Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology instigated by Suw Charman-Anderson at findingada.com. 1980 bloggers pledged to write about a woman in technology that inspire them, and so far over 1080 posts have been added to The Ada Lovelace Day Collection.
I didn’t quite get round to writing something myself, but I’m looking forward to reading what these bloggers, who come from across the world, have written. The list of posts has an extraordinary range of women, from Ada Lovelace herself*, to well-known women like Marie Curie and the actress Hedy Lamarr (who co-invented an early form of spread spectrum communications technology, a key to modern wireless communication).
Many of the posts are about contemporary women, including innovators, computer programmers and web developers, and some wrote about more than one woman, emphasising the collaborative nature of their work. But many bloggers have chosen to write about women close to them – not simply colleagues, but friends and family members: mothers, sisters and daughters who have helped and inspired them to use technology.
With the purpose of Ada Lovelace Day being to highlight role models for women in technology, it’s great to see that a growing number of women (and some men) have female role models in their own lives.
*The daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace is considered the world’s first computer programmer, as she wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s (never completed) Analytical Engine. She also predicted that computers would be able to more than crunch numbers, suggesting that the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” I particularly like this post about Ada Lovelace, by cartoonist Sydney Padua.
