Ada Lovelace day.

Nevyn

Today is Ada Lovelace day.

It is a day to raise the awareness of and to celebrate the contribution of women and the achievements of women in technology and science.

Who was Ada Lovelace?
The first computer programmer evar!

http://findingada.com/about/

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.

Ada Lovelace, 1838

Ada had been taught mathematics from a very young age by her mother and met Babbage in 1833. Ten years later she translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine – the first computer programme. The calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Understanding that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers, Ada suggested that the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” She never had the chance to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage’s inventions or her own understanding of computing. She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852, of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.

So ladies who works in tech/science? what do you do?
If you don't do you know any women who do?

anniehoo

Cool Thaedydal i hadnt heard of her before!

My job is involves diagnostics and research in Veterinary Science and (most) of the time i love it...unless its a sloooow week like this one Veterinary has come along way with regards women over the last few decades. Where there were little or none in the early 1900s to now having a majority 65:35 and women are now involved in careers that were solely male dominated e.g College Deans, Head of Farm Animal Studies etc. Amazing transformation.

Morgase

Great thread to start. Ada Lovelace is awesome.

I work in a technical field. Working as a civil engineer at the moment which has been quite varied. I've done a lot of computer modelling as well as working on a proper roads building site (where I was the informal IT fixer as well as a site engineer!).

However the engineering is not nerdy enough for me so I'm making a career change. I'm hopefully returning to university this year to study science.

jellie

it took me a minute to remember why I knew her name!

Ive a programming/CS background, used to work as a php developer but now i do project management. i think i preferred programming, though it might be more to do with all the extra crap i have to deal with now. i get to boss around lots of men though :cool: (im the only girl)

ive always liked computers, web stuff in particular, but lately im finding it very hard to keep an interest in, dont know if its my current job.. im considering leaving computers and doing something else.. i just have no idea what

rainbow kirby

Great thread

I'm currently working on a masters in CS, with a focus in computational science so I've got a pretty strong maths background too. Should be done in September, and I'm starting to apply for software engineer roles.

panda100

Women in Science and Tech rock!

My favourite female scientist of the mo is Melissa Hines (http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?mh504) whose resarch into the neuroscience of gender is groundbreaking. She's debunking a lot of these Men as Caveman and women as homemaker type myths.

In the tech field Rainbow Kirby is my hero,anyone that can survive in the computer science labs in UCD,deserves a medal

Morgase

panda100 wrote: »

My favourite female scientist of the mo is Melissa Hines (http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?mh504) whose resarch into the neuroscience of gender is groundbreaking. She's debunking a lot of these Men as Caveman and women as homemaker type myths.

Thanks for posting about this professor; her work sounds really really interesting. I'm going to try and track down some of her papers if I can.

LenaClaire

Ada is super cool! I finished my MS in IT last year and am a data analyst/database admin.

Nevyn

I was looking at why so few women seem to achieve as much and I found an intresting article.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14743175

Culture and children remain biggest barriers to women in tech
By Chris O'Brien

Mercury News Columnist
Posted: 03/23/2010 06:11:09 PM PDT
Updated: 03/24/2010 05:50:06 AM PDT

Taking a year off from work to be a stay-at-home dad was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. You can't really understand just how much of your child's life you miss at work until you're around them full time.

I flashed back to my year off while reading two reports released this week by the Anita Borg Institute that shed more light on the reasons we see so few high-ranking women in the technology industry. Together, these reports attempt to identify the attributes that make women successful in the workplace, while also listing the steps companies can take to create more female-friendly environments.

But I fear that many of these efforts will go only so far because of the most important lesson I learned during my year at home:

In our culture, women primarily raise the kids.

This dynamic has remained stubbornly resistant to change even as we have otherwise seen sweeping revolutions in gender relations over the past 40 years. It gets obscured because we have progressively seen men take on more responsibility at home.

Don't be fooled by all these dads you see helping out. It's a good thing, but it only goes so far. At the end of the day, the primary responsibility for raising kids almost always falls on women. And with that burden come much harder choices about balancing career ambitions with family.

I'm not dismissing the critical work of organizations like the Borg Institute, a
runs programs to train and develop women leaders in high tech. It has provided vital networking and mentoring opportunities for women while also prodding tech companies to adopt more family-friendly policies.

These efforts, I believe, are effective only at the margins because of this more fundamental issue of who raises the kids.

Take my own experience. In 2006, my wife enrolled in a one-year graduate school program at Harvard University.

I took the year off and had primary responsibility for watching our kids, then 1 and 31/2. That first summer, as we explored the playgrounds of Cambridge, Mass., I couldn't help notice that it was usually just me, the moms and the female nannies day after day.

What about the growing number of stay-at-home dads like me? I remember wondering. Don't be fooled.

Consider the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. In January, the census reported that there were 158,000 stay-at-home dads in 2009, up from 140,000 in 2008. But the number of full-time dads is still less than 1 percent of all married couples. The number of stay-at-home moms is 5.1 million, down from 5.3 million in 2008.

No doubt that for some of these women staying at home is a choice they embraced. The issue is that for most women, I think, being the primary caregiver happens by default, with little real choice involved. For men like me, being a stay-at-home dad is more often the result of circumstance, such as a layoff, rather than the embrace of a progressive ideal.

The impact of this disparity is felt across all industries, but hits high tech especially hard. Women make up 49.9 percent of the work force, but a scant 24 percent in high tech. That number falls to 4 percent of women in the almost 1,800 senior positions at seven Silicon Valley companies Borg surveyed.

Even for those few women who broke through to upper management, they were still twice as likely to have a partner who works compared with their male peers. The juggling act of career and children is still performed by women in these cases.

"There is that moment, at a meeting at 5:30 p.m., where you say, 'I have to pick my kid up from day care or I'm going to get charged extra,' " said Jerri Barrett, a vice president of marketing for the Borg Institute. "Even when you've got dual-career families, women are still the ones that have that primary responsibility."

My wife and I try to split responsibilities for the kids as close to 50-50 as we can, now that I'm back at work and she's working toward her doctorate. But there's no doubt that try as we do for parity, she handles much more of the planning and arranging around the kids.

I asked Barrett whether the issue of who raises the kids is too big of a barrier for women and companies to overcome. She said she remained optimistic that plenty could be done to attain greater equality in the workplace.

I am far less hopeful. I don't doubt the good intentions of these executives, or the impact of organizations like the Borg Institute. But the overwhelming force of our culture (women are expected to raise the kids), economy (disparity in pay) and policies (California remains one of the few states that provides paid paternity and maternity leaves) place the role of child raising on women.

But achieving the equity in the office that we claim to want is going to require much more radical changes in our culture, economy and policies than we have been willing to contemplate.

Until we're ready to have that discussion, the journey from playground to executive suite will remain a slow one for women.

IvyTheTerrible

I have a degree in Genetics and a phd in Botany. I work in France on plant science.

There are lots of female phd students and postdocs where I work, but the vast majority of senior people are men. However, I think this is just a generational thing (because all the senior people are in their late forties and fifties, and at the time when they started in Science there weren't as many woman) and that will change as the people at my level advance in their careers.

As for who I admire in science, I think that would have to be Rosalind Franklin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin.

panda100

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

However, I think this is just a generational thing (because all the senior people are in their late forties and fifties, and at the time when they started in Science there weren't as many woman) and that will change as the people at my level advance in their careers.
.

Hmm I dunno about that. Women have been outnumbering men entering into medicine since the late 70's here in Ireland but there are still few women in senior positions. I think its a structural rather than generational thing.

Stheno

Thaedydal wrote: »

I was looking at why so few women seem to achieve as much and I found an intresting article.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14743175

It's not that women don't achieve as much, rather that women are quitting IT/Science/Engineering at the mid/about to break into senior level at a shocking rate.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/319212/Why_Women_Quit_Technology?taxonomyId=10&pageNumber=1

Why women quit technology careers
More than half of the women in science, engineering and IT leave the field at mid*career. Here's the reason.
By Kathleen Melymuka
June 16, 2008 12:00 PM ET Comments(316)Recommended(873)DiggTwitterShare/Email
Top Stories

Computerworld - What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at midcareer? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave -- most of them during their mid- to late 30s.

In this month's Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce and Lisa J. Servon describe the Athena Factor, their research project examining the career trajectories of such women. Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, told Kathleen Melymuka about what they learned.


HewlettYour research shows that there are more women on the lower rungs of science and technology fields than most people suspect. Women are actually excelling in science, engineering and technology, despite the fact that the schools are not very good at encouraging them. Many don't just survive the educational process but get some distance in terms of careers. The story is very encouraging in the early run. Between ages 25 and 30, 41% of the young talent with credentials in those subject matters are female. It's a more robust figure than many suspect. That's the good news.

What happens later? The bad news is that a short way down the road, 52% of this talent drops out. We are finding that attrition rates among women spike between 35 and 40 -- what we call the fight-or-flight moment. Women vote with their feet; they get out of these sectors. Not only are they leaving technology and science companies, many are leaving the field altogether.

How many women are we talking about? We reckon that maybe a million well-qualified women are dropping out in that age range. We reckon that if you could bring the attrition rate down by 25%, you would hang on to about a quarter of a million women with real experience and credentials in these fields -- fields that are suffering a labor shortage.

Based on the demographics, it seems likely that they leave to start families. Is that what happens? No. I'm not trying to pretend that work-life balance is not important, but we found four other more important factors about the culture and the nature of the career path. We call them "antigens," because they repel women.

The Good News
Several of the companies that were involved in the Athena Factor project are experimenting with programs to change the pattern of the female exodus from IT. Here are some of the more promising initiatives:

Cisco Systems Inc. launched the Executive Talent Insertion Program for lateral recruiting of senior women and multicultural talent. As of mid-May, 15 new female vice presidents had been recruited, including Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior. Intel Corp. has created a women's engineering forum. The goal is to showcase their research, relieve isolation, foster solidarity and mentoring, and support creativity. Johnson & Johnson has a program called Crossing the Finish Line, which provides high-potential women with career development resources and, more important, senior sponsors who are charged with looking out for them. General Electric Co. is initiating a program called Restart in its Bangalore global research center. The goal is to reach out to women who have left to rear young children and to facilitate their return when their children reach school age.Tell me about those. The most important antigen is the machismo that continues to permeate these work environments. We found that 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment. That's a really high figure.

1. They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don't have what it takes -- who see them as genetically inferior. It's hard to take as a steady stream. It's predatory and demeaning. It's distressing to find this kind of data in 2008.

Is this data global or national? We studied private-sector employers in the U.S., and then we looked at three large, global companies with women working across the world. We also did a bunch of focus groups in Australia, Shanghai and Moscow. The data were pretty consistent. Actually, India is a little better than the U.S. But there's not much variation across geography.

What are the other antigens? 2 The second one was the sheer isolation many women cope with daily. She might be the only woman on the team or the only senior woman at a facility. Isolation in and of itself is debilitating, with no mentors, no role models, no buddies. And if you're surrounded by men who don't appreciate you, that can be corrosive.

3 The third thing is that, for many women, the career path is all very mysterious because they don't have mentors or sponsors or folks looking out for them. Some of them can't begin to map what the career ladder looks like. This mystery adds to the sense of stalling, of being stuck and not knowing where to go or how to get there.

4 The fourth thing is the risky behavior patterns that are rewarded. We found, particularly in the tech firms, that the way to get promoted is to do a diving catch: Some system is crashing in Bulgaria, so you get on the plane in the middle of the night and dash off and spend the weekend wrestling with routers and come back a hero, and there's a ticker-tape parade, and you get two promotions -- you can actually leap a whole grade if you rescue a big enough system.

But what does that have to do with gender? Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, "It's not your fault; try again next time." A women fails and is never seen again. A woman cannot survive a failure. So they become risk-averse in a culture where risk is rewarded. Women would rather build a system that didn't crash in the first place, but men enjoy that diving catch and have a system of support that allows them to go out on a limb.

5 So finally we come to work-life? The fifth one is a combination of extremely long hours -- in tech, the average workweek is 71 hours -- emergencies and a very family-unfriendly atmosphere. And at 35 to 40, women are often having the second kid, a time when even the most organized woman finds herself caught short by the demands of her life.

Is this whole scenario worse in technology and science than in other types of jobs? We did work in other fields in our '95 study. It was a slightly different pool, but we found that women across industries will often take a brief break -- like for two years. But our sense is that this is distinctly worse. In many fields, almost 100% of women will try to get back into the industry [later]. Here, only 60% say they would be willing to give it another try if conditions were right.

So 40% leave the industry entirely. Right. They've been too badly burned. It's particularly serious for the women who have invested decades getting a Ph.D. in a much-loved field -- and for society.

What practical steps should CIOs take to keep women from leaving? It's the most standard solution in the world: You've just got to get mentors to pair with the young talent.

It is a total savior, because it prevents the isolation setting in, allows them to start mapping their career paths and insulates them from some of the worst repercussions of the macho behaviors. If you have only a few senior women, use some of your men.

And use technology. Cisco is using telepresence technology to do virtual mentoring sessions across the world -- linking young women in India with senior women in San Jose.

I'd agree 100% with this article, I've worked in IT for 13 years now, and have experienced all of the above, in my current role which is in IT Operations, there are no other women on the teams I manage, and there are twenty people spread across three teams. Over the past few years as positions have become vacant and we need replacements, we simply don't get in c.v's from women, we have had two women working in different roles but the overwhelming majority of candidates/staff are male. Things do tend to be slightly less skewed in terms of development and project management fields, but are still largely male. A local example of this would be Girl Geek dinners, where the majority of attendees are in the development/project management field, but few women there are in any sort of operational related role, possibly because as one recruitment specialist there told me once "they just don't have the time"

In terms of the points I've bolded up above, I've experience of point one in several roles, a large concentration of blokes in a job does lead to blokeish behaviour (to put it politely) and leads to point two, that women can feel isolated. I contracted for severall years and despite two years plus in my current job, am on job number six in six years During that time, I ended up working in Business Analysis in a bank, and as it was outside the IT department it was completely different to any other environment I had worked in, and had a large proportion of women in the team. In my current job and the one before that, rather than being surprised that I was the only woman in a meeting, I was/am surprised if there were other women in the meeting

Point three is also very valid, we have organisations here like WITS (Women in Technology and Science) and Girl Geeks, and whilst WITS have a programme for encouraging female students into Science/Technology, there are no real mentor programmes for women in IT, either within companies or outside of the companies themselves. Networking opportunities for women are rare, I regularly get invites to industry events, but the proportion of women is terribly low there. I was at one women in IT event a couple of years ago, and it was a fantastic opportunity to meet other women working in IT, and discuss issues/events/trends with other women. At one point in my career I did have a fantastic male mentor for several years, a relationship that developed as a result of us working together in one company, but I've currently no mentor either within or outside my company.

Point 4 in my opinion is pretty key. I've possibly made more progress throughout my career by not being risk averse in terms of both decisions I make in my work, and in terms of roles I have undertaken. There is inevitably the "Oh ****" moment, closely followed by the "Oh well, how much worse/how much more broken can we make it" moment, but taking risky decisions tends to pay off in my opinion.

And finally to point five The hours, OMG the hours. Not so bad in my current role, which is primarily an 8am - 6pm operation, but regularly involves calls/texts/mails in the evening and weekends if there are problems, and texts from the boss the odd Sunday at 11pm if he thinks there's an issue and wants an update. In previous roles, and particularly my last role as a consultant, the hours were literally insane. At their worst, I once started work at 6am in a hotel room, had a breakfast conference call, visited a client, got on the train back to Dublin, spent that time on a conference call, got back to the office at six pm, worked on a tender until 10pm and was back in the office the next morning at nine. It can really be a hugely time consuming job.

Three other points I would consider as a result of my own experience:

1. I found that as I moved up the ladder my partner of 11 years (before the relationship ended) became increasingly resentful of the time my job took up, particularly the need for me to have my phone/blackberry with me all of the time, and the unscheduled interruptions that would happen. I'm not sure but I would suspect, that the impact on personal relationships that a work/life balance such as that that can be experienced in IT may be worse on women's relationships than mens, but that's supposition. My current partner never knew me when I went on holiday and left the work phone at home, or had emergencies at the weekend, so he's used/fine with it.


2. Contracting: A fairly large proportion of IT roles these days are contract roles, and it's believed that trend will increase. Goes back to the point above about risky decisions and how averse or not women are to taking them. Contracting is a fundamentally insecure and risky way to work, especially if you take on short term contracts for a period of months at a time.

3. Children and the culture of women being the primary carers: I am on a three year contract at the moment (yes another contract ) but one which is potentially going to lead to a permanent role. If I wanted/needed it, I would get maternity leave, but were I to take the full of that leave in that situation then I'd spend 25% of the entire duration of my contract on maternity leave. Given the role I work in, and the changes in the IT dept I work in both organisationally and technologically, that would be an enormous gap to bridge. And it's in line with Thaed's link above. I don't know a single senior female IT professional with children, but I know lots of senior male IT professionals with them Even if you break it down that for every five guys in IT there is one woman, those with children who are male would easily outrank those who are female with children by 10:1 in my experience.

Sorry for the length of the post, hopefully someone finds it informative

Das Kitty

I'm a Quality Engineer but my degree is in IT and I have a postgrad in systems analysis. I actually hate working in Quality as it's thrust gets in the way of innovation which is more my bag, but thems the breaks. I've been given more techy stuff to do in the past year, thankfully my boss is good at recognising people's strengths.

Loved programming in university, in industry it's rare that you get to be creative in that area though so I wanted to work on internet stuff as it's more modular if you will, managed to get about a year working int that but alas it didn't last.

Ada Lovelace is one of my role models and Ada was on the list of baby names I had when I was first pregnant.

(Actually I love anyone who's passionate about Science and Discovery regardless of their gender, I've got the love for Professor Brian Cox at the mo!)

The Big Red Button

Thaedydal wrote: »

So ladies who works in tech/science? what do you do?
If you don't do you know any women who do?

I'm not at all techie or sciencey ... but my sister is, and she's so super-clever, that if you google her name, all these research publications that she did come up - even before her facebook and stuff! Seriously, she is gooood!

(Also I think she may stalk me on this! Hi there you! )

g'em

For any fellow science/ engineering/ technology ladies here there's a great initiative in Trinity called WiSER - the Centre for Women in Science & Engineering Research, that you might want to check out

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Piste

I'm studying medicine and we've a good few female lecturers (just under half I'd say) who are involved in cutting-edge research. Two women have offered to supervise me doing research in the Summer and there are plenty of women involved in another research programme I've applied for.

I'm dreading the day I have to make decisions about having kids, I'd say it'll be hard juggling a family with work. My career would probably come first, which just wouldn't be fair on the kids, but at the same time it could be years before I get to a stage where I have a good salary plus free time, by which stage I'll be old and barren