Thank the Women

Do You Use the Internet? Thank These 10 Women!

If you are using the Internet right now, you have a woman to thank. We've all heard of the men who created the Internet as we know it, Al Gore, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and so on, but women made huge contributions to the field too. Let's give them a huge thank you. 

1) Elizabeth Feinler
Before GoDaddy became the best-known (and most controversial) Internet naming registrar, there was Elizabeth Feinler. Feinler developed the first directory of Internet names and addresses. She also co-invented the domain-naming scheme we still use today to identify organizations as .com, .edu, .gov, or .org.

http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/elizabeth-feinler

2) Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder
The Domain Name System is a helpful technology that lets Internet users enter names instead of addresses, but there are security problems with the system. Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder is working on a fix. Löwinder works on DNS security extensions that help Internet users be sure they are visiting the website they think they are visiting. 

http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/anne-marie-eklund-löwinder

3) Latanya Sweeney
Speaking of security, you probably have concerns about privacy on the Internet as well as security. Well, so does Dr. Latanya Sweeney, and she is working on your behalf to improve Internet privacy as the Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Sweeney has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and is on leave from her work as Director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard while she works at the FTC. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Arvette_Sweeney

4) Radia Perlman
Without the work of Dr. Radia Perlman, you could not be reading this Internet blog post. Dr. Perlman develops routing and switching protocols that form the underpinning of the Internet. Ask any network engineer if they have heard of Perlman, and the answer will be a resounding yes. Many engineers learned networking from her influential book, "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols." 

http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/radia-perlman

5) Sally Floyd
Have you ever called tech support to complain that the network is slow? You have a woman to thank for the technology that can fix the problem! Dr. Sally Floyd invented Random Early Detection and other networking technology that can automatically recognize when a network link is congested and redirect traffic around the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Floyd

6) Barbara van Schewick
Speaking of network congestion, should Internet service providers be allowed to charge extra for handling huge video streams from companies such as Netflix? Net neutrality experts, including Dr. Barbara van Schewick, might say no, arguing that innovation arises from a more hands-off approach where all network traffic is handled equally. Van Schewick knows both the law and the engineering behind net neutrality. She is a Professor of Law at Stanford, holds a PhD in Computer Science, and is the author of the book "Internet Architecture and Innovation."

https://www.law.stanford.edu/profile/barbara-van-schewick

7) Kim Polese
One of the most common programming languages in use on the Internet is Java. Kim Polese was responsible for bringing Java to market in 1995 when she was the Java product manager for Sun Microsystems. Java revolutionized the way that software is written for the Internet, allowing programmers to write one app that can run on multiple platforms. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Polese

8) Sandy Lerner
Cisco Systems manufactures the equipment that controls much of the Internet. Founded in a garage in 1984 by Sandy Lerner and her then-husband, Len Bosack, Cisco grew to become a multinational corporation. Lerner went on to found the cosmetics company Urban Decay and to write a sequel to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." She is a Renaissance woman, and without her, the Internet may never have grown to what it is today. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Lerner 

9) Diane Greene
Another huge networking company was also founded by a husband and wife team, with the help of others. VMware was founded by Diane Greene, her husband Mendel Rosenblum, and colleagues. You've heard of "the cloud," right? Well, you have Diane and her colleagues to thank for the cloud and other virtualization services that run the Internet as we know it. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Greene

10) Joyce Reynolds
Finally, let's end with an early Internet pioneer. Joyce Reynolds was one of the most prolific authors and editors of the earliest Request for Comments (RFCs). RFCs specify the protocols that run the Internet. RFCs are still being written today. 

http://icannwiki.com/Joyce_Reynolds 

Summary
In summary, if you read a history of the Internet and no women are mentioned, don't believe it! Yes, many more men than women worked on the protocols and infrastructure, but it wasn't only men. Far from it! Then and now, women work to enhance, secure, and document the Internet, and they deserve our thanks. 

Frequency-Hopping Inventor, Hedy Lamarr

In honor of International Ada Lovelace Day, I am writing about the actress and inventor, Hedy Lamarr. I like this photo of Lamarr because I like to think she's reacting to the Internet idiots who post comments claiming women don't belong in technology. 

"Really," she would say, in her smoky, low voice. "You should have been there when I invented frequency-hopping, a technology still used today on wireless networks. I invented it to prevent Hitler from jamming the Allies' radio-controlled torpedoes. How about you, dude? What have you invented lately?" 

Lamarr was a Hollywood film star in the 1930s and 1940s. She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1913 in Vienna, Austria. She married young and was unhappy in her marriage. She wrote in her autobiography that her husband, Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer, was extremely controlling. 

In the 1930s, Lamarr accompanied her husband to dinners and meetings with arms developers and learned about control systems for aircraft. The marriage broke up in 1937, and Lamarr, an anti-Nazi of Jewish descent, escaped to Paris, then London, then Hollywood. She took her knowledge of control systems with her.  

Lamarr met her co-inventor, the avant-garde musician George Antheil, at a party in 1940. At the party, Lamarr proposed the idea of frequency-hopping as a method for radio remote control of torpedoes. Frequency-hopping could reduce the danger of detection or jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes. 

Although the idea of radio control for torpedoes was not new, the concept of frequency-hopping was. Broadcasting over a seemingly random series of radio frequencies, switching from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals, prevents radio signals from being jammed. The receiver can be synchronized to the transmitter to allow the two to jump frequencies together. If both the sender and receiver hop in sync, they understand the message, but anyone trying to eavesdrop hears random noise. 

Lamarr and Antheil obtained a patent for their "Secret Communication System" on August 11, 1942. The US Navy was unfortunately not interested in this early version of frequency-hopping. However, the idea was finally implemented in 1962, when it was used by US military ships during a blockade of Cuba, after the patent had expired. 

Subsequent patents in frequency-changing have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind anti-jamming devices used today. In modified form, frequency-hopping is used to send secure wireless transmissions in many modern communications systems.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation honored Lamarr with a belated award in 1997. Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida on 19 January 2000. She was 85. 

Advertising Matters

Today at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the CEO of GoDaddy, Blake Irving, is on a panel for male allies. This worries me.  

From 1984 to 2013, the number of women graduating with a degree in CS sank from 37% of the graduates to 14%. GoDaddy may be singlehandedly responsible for a large portion of that decline. 

For years GoDaddy advertised their domain name services with disgusting ads that showed nerdy IT guys and female sex objects. The message was clear: IT is for men. Displaying sexy body parts is for women. The 2013 GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial was the most tasteless ad ever made, not to mention one of the most sexist. 

I like to compare this to the ads that I grew up with. The print ads from IBM and other mainframe companies showed glamorous women, solving interesting problems using computers! I wanted to be that woman! Well, maybe not the woman in the following photo, because she's a blonde, but the ad is intriguing because it shows a woman working on an IBM System/360. 

Check out this brunette, in an ad for the Control Data CDC Cyber 70 Series mainframe. I could be her! I'm a brunette. She's not in the ad to sell to men. She's there to convince women to join the rank of programmers, especially if they use CDC computers. (We had an Amdahl mainframe at the University of Michigan where I went to grad school, but close enough!) 

Like Control Data and Amdahl, International Computers Limited (ICL) created machines to compete with IBM. As was typical for the times, ICL showed women working on their computers in their ads.

Check out this picture of a woman working at NSA on an IBM 360. I want to be her! :-) 

I got this photo from a 1970s timeline at NSA. I suspect the photo might be an ad, not because the woman in the picture couldn't do the work, but because the screen doesn't appear to be on? :-)

I also like this photo from NSA showing a Cray supercomputer. Note that the women are discreetly dressed, working on the computers, and not kissing the nerdy IT guy (as the GoDaddy 2013 Super Bowl ad showed.)

The GoDaddy 2013 Super Bowl ad was so disgusting that customers fled from the brand, both women and men. The company managed to insult both women and men. 

After the 2013 ad, I moved all my domain names but one from GoDaddy. Ironically, TheMakersOfThings.com is the one record I still have at GoDaddy but that was because I was planning to give up on the blog. Why write about women in tech if the industry is dominated by pigs like GoDaddy? Why encourage young women to go into a field where the women don't solve technical problems? They just show off their boobs. Why go into a field where your male coworkers will be pimply, out-of-shape geeks? 

Well, hopefully things will get better. Anita Borg Institute and the Grace Hopper conference will hopefully set GoDaddy on a track that supports the equitable treatment of women in tech. The male allies panel is actually a good idea, but the CEO of GoDaddy better start by deeply apologizing to women in tech.

In the meantime, I'm glad to see positive articles like this one from Glamour magazine about women in tech. Maybe soon we will start to see ads that show gorgeous women working on computers again. 

Allied Forces

Innovating Women

In September, 2014, a new book on women in STEM called Innovating Women shipped, after many months in development. I helped work on this book. The main authors are Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya, an Indian-American man and an African-American woman. 

A few women have asked me why a man should write a book about women in technology. The last thing we need is yet another man telling us what we already know!

I don't think it matters that one of the authors is male, as long as he's not acting patriarchal. (I don't think it matters that the other author is not really in STEM either, since she's a great writer). Both of these authors are allies. 

What does it mean to be an ally? Many people have written about this, so Google it for better explanations than mine. But I think it means being a person with privilege who is operating in solidarity with someone who has been denied the privileges.  

It's a tricky business being an ally, though! I know I've made numerous mistakes as I've tried to ally with friends and relatives fighting for legal same-sex marriage and African Americans fighting for justice in Ferguson, Missouri, and throughout the United States. 

Sometimes allies act like they deserve a big reward for being an ally, or like they are the knight in shining armor coming to the rescue of the poor underprivileged people. That's not helpful. 

The easiest mistake to make when being an ally, however, is to turn the conversation to yourself. For example, those of us who work on the "women in tech" issue hear things like:

• I've worked in tech for many years, but I've never seen any sexism. 
• I hired a lot of women when I was a manager. 
• I had a woman boss once and I didn't have a problem with it. 

We hear comments like this from both men and women. The speaker is turning the conversation to be about him or herself. These individual experiences, with a sample size of one, do not add anything to the conversation.

Now did our male author of Innovating Women try to turn the conversation to be about himself? Is he expecting some sort of huge accolade for helping the ladies? Maybe, a little bit? Is he an ally nonetheless? YES. Here's why I think he's an ally:

• He spearheaded the Innovating Women project, then got out of the way.
• With the help of female colleagues, he opened a forum for women to discuss the challenges that we face as women in tech. Hundreds of women joined the discussion. Our content became the book. 
• He did not participate in the discussions. Only women told their stories. He just listened, which is an important skill for allies. 
• The book development project was crowd-funded at Indiegogo, giving lots of people an opportunity to get involved. 
• Vivek and colleagues recruited numerous female role models to tell their stories, including Google[X] VP Megan Smith (possible next White House CTO!), venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, and Anousheh Ansari, a serial entrepreneur and space explorer.
• Vivek took on the old boys' club. When he first started writing about women in tech, men were extremely critical of him. Vivek didn't stand down. He argued with them. So, he's not just talking to women about what we need, as some of his female critics have assumed. He's talking to his own people too (men). That makes him a good ally.
• Vivek will not directly benefit from the book. The profits will go to a fund at Singularity University to educate women about advancing technologies and to fund their startups. As far as Vivek "building his career, reputation, fame on women in tech issues," as a Twitterer said, that's bunk. He is already famous.  

The decision that someone is an ally resides with the person being allied, not the ally, according to Jamie Utt in this terrific article, "So You Call Yourself an Ally: 10 Things All 'Allies' Need to Know." 

So Vivek doesn't get to crown himself Mr. Big Super Ally, but I get to declare that I think he is an ally. Other women can make up their own minds, but I consider both Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya allies of women in tech. 

By publishing a book that showcases the words and work of successful women in tech, the authors are helping women learn strategies to overcome artificial barriers. And by focusing on innovation, the book will help organizations learn how to benefit from the creativity and intelligence of all people, not just men.

Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology

Prince Charming Isn't Real Either

I like Arthur Chu's blog that discusses the dangers of nerdy guys believing the myth that as long as they work hard, they'll get the girl. (Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds) My only criticism is the ending. He says these men need to grow up. While that may be true, it's not enough. Perhaps Chu can write Part 2? In the meantime, I have a few comments on the topic... 

I love nerdy guys. My husband's perfect GPA from MIT was a big part of his sex appeal! :-) I hate to see nerds suffer. Chu's article made me sad for the nerdy guys. Who is giving them advice when their hearts get broken? Where can they go to cry? The men's rights organizations are too focused on rights, and no, men don't have a right to a girl. But they do have a right to pursue happiness. Perhaps they could learn from women? 

When women are heart-broken, we call our friends and talk for hours. We get pedicures and read Vogue. We get massages. We re-read every Bridget Jones book, and call our moms and our grandmas. We have access to about a million self-help books that teach us how to be self-sufficient, to rebound from a broken heart, to take care of ourselves. What do men have?

We women grew up thinking that Prince Charming would arrive. We've had to learn the hard way that he isn't coming, but at least we have support. We have girlfriends, guy friends, sisters, moms, aunts, grandmas, all willing to talk about our feelings and to help us return to thinking rationally about our love lives. And if that fails, there's always Ben and Jerry, and old Hugh Grant movies.   

In my case, Prince Charming didn't arrive, but love did, in the shape of a tall, gangly, brilliant software engineer. He wasn't Prince Charming, but he was somewhat charming, chivalrous, and romantic.

He was also persistent. He had to be persistent "to get the girl." But his persistence wasn't pressure to have sex (I had to get that going! :-). His persistence was taking me out on dates, bringing me fresh strawberries as a surprise one morning in February (we lived in California where strawberries ripen early), teaching me modular arithmetic, and going to movies together. 

We knew we were meant for each other when we both agreed that Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was way better than that silly Terms of Endearment! 

I think Back to the Future sealed the deal. We both loved that movie and still do. So we got married! Our plans for our 28th anniversary Sunday are dinner at a fancy restaurant, followed by watching Silicon Valley, followed by watching Cosmos, followed by... (censored). :-) 

Perhaps any nerdy guys who read this can learn from my hubby. Or maybe they could take my advice to watch Hugh Grant movies!?! OK, I admit, a lot of guys can't stand Hugh Grant... 

So, guys, start helping yourselves. You understand what will help better than we women do, whether it's support groups, blogging, movies, talking more to each other, etc. But be sure to talk to us women too. We're good with this touchy-feely stuff, and a lot of us would be glad to help.