
Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018) - mumblemumble
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/important-women-in-cs/
======
risho
Kinda sad to not see Joanna Rutkowska in the article or in the comments
anywhere. She's contributed a lot to computer science generally, but the
biggest thing is probably her work on qubes os, which is an awesome project.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Rutkowska](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Rutkowska)

~~~
wyldfire
> ... or in the comments anywhere

You fixed that particular problem ;)

From the article:

> I left a lot of qualified people out because there were a lot of people and
> I got lazy. Consider this a sampler rather than an exhaustive list.

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asebold
Am a woman. Fucking thank you. So tired of hearing about the same people over
and over again.

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marklacey
Glad to see Fran Allen on the list.

I remember reading (in the early 90's) several papers authored or co-authored
by "F.E. Allen" and having no clue "F.E." was a woman until a few years later.

I was in a compiler workshop several years ago and when I looked up I realized
she was sitting directly in front of me at the workshop. I believe she was
retired at the time but still attending conferences out of personal interest.

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robertbmenke
To Betty Holberton, inventor of breakpoints, thank you. Sincerely, everyone.

~~~
whalesalad
When I got to that line I thought to myself... wow imagine inventing
breakpoints. Like, hey guys this debugging is a monumental pain in the ass
what if we did this thing here. BOOM.

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ggm
Sally Floyd? did heaps of work on TCP/IP Alison Mankin? head of the IRTF, also
big in networking. RFCs Elise Gerich? ran NSFnet, Was IANA for many years.
RFCs Susan Hares? does BGP stuff. RFCs

------
jeffadotio
I went to a bootcamp that had a room named after Lovelace, a room named after
Hamilton and a room named after Hopper. Those were the only rooms aside from
the open floor plan. There were no women on the staff.

------
api
These two come to mind. They're technically more math but they've had a
significant impact on CS in certain areas like cryptography and data
compression:

Ingrid Daubechies:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies)

Tanja Lange:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Lange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Lange)

------
dpiers
Harriette Kollman went to work for Boeing while her husband was fighting in
World War II. She would later go on to become their first female computer
programmer.

Unfortunately I don’t know more about her achievements in the field. I know
the name because we get letters addressed to her sometimes, but she passed
away a few years ago.

------
frostyj
Fei-Fei Li deserves to be on this list too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-
Fei_Li)

------
rewq4321
Leslie Kaelbling:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_P._Kaelbling](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_P._Kaelbling)

Interview on AI podcast:
[https://youtu.be/Er7Dy8rvqOc](https://youtu.be/Er7Dy8rvqOc)

Maybe doesn't meet the "sound-bite" condition, but a really impressive human
none-the-less.

~~~
jakear
Wild. She taught me about partially observable Markov decision processes,
didn’t know she invented them.

------
fortyrod
It seems like there used to be a lot more women in computing. In my first job
out of college (late 80's), I worked in a group of software developers with 12
women and two men. It was not considered odd.

~~~
anonymfus
That is a basic feminism that in a patriarchal society as soon as a profession
becomes more prestige and/or well paid it also becomes more male dominated.

~~~
ekianjo
Not true. There are more and more female physicians and the trend is that
females will progressively take over that profession, percentage wise.

[https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-doctors-
better-...](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-doctors-better-
patient-interactions)

~~~
noddingham
Which doesn't dispute what the parent said:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-
over...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-
dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html)

~~~
ekianjo
They said that high paying jobs are sought after by men. Doctors are highly
paid and women are taking over that job. Sounds like the opposite of what was
claimed.

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KerrickStaley
Tin Kam Ho (who introduced the random forests ML technique) should be on the
list too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Kam_Ho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Kam_Ho)

------
cryptozeus
Wang Xiaoyun Broke MD5. Broke SHA-0. Broke SHA-1.

Awesome !

------
not2b
Adele Goldberg of Xerox PARC / Smalltalk fame.

------
roca
Jeannette Wing was my PhD (co)advisor. She is absurdly brilliant. Another CS
woman I know who is ridiculously brilliant is Dawn Song (Berkeley).

In my years in academia, IBM Research and Mozilla I mostly worked with men,
and many of them were outstanding, but no more than one or two of them could
compete with Jeannette or Dawn in terms of sheer intellectual firepower.

------
drfuchs
Setting the record straight: Cynthia Dwork, not Latanya Sweeney, (co-)invented
Differential Privacy. And Proof Of Work (later used by Bitcoin and HashCash).
And Lattice-based Crypto (resistant to quantum computer attack). And
Nonmalleable Cryptography. But I'm admittedly biased.

------
anonsivalley652
My mom started as a data entry operator, who then became an accountant who had
to pickup COBOL and FORTRAN programming on punch-cards for a time as part of
her job.

In the early days of computing, women were only allowed to _operate_ computers
that were designed and programmed almost exclusively by men. To be a female
programmer in the early days was rare, and to be an African-American
programmer in the times of segregation would seem to be that much more
difficult. The film _Hidden Figures (2016)_ seems like a pertinent fictional-
recreation/parable lesson in these barriers that were more prevalent in the
past, but it's important to be mindful that biases are a constant of human
nature and never disappear.

------
Kassandry
Audrey Tang as well. She's awesome.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)

------
segfaultbuserr
> _Radia Perlman - Invented the Spanning-Tree Protocol._

Thanks for posting this. I've even read the STP poem before, but I never had
any idea about the person behind it.

~~~
_wldu
She came up with STP over a weekend. A friend of mine calls her the "Mother of
the Internet".

------
whalesalad
After reading the post I was exploring some of the other content on this site.
Hillel (the author) does consulting work to help teams design better software
systems using a tool called TLA+

I had never heard of TLA+ at all until this point. I am going to reserve my
opinion on it seeing as I have about 10 minutes of experience with it -- but I
am super curious if others here have anything they'd like to share on TLA+?

~~~
dwohnitmok
In short: it's great, learn it.

Slightly longer, it may seem useless at first given that TLA+ doesn't verify
code you write, but is rather better thought of as a formal design language
for designing abstract state machines. However, it is extremely useful for
clarifying thoughts and serving as a concrete design artifact for other
engineers to examine. Also because its apparent weakness that it doesn't
verify code you write is in my opinion a strength because it means you don't
incur a dependency on it if you or your team doesn't like it and wants to
throw it away. You lose no more time than what you put in.

------
Isamu
If we include the theory of error correcting codes, add Jessie MacWilliams and
Vera Pless.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Pless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Pless)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_MacWilliams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_MacWilliams)

------
downerending
That's pretty interesting. Only knew of two, myself.

Would love to see a similar list of relatively prolific women open source
programmers.

------
michelpp
I'd add Ingrid Daubechies, more mathematician, but has had an enormous
influence on signal processing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies)

------
BadMrFrosty
No mention of Sr. Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M., a Catholic religious sister and
the first woman with a PhD in CS? She helped develop FORTRAN and BASIC.

------
tuke
Need to add Ann Wollrath to this list. (Primary author of the RMI whitepaper.)

------
bane
Here's an idea that we've implemented where I work: when coming up with
working names for projects or whatever, go out of your way to name them after
notable women in STEM. Bonus, purposely retire the example women that
everybody knows -- that means no "Project Lovelace" or "Ada", no "Grace
Hopper" network optimization effort, none of that.

Make it a rewarded _challenge_ for people to spend time finding out, bringing
forward, and celebrating the contributions of amazing women.

Feel free to be expansive in what you consider technology and STEM. For
example, women who've written music on music synths: Wendy Carlos, Imogen
Heap, etc.

Or videogame designers: Carol Shaw, Dona Bailey, Joyce Weisbecker,...actually
here's a list [1]

Cryptography: Dorothy Denning, Margaret Rock, and so on. [2]

 _Make it a point_ to explain the history of the person you named the project
after as part of your project charter and when you onboard new people onto
your project, explain the history of the name to them and why you are making
it a practice to name projects in order to celebrate the contributions of
women in technology.

It doesn't have to be a long, drawn out affair. But I can tell you that (from
first hand experience) this type of celebration can have amazing effects on
mixed gendered teams. I've never seen so many talented women staff suddenly
get so supercharged. It's honestly amazing and incredibly humbling and it will
absolutely become a continued practice wherever I go.

The number of times I've also heard from women staff "if I had only known
about so many of these women growing up, I might have made different choices
in life"....you can _feel_ the unfed hunger for recognition.

You can do variants on this approach for many underserved and underrepresented
groups of people. It actually becomes kind of fun for people to spend time
learning about what people other than Turing, or Babbage, or some mythological
God figure (or Star Wars/Trek character) and how they contributed to where we
are as a species today.

Get _cheeky_ with it. Instead of "Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave" turn it into
"Project Brown Square Cave" and have a designer make a cool logo design, or
"Pamela Hardt-English" into "The Angled Heart Project" and make an 8-bit pixel
art version of a heart or something. Make memes out of Margaret Hamilton's
smiling face and send it around as a local meme when somebody does something
really cool. Keep all references to women associated with positive/cool/etc.
things. _Never_ use them as a degrading joke, or to make fun or somebody or
something.

Pick women who are currently in STEM, e.g. Katie Bouman is a great name for an
effort to add better visibility into the workings of a tech stack.

 _Meet_ these women. Many of them are still alive. I know that the ANTIC
podcast [3] has many dozens of amazing interviews as does Matt Chat [4]. Even
though these are mostly about games and computing, many of the women featured
went on to some pretty great careers. (ha! The most recent interview as of
this comment on Matt Chat is Annie VanderMeer, a game designer)

Make this an official policy. There's enough recognition for men already --
we're good.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_gam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_game_industry)

2 - [https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-
do/stimulate/women...](https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-
do/stimulate/women-in-cryptology.html)

3 - [https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/](https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/)

4 -
[https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8](https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8)

5 - and some more if you need
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing)

~~~
downerending
This seems quite patronizing. Better: Make sure everyone is paid right and
that any jerks are removed from the team.

