Celebrating Women in Tech
By Janelle Cynthia & Cassey Deveau. Illustrations by Becca Rowland.
Happy International Women’s Day! We’ve been celebrating all week with one-of-a-kind illustrations of inspiring women from VERB’s very own bad-ass lady Becca Rowland. Check out her work on Instagram (link above), or online at www.girlinwhiteglasses.com.
Ada Lovelace
Did you know the first computer programmer was a woman? Meet Ada Lovelace—she wrote the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine. She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere number-crunching and the computer language “Ada”, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after her.
Hedy Lamarr
Austrian-born American actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr helped develop a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during WWII. She used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to avoid jamming by the Axis powers. The principles of her work have been incorporated into today’s Bluetooth and Wifi technology. In 1997, Lamarr was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the “Oscars of inventing”.
Lisa Gelobter
Lisa Gelobter’s resume is impressive. She served as Vice President of the Black Entertainment Television network, was Chief Digital Service Officer for the United States Department of Education during the Presidency of Barack Obama, and she founded tEQuitable, a platform that addresses issues of bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace. Oh, she’s also the computer science guru responsible for developing the animation used to produce GIF images.
Dr. Grace Murray Hopper
Dr. Hopper was an American computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and her work led to the development of COBOL, an early programming language still in use today. Impressed? You should be—Grace Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities worldwide during her lifetime.
Nellie McClung*
Nellie McClung was a Canadian suffragette, politician, author, and social activist. She and four other women, later dubbed “The Famous Five”, launched the Persons Case, contending that women could be “qualified persons” eligible to sit in Senate. ” The ruling came back; women were not included in the word “person”. However, the case was eventually won upon appeal, clearing the way for women to enter politics in Canada.
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*Including Nellie McClung in a list of “women in tech” might seem strange, but before her, women in Canada weren’t legally considered “people”, so we think she’s pretty darn important.
