March is Women’s History Month (WHM), first observed nationally in the U.S. in 1987. The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, in 1848, is often cited as the beginning of the women’s movement, but despite the advances in women’s status since then, many women’s contributions to the technology industry have received little attention. Technology often leads the way to enabling workers to work more productively and efficiently. Celebrating women in technology raises awareness of their contributions today and acknowledges their contributions women in history.
Celebrate Women’s History
Women in technology to recognize this month include mathematician Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed general purpose computer. Grace Hopper‘s devised the concept of computer languages that were not tied to a specific hardware led to the development of languages such as COBOL. “The ENIAC girls” — Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman — are regarded as the first computer programmers, working with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, an early computer that produced ballistic tables and was later used to calculate thermonuclear reactions.
Women Advance ADA With Technology
Women like Judith Heumann, an American activist for disability rights, also influenced technology. Her work has inspired efforts to use technology to make the world more accessible for people with disabilities. We also acknowledge, that Katherine Johnson, an African American space scientist and mathematician, is a leading figure in American space history and has made enormous contributions to America’s aeronautics and space programs by her incorporation of computing tools. She played a huge role in calculating key trajectories in the Space Race — calculating the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon.
Trailblazers
Other technology trailblazers include women such as Annie Easley, a NASA scientist who advocated for for gender and racial diversity in STEM. She is also known for her vital work on the NASA Centaur rocket project, laying the foundations for future space shuttle launches. Information science pioneer Karen Sparck-Jones received the BCS Charter Institute for IT’s Lovelace Medal in 2007. She is known for developing Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), a weighting factor that evaluates how important a word is to a document used in web search engines and used to rank a document’s relevance to a search query. Elizabeth Feinler, who worked on ARPANET, the original backbone of the Internet, and was on the team that developed the domain naming scheme of .com, .edu, .gov, .net, and many more. Nicknamed “Mother of the Internet”, Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), an algorithm, which significantly influenced the self-organizing and data movement of networks and put the basic rules of internet traffic in place.
All of these women above are amazing and their contributions invaluable. Join me in celebrating the women in technology and all those who support and uplift them. Happy WHM!
Dr. Ursula White-Oliver has worked for the government for over 29 years within IT, which includes data integrations, technical lead, application development, system support/development, project management, systems analysis, ESJ, management, employee/ leadership development, as well as creating, improving and assessing needs for practices, processes, procedures, and methodologies. Currently, she works in Data Services collaborating with other organizational leadership on AI governance, planning, and operationalization. Recently, she completed consulting to improve the onboarding and organizational socialization for government IT employees in partnership with her doctoral Professional Administrative Study. She volunteers on several nonprofit boards and am an active member of social, faith-based, professional, and community organizations. More importantly, she volunteers at her workplace which includes such efforts as volunteering on boards, committees, and improvement projects, and support women through activities like leading the celebration of Women’s History Month.
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