8 Female Firebrands in IT and Tech

In recent years, a lot has been written about female IT and tech pioneers. Many tech fans now know about Ada Lovelace, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, or Hedy Lamarr, and rightly so, as their innovations helped shape the world.

This International Women's Day, March 8th, let's look at 8 female firebrands you may not have heard about.

8. Carol Shaw

Retro game fans will remember Atari! 

Carol Shaw is one of the first female game designers and programmers, most famous for her 1982 game River Raid, a vertically scrolling shooter on Atari 2600.

Her unpublished 1978 game, Polo, is the first documented game designed and programmed by a woman.

She also worked on 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1979), Video Checkers (1980), and many other games you may know.

7. Melanie Perkins

If you work with graphics, you surely know about Canva, the online template app that helps you create anything in minutes.

Canva was created in 2013 by Australian entrepreneur, Melanie Perkins together with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. This was not Perkins' first business venture; in 2007, she dropped out of college to launch Fusion Books, an online yearbook publisher.

Perkins made the design process easier and more accessible for people from all walks of life—an undeniable contribution to modern business.

6. Mary Allen Wilkes

Mary Allen Wilkes studied Philosophy and Theology at Wellesley College. She dreamt of pursuing Law, but, discouraged by the challenges women faced at the time, turned her attention to programming.

She was one of the first programmers. She helped develop the Laboratory INstrument Computer, also known as LINC, which is now considered the first personal computer. While working on LINC, she actually took it home with her, making her the first person to have a PC in her home and the first one to work from home in the way we do today.

After achieving this, Wilkes pursued her passion and became an attorney.

5. Susan Kare

Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) can really make or break a device.

Susan Kare was part of Apple's original Macintosh team. She built on the GUI inspired by the work of another firebrand, Adele Goldberg, at the Palo Alto Research Center, formerly known as Xerox PARC.

She created a sleek, legible font for Steve Jobs and developed graphics for Apple. She is actually the one who persuaded them that icons should be recognisable symbols related to real-world objects. 

The Apple clock, the finger pointer, the trash can, and—perhaps most notably, the command key (⌘)—are all her work.

User experience would not be the same without Susan Kare!

4. Donna Dubinsky

Remember PalmPilot?

Launched nearly 27 years ago, on March 10, 1997, PalmPilots were the second generation of Palm Personal Digital Assistants, also known as PDAs.

An alumna of Harvard Business School and former Apple employee, businesswoman Donna Dubinsky founded Palm, the first PDA company in the world. After leaving Palm, she founded Handspring, whose signature product, the Visor PDA, boasted increased storage and more functions.

These devices paved the way for the Blackberry and, in 2007, the iPhone! 

3. Sister Mary Keller

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller was the first woman to attain a PhD in Computer Science in the United States.

At age 26, she became a nun at the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and went on to pursue her passion for science.

She completed a BA in Mathematics in 1943, then an MS in Mathematics and Physics ten years later. Together with John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, she founded the Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code programming language, also known as BASIC. IBM included it in their first computer for home use. Two years later, in 1965, she was awarded her PhD.

Sister Mary championed women in STEM—she even encouraged her students who were working mothers to bring their children with them so they would not miss out on lessons.

2. Megan Smith

A former Google VP, Megan Smith served as the United States Chief Technology Officer (CTO) under President Obama.

Aside from bringing technical innovation to the US Government—which, reportedly, still used floppy disks in 2015—Megan Smith advised President Obama on his decision to maintain net neutrality and endorse "a free and open internet." At the time, this was his most direct effort to influence the Internet debate.

Among other notable achievements, Megan Smith also created an online resource to honor and tell the stories of women in science and technology, Women in STEM, which may be why we're seeing more blogs like this one today!
 

1. The Women of ENIAC

According to Smithsonian Magazine, in the beginning, "computer programming used to be women's work."

"As late as the 1960s, many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled 'The Computer Girls,' the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers."

In the first half of the 20th century, female mathematicians at Harvard laid the foundations for the department that would later become NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Six of them programmed the world's first electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, which was completed in 1946, and became the world's first coders. When people saw the photo above, they assumed the ladies were models, but these are actually some of the programmers themselves!

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