be called a single family home in order to include the more people living in those apartments. I do talk about all that. You do? Yeah, the impact that the women had on the city. Did you talk about the large number of women that moved in here, the huge number? Okay, thank you. Yeah, one of the most interesting parts of the book, another interesting part of the book for me was actually the lifestyle that these women lived while they were in and we were talking earlier about sort of the picking out the homes where these women spent their time, their private lives. But even then, that was sort of tinged with sort of the wars of the time and constrained by that. And actually, and again, talking about the massive amount of building that had to happen for the men as well as the women, I guess. Yeah, and I do talk about the way they changed the landscape. I live in Arlington and the three floor guard departments that you still see around Arlington were built for these women and in fact, the apartment that my central character lived in with her code-breaking friends is still there and I saw it. One day we'll have a plaque on it, presumably as a result of your book. It's very interesting. My name is Margaret McKenna. I'm Margaret, my mother, I mean, my grandmother is in the book. She graduated from Bryn Maher in 1942. And I'm gonna try not to get emotional. I skyped with her, yeah. It's a really important book. It was a very meaningful to talk to her. Yeah, her mother, Margaret Gilman, I skyped with her and she just as you said, she came down from Bryn Maher and she worked on the German codes and her recall was extraordinary and her contribution. We were reading the German U-boat codes and they had to re-break them every day or every two days and she was part of that effort and really by the war's end, that effort was being run completely by women like Margaret Gilman. I'd just like to add, I'm Holland McKenna, our son, that some of this talk about them just going back after the war and being discarded. My mother did get married and had a bunch of kids and then when my youngest sister was a teenager, she went back to work at Bryn Maher and became the director of the first Bryn Maher, director of personnel at Bryn Maher College and blazed a pathway there. So I'm sure her war experience she, they had passed ERISA and Bryn Maher was helpless and they just put out a call for an alum who would work cheap and was available. And so my mother created a whole personnel department from the ground up and did a great job. And I'm sure that her wartime experience gave her the courage to jump in again and it was great for her and it was in Bryn Maher College, now has three or four people doing her job. Thank you for that. Sure the NSD does also. I believe that's 100% true. Working the government, jumping in, doing things you never thought you'd do, it would give you courage to do just about anything, so. Hi, I'm Leah. I work for a law firm in database management and my question is sort of about legacy and this idea that these women created what would become the NSA. And I think a lot of people who maybe aren't really into tech kind of think that cybersecurity is this new fangled idea when really it's been around. And I just wondered, anybody really on the panel, your thoughts about sort of these women creating a whole something out of nothing in terms of cybersecurity? I mean, I think you're, I mean, to Courtney's point earlier about having people behind you and people ahead of you, I think that women are excellent at security, being information security engineers, and I think that, I mentioned my friend, Parisa, but I think there's lots of women who are really passionate about this topic because it's an applied issue for them. Another woman, I don't know if you know Leigh Honeywell, she's the technologist in residence for the ACLU right now, is particularly passionate about issues of security and it's both because of national and international issues but also personal issues. And I think that women will continue to be on the bleeding edge of solving really hard problems that deal with the security of their fellow people. It's just the thing that people are drawn to. Let me just say a little bit more about the fact that these women were literally sort of starting the field in some respects or at least taking it to a place that was well beyond where it was at the beginning of the war. Yeah, because this was cybersecurity and I mean, I would argue that what they were doing in terms of eavesdropping and surveillance was hacking. I mean, they were hacking into enemy communication systems but they were also encoding and enciphering our own military communications. And as far as I know, I mean, that would be the definition of cybersecurity. They were keeping our communications safe. And in some cases, I mean, with the D-Day landings, they actually, they studied our military radio traffic to such an exact degree that they were able to create fictitious radio signals that convinced the Germans that there was an Allied force, a major Allied force that was going to invade into a different part of France. So it was what they called dummy traffic that they actually created a fictitious army that was going to invade to fool the Germans into thinking that the landings would happen in a completely different part of France. So, you know, as far as I can tell this, this really was the beginning of cybersecurity and that's what they were all doing. So it was a nice hardware piece as well where the women going to Dayton, Ohio and working with the National Cat Register Company. Sorry, another interesting question. Hi, my name is Annie Kleinman. I'm an Air Force reservist and I served on the cultural support team a few years ago. So we were one of the first women to serve with special operations forces in Afghanistan. And I see a lot of just very interesting parallels between the program that you talk about and what I had participated in in terms of when there is a great need. In our case, it was the need to talk to Afghan women when male soldiers couldn't do that. But there's always a need and women are used to fill that role but it's always an ad hoc program and then at the end it kind of fizzles out and we ran into much of the same issues with our program. And my question is what is it going to take as a government, as a society, as the tech sector, but what is it going to take to stop doing that? Instead of ad hoc programs, how do we actually just utilize the talent that's available and out there instead of using them and discarding them and then finding more later when the need arises? Well, I don't have a great answer but I have one mini story of a system changing. So actually my best friend is currently assigned overseas and her last deployment was with the Army with the Special Operations Unit in Afghanistan. And that's not the story I want to tell, the story I want to quickly tell is she went to the opera last year and saw this in-vity person walking by realized it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And so my friend is like pretty shy but walked up to her, stuck out her hand and said, Justice Ginsburg, your decision requiring the Virginia Military Institute to admit women is why I was able to go to medical school and is why I can serve my country as a major in the U.S. Army. And I think it takes leadership from public servants like Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. I think it takes our all four estates working with the public to actually move whole systems forward because you're right, we can't just be let around by emergencies forever. These systems have to be changed. Yeah, I'm glad you said it more eloquently. I was gonna say a female president. Only because... Better. You said it much better. Only because I feel like we have to just stop being seen as ad hoc, right? And to me, a female president represents a thing in theory that's here for four years, right? That's not movable, like, you know, a leadership structure. I think you covered it, though. But I think that's really what it takes is like Erie said, female leadership that is visibly public and recognized that doesn't feel ad hoc. Like, women, we are just really good at problem solving. We are living in a world that was not created for us that continuously reminds us that the things are not for us and we're constantly shape shifting and figuring out how to Tetris our way through this world. So we're amazing problem solvers. And so, yeah, you wanna throw us into a situation where something's totally crazy and who's gonna figure it out? Of course the women will, you know? But we just need more permanent structures, right? Like, more people to permanently be thinking about us, more people to be intentional about what it is like to be a man, a woman, trans, queer, all of these things, right? Like, in these spaces to represent all of those people and make no one feel like they're disposable. I think we have time for one more question so it's ready at the back. Hi, I'm Mary Atu. I work at New America and this is a really fascinating book, fascinating topic. Her question actually lead into some of the things I was a little confused about. That this sector was ad hoc. That was interesting, I didn't realize that because my question is, after the war, it seems like there's this big influx to bring these women in and get their insight and get their experience and have them do all this work and then we have the mechanisms and the structures to support them because we want them to do all this work. Then they come, then the men come home, then they leave. But it's not like cybersecurity goes away, like we still need people to do the jobs and of course they're gonna have men come in and fill in those positions but I mean, there's still a space for women over time after they leave. So in your research, at least for your book, how did that play out? Did you see that, did those spaces still exist and when they did need those women, did those structures for care still exist? And maybe even moreover, how do those structures for care help them now in their elder state? I mean, home care is like, now I'm extrapolating so much but now we're talking about care, taking care of them as they've gotten older. How has that operated? Does this make sense? Yeah, those are all really good questions. Well, the women were basically ushered out of these spaces that they had pioneered and created. I mean, the childcare that was available to women during the war was withdrawn, that was ended. There was actually a propaganda campaign and films that were made, urging women to return home, have children, start families. And I mean, I interviewed a number of the women about how isolated they felt after the war. In fact, one group of women started this round robin letter writing each other, because they missed each other so much and they were so isolated at home and they didn't even have appliances because the factories had been building tanks and bombers for four years. So it was very hard housework all of a sudden as opposed to brain work. But just as you say, that the cybersecurity continued, the Cold War started, we were reading now the messages of the Cubans and the East Germans and the Soviets. And there was a core group of women who stayed on and made the NSA their career and their life and had friendships with each other, but most of them did not have children. That was the dividing line. You talked about that handwritten note. The mathematician who stayed on, she was the best friend of my central character and she continued working at the NSA until the early 50s until she started having children. And then she submitted this handwritten resignation letter said, I expected to be home with my baby. So the government lost her talents. But like Margaret Gilman, when her kids were teenagers, she went back to work and a lot of these women did. So Liza, we're pretty much at the end there. I'm gonna ask you one more question before we finish. Obviously everyone who hasn't read this book should buy it and read it. But for those people who've been inspired by this conversation, get further inspired by reading your book, what else can they do to learn more about these women and everything that you have written about in the book in terms of places to go, opportunities to go and sort of museums, et cetera. Well, you can spend a couple of months at the National Archives, as you seem inclined to do now. You can go to the Cryptologic Museum in Maryland, which is our little Bletchley Park. And I think they're hoping to revamp it and get it sort of a little bit more in a new age. It's a little musty, but it's really quite interesting and they've got a wonderful library. So I mean, I wish there were more places that people could go to find out about this, but that would be a start. And some of these universities are starting to recover this history and actually build their collections. And I have a website. You can see I have video snips of some of the women being interviewed and I find those conversations really moving. And loads are confided earlier that Booker's now just been optioned as a movie. So... So... So... So... So... So hopefully in due course, we can follow up and watch that in the movies. Can I make one Minion? Of course, sorry. Your country, I mentioned earlier, needs you. And if you're a technologist or a designer or just really scrappy, you can go to jobs.codeforamerica.org and we have a listing of every single really cool tech and government job that's open right now. They're desperate for you. Sorry. Thank you. Really quickly. Also, if you're interested, like the people in the book, in fighting Nazis, color of change is fighting Nazis. If you go to colorofchange.org slash careers, you can find out how we are fighting Nazis every single day in America. And of course, as we have a drink, please come and talk to these fantastic women and hear more about their careers and what they've been doing and digging deeper into the stories that we've been discussing. But for now, Erie Meyer, Courtney, I am Willis. Here you go. Thank you. And Liza Mundy, thank you very much. Absolutely, thank you. Thank you.