Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I’m determined to write something, even if short, to celebrate.
There is definitely part of me that balks at singling out women based on their gender, but the fact remains: there is a distressing paucity of females working in tech today. If holding up examples of women in tech whom we admire can help right the imbalance (and it makes good intuitive sense to me that it would, surveys aside), then I am more than happy to participate, and look forward to the time when this exercise is no longer necessary.
Firstly, I’d like to collectively thank the women programmers with whom I worked at IST-CNS, UC Berkeley from 1997-2002, especially Terri Kouba (my long-time supervisor) and Urszula Frydman (my manager). Looking back, I realize what an unusual situation I ended up in there. Not only did I work in an IT group comprised mainly of women, but I also had a female supervisor and manager for my entire tenure at the job.
I learned a great deal from Terri by observing her at work on database and systems design, both from a purely technical point-of-view and in terms of consulting with users. She is both extremely smart (sometimes delightfully geeky) and also good at communicating with all kinds of people. Over the years I worked with her, I saw her both learn whole new technologies (e.g., VoIP) and whole new ways of working (e.g., delegating work instead of doing it all herself). She also always has all kinds of web dev projects going on outside of work, and I admire her entrepreneurial spirit.
I didn’t work with Urszula for all that long (under a year?), but doing so left an impression. She is fiercely smart and no-nonsense, a kind and fair manager, who sees the issues at hand with a laser-sharp vision and is a great advocate for her team. In terms of education, she was one of the first females to go to MIT, where she studied computer science – a fact that always awed me. Now retired, she is continuing the activist work that I remember her doing already when she was my manager. I really admire her for her balance of smarts and social involvement.
These aren’t examples of famous or internationally influential women by any means (sorry Terri and Urszula!), but they have been good real-life models of women in tech for me.
Now that I’m on a new career path in academia, there’s a different sort of technically-minded woman that I look up to, but hey, I think I’ll save that for next year.
Check out other Ada Lovelace posts in list form here or plotted on a world map by author location here (cool idea!).
