Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. To learn more, go here.
To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day I signed up to write a post about a woman I find inspiring in technology. I signed up a couple of months ago, thinking that the right person would turn up under my nose… but sadly I’ve been drawing a blank. The two women who came to mind were Carly Fiorina (former HP CEO) and Ada Biron (the woman who coined the phrase “debug” and thus “computer bug” in the software industry). Too obvious. I woke this morning to see that people were already blogging and knew I had to come to a fast decision.
I thought about how I started in technology, way back in Vancouver, studying “Multimedia” at the Vancouver Film School in 1998. The class was about 4 women and 22 men as I recall. That ratio has followed me since then, except when I ran my own company. And then I recalled the one place that I had the opportunity to meet other women in technology – a fairly new association called Wired Woman. It was started by Emma Payne. It opened a whole world of other chicks like me, trying to hold credibility in technology without having to resort to behaving like the boys. I was a member for several years. The group was a great positive reinforcement, a mirror to hold up and help me feel good about what I was trying to do.
Emma (along with several other women whose names escape me right now) really pioneered the group. Her vision for the society was so large that she put a strong infrastructure into place so that when she moved on, the group was already self supporting. I heard Emma talk at meetings, but only talked to her directly a few times. Emma, you are a woman whose actions have had a significant impact on others around you. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you for creating a forum for me and so many other women to come together. Happy Ada Lovelace Day.
P.S. Who was Ada?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.