>>: So to get us started, I’m really excited that we have Rico Malvar here who is a Microsoft
Distinguished Engineer as well as being the Chief Scientist for Microsoft Research and, in addition to all
that, runs a group here at MSR NExT. So with that, I’ll let Rico introduce our speakers.
>> Rico Malvar: Alright. Thanks Scott, it is really a pleasure to be here and for me to do this
introduction. First I want to thank Telle, Susan, and Katy for being here with us participating in this. So
let me start with the introductions and we’ll have the three presentations by then. We’ll start with Dr.
Telle Whitney with whom I have the pleasure to interact a little bit over the years and she’s done
wonders for diversity and inclusion, especially gender diversity as a founder of the NCWIT, cofounder of
the Grace Hopper Conference, which grew beyond your expectations for sure, and it’s a pleasure for us
to be here with you, and as you see there, she’ll be talking about the history of women in computing
and woman leaders in computing. It’s amazing what women have done for computing and we don’t
necessarily know about, and I’m sure we’re gonna learn more.
And then after Telle we’ll have Susan Rodger. Thanks also Susan for joining us. She’s in the Department
of Computer Science at Duke University. She’s done a lot of work in education—computer science
education. She was telling me how she enjoys six hundred students this year. [laughter] And from basic
computer science to very sophisticated, formal language tools there are… she’s well known for and
received awards for. So with this deep technical background so, but also pushing a lot with CRA-W and
other institutions about gender diversity. So, thank you Susan.
And last, but not least, Katy Dickinson. She’s an expert in mentoring and being done so many things,
mentoring in general, and in particular mentoring to help foster diversity and bring more opportunities
for everybody all over the world. We were even talking that she’s done things in South America, and I
am Hispanic, I am from South America so, and she says she will have some nuggets for me and I look
forward to that. So, Telle. [applause]
>> Telle Whitney: Well, so it’s a real pleasure and honor to be here. I am the CEO of the Anita Borg
Institute but I’m also a computer scientist. I worked in semi-conductors for many years. As I got ready to
do this talk, I thought about, “What should I wear?” And I picked this jacket out. And then I thought,
“Well maybe a neck brace. [laughter] I think that would actually add to it.” So, I love your comments.
We’re thinking about adding some jewelry, maybe taking the earrings off here and moving them here.
So, excuse me, it’s just something that I need to be wearing right now, so it’s just part of my jewelry.
So my… even though the whole entire talk is called The History of Women in Computing and Women
Leaders in Computing, in fact, my part of this presentation is to provide some context, to look at the
landscape. And then my two remarkable colleagues, Susan and Katy, will really talk about these women.
So it should be just a great set of talks.
I… What I am going to do is talk first about the landscape and then talk about what we can do, and then
talk about the importance of role models because a lot of the work at the Anita Borg Institute is about
role models. You know, I started in semi-conductors and I love creating technology, but I was always
one of just a very few women in the field. I mean, building chips, there just were not very many women
and one of the ways that I kept my sanity was to meet other women in computing and that was how I
first met Dr. Anita Borg in 1987 when I first moved to the bay area, shortly before she founded
something called Systers. She and I created the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and
at that first conference in 1994 as we looked, I mean, we had put this thing together, but for me as a
relatively, relatively young computer scientist to go into this room of all these remarkable women—to
meet the Fran Allen’s, and Susan Owicki’s, and Barbara Liskov’s, and others, and to hear their stories and
just the excitement about the technology that we were creating, was a life-changing experience. And
that was all about those role models. It certainly—you know—it impacted my career in ways that I
can—you know—in terms of I basically took over the Institute in ways that I didn’t anticipate at the
time. But certainly seeing those early role models is something that has been a factor in my life. How
many people here feel like they have role models that they have looked up to? And did those role
models actually help you in your career? How about today, I mean, as you look forward to… are you…
do you grapple with trying to find new role models and you’d like to figure out how to find some
additional role models, is that something that you look at right now? Yeah. It’s really important. And
the thing about role models is that they come in all shapes and sizes.
So maybe I should tell you that the Anita Borg Institute as an organization—we’re a nonprofit
organization founded in ’97 by Dr. Anita Borg, renamed in her honor in 2003. We connect, we inspire,
and we guide women in technology and work with organizations that see innovation as the strategic
imperative. Microsoft has been instrumental to our work since I’ve been there, since 2002. Rick Rashid
has served on our board. They have contin… Microsoft has continuously made a commitment to the
work that we do and participated in many ways.
What work do we do? So this slide talks about some of the programs of the Grace Hopper Cel… of the
Anita Borg Institute. By far our largest program is something called the Grace Hopper Celebration. How
many people have attended a Grace Hopper Celebration? I would encourage all of you to give it a shot.
It started with five hundred people in 1994, last year we sold out at eight thousand people. We expect
twelve thousand people in October in Houston, and we’re gonna sell out. Microsoft just made a huge
registration push. I think that they’re bringing something like five hundred people, I mean, it’s amazing.
So what do we… what’s the… the Grace Hopper Celebration is a lot about role models. It’s really
important that the attendees have a chance to have exposure to many women who are doing
interesting work. So I thought it would be worth hearing from the people who attend. What do they
think? So this is just a summary of Grace Hopper—the Grace Hopper Conference. You can see by the…
on the left that we have grown rather dramatically since its beginning and we had over eight thousand
people. If you look at the attendees about thirty-five percent are students and about fifty percent are
working professionals. We see those as our two primary audiences.
What do the students get out of Grace Hopper? I mean, if you talk about role models, thinking about it
from a student perspective is really important. You know, students, for them this is often not just the
first Grace Hopper they’ve ever been to, this is the first professional conference they’ve ever been to in
their life. And if you think about it, many of these students are at University’s where they are still…
there’s not a lot of women, and so coming into this room where there’s more women than they’ve ever
seen in their life can have this hugely inspirational impact. And, in fact, we call it “the Hopper effect,”
because a lot of the culture of the conference is focused on the positive, so students have the chance to
really hear about the cool things that are happening in technology and make connections, people they
can continue to talk to, and really feel like this is worth doing. And I’ll talk a little more about that later.
But let’s… it’s not just students, actually. It’s really important for women who work in companies to
come and to also be inspired to find role models. We see once again with working professionals that
about seventy percent of them have what we call “the Hopper effect,” which is really… you walk into the
room, sometimes you feel very dissatisfied with what you’re doing, but having the chance to talk to this
woman who’s doing this really cool project over at… within your own company even, or at a different
company, can have a really life-changing experience.
So why do we care about all this inspiration? Why do we care about role models? So I want to talk for a
few minutes about the landscape for women in technology. If you look at computer science degrees—
you know—in 1987 almost forty percent of the computer science graduates were women. If you look at
2012 it’s about eighteen percent over all. Now, the numbers appear to be going up slightly, but the data
hasn’t yet come out, but still, eighteen percent is not as much as you’d like. If you look at the job
projections, so the Department of Labor talks about how many jobs are there… are going to be there
that need technical skills, we are looking to graduate about half of the people to fill those jobs.
Microsoft knows this. Lots of companies know that. That’s actually why there’s so many people trying
to hire. We have over three hundred companies at Grace Hopper trying to hire. And I do think that
having a fifty percent of the population are women, being able to engage more with women would just
solve this problem overnight. Whoo, that’s it.
But the pipeline is not the only issue. You hear a lot of people talk about the pipeline, but in fact,
women leave at twice the rate of men, and if you… this is data that came out of our Top Company
Program, if you look at entry level, mid-level, senior level, and executive level women, the numbers go
down dramatically. And until you solve the retention problem of women the pipeline is not gonna help
you. You can continue to bring more and more women into the field, but you’ve gotta keep them there.
Now I met with the head of HR of Microsoft earlier today and she says that perhaps the retention issue
isn’t as big a deal at Microsoft, which is great. This is a very common outcome, I mean, so if that’s not
true here that is actually very inspiring. And understanding what your numbers are is really important.
So what can we do? In May of 2014 the world changed because companies for the first time announced
their numbers. I do think that as an engineer, as a computer scientist, I believe that what you measure,
you will change. There’s just no question that if you understand where you are then you can
understand how to change. And these are just some of the companies that over last summer did
announce publicly their numbers. What I’ve included here is the technical workforce since that’s what,
at the Anita Borg Institute, that’s what we focus on. But one of the things that you see is that numbers
vary pretty dramatically, that there is a large discrepancy in terms of the companies that have more
women both at the top and at the bottom, and understanding what your numbers are can make a huge
difference.
This last year for the first time we also announced something called the Leadership Index. We’ve been
working with some Top Company Program for a number of years and each year we’ve announced one
winner, but really what we’re about is a data platform to look at how are companies doing. We look at
entry level, mid-level, senior level, and executive level. And on the Leadership Index are companies that
were above the mean, these are companies that are doing better than the average. Very exciting. One
of the other outcomes from this whole top company approach is that we now also have a lot of data
about a large number of women working at a lot of different companies. And there was two very
important insights; they’re very related to the work that we’ll be talking about today. One is that if the
companies that have more women overall, tend to have more women in technical roles. And the graph
you see here, the average is in the middle which has about twenty-one percent in the technical
workforce. This is the accurate data for all the companies that participate. But if you look at the top five
it’s closer to thirty percent women technologists, and if you look at the bottom five, it’s significantly less,
it’s fifteen percent. So the total number of women really matters.
And the other thing that is not a surprise is that role models matter, is that if you look at companies with
the highest executive level of representation, they also have higher number of women at the lower
level. You see, take a young female engineer just graduated from Carnegie Mellon, that woman looks
[indiscernible] direct staff, and consciously or not, if they don’t see somebody who looks like them it…
they’re aware of it and what… “Do I belong here? Where could I go? Where are the women in this
company?” These role models are hugely influential in terms of the younger folks coming in.
So I want to spend just a few minutes talking about the importance of role models, both what we see at
the Grace Hopper Celebration, but also my own story. You know, we… one of the exciting things about
Grace Hopper is that we do have very senior women come back year after year, and on the screen are
two of my favorite people. Fran Allen was the first woman to get the Turing award. I was honored to be
in the audience when she received it. She’s on the right. Now, she no longer… her health has
deteriorated so she no longer attends, but for many years she would come every year and there would
be tweets from the students saying, “Fran Allen is in the house.” “Fran Allen is on the dance floor.”
They knew where she was, they knew what she was up to, and it really mattered to them. You can see
Barbara Liskov was the second woman to get the Turing Award and she… after her talk at a recent
Hopper Conference she was surrounded by young people just wanting to talk to her. I mean this is… you
see pictures like this and you know what the power of role models are. Access to these people is really
important.
I wanted to talk about two of my most important role models. I was at Caltech and my PhD thesis
advisor was a man named Carver Mead, who was known by many to be the father of the LSI. When I
got there in 19… well, a long time ago, and had the chance to work with him… so I didn’t know him very
well, but I watched the way that he interacted with his students. He was the classic role model. I mean,
we hadn’t yet worked together, but he would sit down with some of his other students, at least one of
which was a woman, and he… first of all this man was crazy busy, he had the chance to talk all over the
world, but he always showed up in the lab. He always made time for his students, he would sit and he
would talk to them, and he wouldn’t tell them they were wrong, but he would keep asking them
questions. Just, “What about this, what about that?” And he would… and that role modeling behavior,
but with a nurturing view, was something that I observed. I had just arrived at Caltech, and I was
absolutely sure that at any minute the police were gonna show up at my office and they were gonna tell
me I didn’t really belong, and they were gonna throw me out. I mean, I was so terrified those first few
years. And so seeing the way in which he interacted with others—that nurturing style—had a huge
impact on me, and he was a classic role model learning how he interacted with other students. Now,
eventually he became much more than a role model for me. He became certainly a friend and a mentor,
but those early days, he was clearly one of my most important role models. One of the things that you
see is that, especially now with technology, having so many more men, many of my role models and also
early mentors were all men. Men have this wonderful opportunity to work and encourage women as
well as other men, to do the right thing.
My second—you recognize the person on the left, I guess—this is the famous talk. That was Maria
Klawe is on the right. She’s a board member of Microsoft; she was also the founding chair for the Anita
Borg Institute board of trustees. But when I first met Anita, she had just become the President of ACM
and I had stepped in as interim president of the Anita Borg Institute, came in for a couple of months,
that was twelve years ago. Okay, I don’t know about you but sometimes life takes you in different ways,
but Anita… Maria and I were both very close friends of Anita, and so we… as Anita is ill with brain cancer
she and I helped out. But those early days of watching her role model as the President of ACM as I
stepped in as President of the Anita Borg Institute was really important. I saw how she led council
meetings, I saw how she dealt with tough conversations, I saw how she kept things on track, and so all
of those were very important early areas of role models that helped me. Now, eventually Maria became
much more than a role model, she became a mentor and a sponsor. And I do think that it is often true
that if you find role models and you start just asking questions, you don’t necessarily go off and say,
“Will you be my mentor?” but often that relationship can evolve. Often it starts with role models but
then moves on to something else.
I am… you know I’ve talked about the importance of role models, I’ve talked about the importance of
role models at Grace Hopper and seen so many of these women that can have an impact on all the
women who are attending. Students provide a very wonderful view on what’s important. And so I
thought that we’ll take a few minutes and let you hear from some of the students. So this are
comments from a student that came from the University of Illinois of Chicago. I’ll just pause for a
minute, I’m not gonna read this, but you can look at it briefly. You also see Maria on the left
surrounded, as she so often is, by students. Both of these comments come from a program called BRAID
that I co-lead with Maria, where we are taking some of the lessons from Harvey Mudd College and
taking them to fifteen Universities. But if you look at what the students say, this gets back to the work
of the women in computing, The Notable Women in Computing. This feeling that there’s genius around
me that can make a difference. This feeling that there are millions of ways that I can contribute and that
today I saw many of those ways and I’m often connected with the people who spoke who are doing such
cool kinds of technology. So this is what one comment from a student.
A second student came from Missouri University of Science and Technology and just take a minute and
take a look at this. But once again, for a woman who often works in a place where they’re one of just a
few women, walking into a room where there’s more women than I have ever seen in my life can be a
really amazing experience. Just as an aside, we had five hundred men at this last Grace Hopper
Conference and I do think that for those men, and there’s so many of them, who really want to
understand how it feels, experiencing this conference can be really a remarkable outcome. The other
thing this student said is that they saw this fascination with computing, and that… just like me, these
people really like this. This is also something else we see. You know, I think that Grace Hopper has
often… has come to mean that there’s this huge job fair and that there’s a lot of hiring, but one of the
outcomes that we actually see quite frequently for undergraduate students is that undergraduate
students decide to go to graduate school. They haven’t really entertained it and they get exposed to
what that means. What does research mean? What does this look like? And I have known many stories
of students deciding to go to grad school, a very common outcome. You know, I didn’t actually set out
to get a PhD. I just got introduced to somebody that was starting the department; I got captured by the
work. Students just don’t necessarily know what they want, and so this exposure to researchers talking
about what’s possible, faculty talking about their jobs, as well as industry. I mean, MSR is a unique place
in terms of being able to do research that’s supported by a company. So that’s another example of how
students perceive the Grace Hopper Conference and what they see.
So I’ve talked a lot about the importance of role models, the importance of role models that we see for
many of the people who attend the Grace Hopper celebration, we catalyze those relationships. I’ve
talked a lot about my own role models, I bet that if I asked every one of you in this room you could tell a
story about how it impacted your life, and those are the stories that we want to continue to hear.
At this point I’d like to introduce well, two remarkable women, but starting with Susan, who’ve actually
systematically categorized some of the women who are out there who are already making
achievements. This is… having all these students understand that these are… these folks that went
before can be so important as we develop the next generation of role models. And so before I turn it
over to Susan, I am happy to answer any questions that specifically in this area and we’ll also have time
at the end for more questions, but I’ll pause for a minute and ask. [applause] Yes, please?
>>: I was curious how some of the numbers with women in the field correspond with other parts of the
world?
>> Telle Whitney: Ah, great question. So the first thing is is that because of NSF and some of the
Department of Labor’s we have better numbers. Like, for example, we have a team in India, and just
knowing we have anecdotal data about what’s in India, but we don’t have the same rigorous attention
to there, so that’s the caveat. But it does vary a lot from country to country. So in India, for example,
between forty and fifty percent of the computer science graduates are women, but they don’t
necessarily join the workforce. Often they use that as something they put on their wedding invitation,
for example. That’s just the culture. There are countries like Puerto Rico and Turkey that actually have
a larger number of… a higher percentage of women. So it varies a lot around the world from what we
do know.
Okay, well I’ll turn it over to Susan. [applause]
>> Susan Rodger: I would also like to thank Telle because I went to the very first Grace Hopper
Conference in 1994 as an Assistant Professor, a young Assistant Professor and I took students with me,
undergraduates, so that was very exciting and it made a big impact on me.
Okay, so I am part two. So I’m gonna be talking about the Wikipedia Project, Pages for Notable Women
in Computing, and this talk is sort of a journey, I’m not a Wikipedia expert, but this is sort of my journey
in trying to make notable women in computing more visible and it’s also a journey in me trying to figure
out how to write Wikipedia pages which I had no idea of how to do. How many of you actually write
Wikipedia pages? Okay, so a few, but not very many. Okay. So and again, just to emphasize that my
background is I am a Computer Science Professor; my work is in Visualization and Computer Science
Education. I’m very passionate about education and diversity. I’m heavily involved in the Special
Interest Group in Computer Science Education and I’m also a CRA-W board member and that’s a very
exciting board to be on because it has over thirty senior women computer scientists are on the board.
It’s the only board I’m on that’s all women. So it’s very exciting. I’m also known for edible CS: this is a
picture of a Turing machine made out of blueberry muffins and icing that I give my students and they
have to figure out what it does. I think actually what was wrong with it, it was supposed to do
something else. And then once they figure it out they got to eat it. This is a red-black tree made out of
cookies. You know what the red-black tree? A type of balanced binary tree. And then I got smarter and
I started making my students create finite state machines with cookies and icing as a sort of like
icebreaker, like early in the semester. And so here I have students… they’re… and most of the males,
especially, have never used icing bags to squirt out icing, so it’s quite an experience for them. And
there’s one of the finite state machine’s one of the groups made.
Okay, so and I also just wanted to talk a little bit about the CRA-W board. They do… sort of their mission
is to try and increase the number of women in computing at all levels of the pipeline. At the
undergraduate level they have programs for undergraduates to do research in the summer, intensive
programs in the summer and they also have programs during the academic year for graduate students.
They have what’s called the Graduate Cohort. Has anybody been to that? Okay. [laughs] So the
Graduate Cohort is for graduate students early in their career, it’s a mentoring workshop, it’s a weekend
workshop where they can go, they can meet senior women role models and get advice on how to get
research done, how to get their PhD. And they also have career mentoring workshops for faculty and
for government industry people who are… they’re early in their career or midcareer. So basically
working at all levels of the pipeline to try and increase the number of women in computing.
Okay, so essentially my questions was like, “How visible are notable women in computing?” And I sort
of pondered this question in early 2012 and I was looking around and looking at Wikipedia—that is the
internet encyclopedia. And looking around there I was trying to figure out first of all like, who’s writing
all these pages and why are all these women that were notable in computing, they didn’t have
Wikipedia pages? So I was kind of pondering that. I was looking at the Turing Award winners, the
women, there was at that time in early 2012 there were only two women that had the Turing Award and
they both had Wikipedia pages, but let’s see where they… how they go their Wikipedia pages.
So Fran Allen, as Telle mentioned, she was actually a school teacher who was in debt and got a job at
IBM and then ended up making a career out of it and stayed there and actually became quite famous.
She worked in compilers and optimization technology. She was the first woman to become an IBM… the
first female IBM Fellow and also the first woman to get the Turing Award. Now the Turing Award was
announced on February 21, 2007, and her Wikipedia page was created on when? Who wants to take a
guess?
>>: February 20th. [laughter]
>> Susan Rodger: February 6th, 2007. So apparently, it was about two weeks before she got the Turing
Award. She didn’t have a Wikipedia page and so somebody created it about two weeks before that and
then on February 21 there was a note that was added, she got the Turing Award. So she didn’t have a
Wikipedia page and then I think somebody realized that she was getting the award, it hadn’t been
announced yet, and somebody created her Wikipedia page. Here is that first page, Wikipedia page; this
is what it looked like. That’s all it had on it, it was very short, but it had—you know—information about
her outstanding contributions and three days later it got a warning. So when you write Wikipedia pages,
if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s warnings that will appear. People are watching you write
these Wikipedia pages and so she got a warning. It said, “This article has not been added to any
categories, so please help out by adding categories.” But nobody was paying attention to the page,
nobody was really noticing it and then nothing else really happened to the page until the Turing Award
was announced and then somebody added it to the page the day the Turing Award was announced. You
can see the warning got removed and here’s the line that was added that she got the Turing Award, and
then somebody also added, “Oh, there’s a category now.” So she’s a Turing Award laureate, so that was
added and also the list of Turing Award laureates got added there too. So all that got added to the page.
Now again, so hardly anybody had written on her page and then in the next three days there was like,
over thirty edits. People were adding to the page and writing all kinds of things about her, they added
all these awards she got… had already had, she was already in the National Academy of Engineering, she
was a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, Fellow of the AAAS, so anyway, but nobody had really
paid attention until now, and now, all of a sudden, people are writing on her page. This is what her page
looks like now. So she’s got quite a nice page, lots of information about her is now on there.
Barbara Liskov, so she was the second woman to get the Turing Award. She got it in 2008. She is
currently a professor at MIT. She was also one of the first women to get a PhD in CS in 1968. Her thesis
was on writing programs for endgames and chess. Okay, so that’s what here thesis was on, on chess.
She’s done a lot of research: CLU, Venus operating system, and so on. She has very… a lot of awards and
she did have a Wikipedia page before she got the Turing Award but not much more. So her page was
created on June 15th, 2005, so that’s about three years before she got the Turing Award and that’s what
it looked like. [laughter] That’s it. Somebody created it—okay—and about thirty-nine minutes later it
had a warning on it that said: this person… it’s not clear that this person is notable enough—because
there’s basically not enough information for you to tell if they are notable enough. And so… but that
happened, like, right away. So thirty-nine minutes later this was already on the page. Here’s her page
now, today, so again, she has a nice page now, it’s got a lot of information about her awards and
everything.
Now we have one more woman who’s won the Turing Award. So for me this was very exciting because I
was a… I got my PhD in algorithms and I had sort of followed her career all along, since I was a graduate
student I’d heard of her, and I just kind of knew she was gonna get it at some point. So that was very
exciting for me when she actually did get it. She’s the co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs and those
are key designs towards cryptographic protocols. So anyway, this was very exciting for me when she got
it. Her… it turns out, her Wikipedia page was written in July, 2004 even before Fran Allen’s and Barbara
Liskov’s. This is what her first page was, whoever created her page, and then this is her page now.
When she got the Turing Award she already had a huge page of information, someone had been
updating her page, and so on, and she’s got quite a long page now on Wikipedia.
So anyway, so I looked at that… so the Turing Award winners—you know—they had Wikipedia pages,
but I was curious about what about all these other notable women in computing, they didn’t have
Wikipedia pages. Why didn’t they have Wikipedia pages? So I started by just looking at ACM Fellows.
There were, first of all, there were few women who were ACM Fellows. In 1994 is when the ACM Fellow
program started and usually when a new fellows program starts there’s a lot of people because all of a
sudden, all these people are eligible for many years and they didn’t have it, so in 1994 they had over a
hundred and thirty fellows. And I looked at the list trying to figure out how many women there were
and there was at least nine, maybe twelve—there’s some names I can’t tell their gender, but less than
ten percent of them were women. The very first year—this was also the same year the Grace Hopper
Conference started. [laughter] I was just realizing that. And then, since then, they’ve had about twenty
to fifty fellows each year. In 2014, for example, they had forty-seven fellows and about six to eight of
them were women, so not a lot of women have been fellows. And then, so I was looking at some of the
names of the fellows—they have a list of all their fellows on their web page—I noticed that a few of
those women, by just sort of googling them and looking around, a few of them actually had Wikipedia
pages. So that’s when I started thinking about investigating a new project for CRA-W. Everybody on the
CRA-W board has a project. You can’t… it’s a working board, like, you can’t be on the board unless you
have a project somehow related to diversity. So I already had some projects, but I was thinking of a new
project and so that was like, why don’t we write Wikipedia pages for notable women in computing and
get some of these pages up there? Like, how hard could it be to write a Wikipedia page? Couldn’t be
that hard. Well, it turns out, there’s a lot of rules you have to follow, but the other thing I noticed is that
this is another area where there’s very few women—and I’m already used to an area where there’s very
few women, okay? So it turns out, who writes Wikipedia pages? Well, a study in 2013 said only about
sixteen percent of the people that write Wikipedia pages are women, okay? So that means all our
history is being written mostly by males.
So anyway, what are some of the rules in writing Wikipedia pages? Well first of all, you cannot write
your own page—okay—you’re not supposed to do that. You’re also supposed to have a neutral point of
view. The person needs to be notable if you’re gonna write their page and that… and all this needs to be
verifiable that they’re notable, you have to put a lot of facts and references, make sure these are all
verifiable. You also don’t want to plagiarize; you want to write everything in your own words. And
there’s also this regard for subject’s privacy, it’s not a tabloid, they don’t want Wikipedia to be a tabloid.
Okay, so anyway, we were at… we had a CRA-W board meeting in April, 2012 when I’d been pondering
this project, and so we thought, “Let’s write a Wikipedia page.” Okay, can’t be that hard, right? And of
course, this is before I actually knew what all the rules were. [laughs] Okay. So anyway, we thought
about who to write about, all the female Turing Award winners at that time, all two of them, already
had Wikipedia pages, so we looked at… decided to write a page on Mary Jane Irwin. So Mary Jane Irwin
is… she’s a Professor at Penn State University, she does VLSI Architecture and Automated Design. She’s
done these Board Level Designs, she’s written software, tools for architecture, and she has several
awards that are quite prestigious: National Academy of Engineering, she was an ACM Fellow, IEEE
Fellow. Looked her up; no Wikipedia page. Okay, so we started… decided to just start with her. Now
we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time, we just thought, “Oh, we can write a Wikipedia
page.” So here’s what happens when you don’t know what you’re doing: so we wrote our page and we
went home, we thought, “This was great,” and then about two weeks later I popped up her page to see
what it looked like, and here’s what it looked like—and I’ll pop the error messages up. So basically, it
has all kind of multiple issues. So we obviously didn’t know what we were doing. In fact, what had
happened was we’d looked at her web page and she had this nice description of her research work on
there and so we had cut and pasted it and put it on there—big no-no, big no-no. So that was part of the
problem. We also didn’t have a lot of references and so we didn’t really know what we were doing. So
that’s when I realized I needed to step back and was trying to figure out, like, how do you write a
Wikipedia page so you don’t get errors? So I checked out other pages, I tried some editing and read
some stuff on Wikipedia and then I tried again. So next I tried to write was Mary Lou Soffa. She is a
Professor at the University of Virginia in Software Engineering, Compiler Technologies, some
Programming Languages. She’s got several prestigious awards: the Ken Kennedy Award, ACM Fellow,
and she also has a mentoring award, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and
Engineering, and she didn’t have a Wikipedia page either. So I wrote her page and here it is right here,
and then I waited two weeks, I popped it back up, no warnings so that was good, so I thought, “Okay, I
think I figured out how to do it,” so I started writing other pages. And again, I have a full time job, this is
not my… this is just a hobby that I have, so sometimes a month or two months may have gone by and as
you mentioned, I had six hundred students last year, so I didn’t write a whole lot of Wikipedia pages this
past year. But… and I tried another person, Carla Ellis, she’s an Emeritus Professor at Duke University,
she’s also an ACM Fellow, she’s done work on mobile devices and energy management, and she didn’t
have a Wikipedia page. So I wrote her page and I waited, and I got another warning. So the warning I
got here was that this page is an orphan page; there’s no other pages that are linking to it, so that’s a
problem. Apparently pages have to be… Wikipedia pages, they should be linking together and weaving
together. So, I could fix that though, ‘cause I noticed that her advisor was an ACM Fellow who also
didn’t have a Wikipedia page. So I wrote his page. [laughter] Jean Loup-Baer: so he’s at the University
of Washington, which is, I guess, here. And so I wrote his page, just a short page, I didn’t write it very
long, but then what I did is I put on there that one of his doctoral students was Carla Ellis and then on
her page I put that he was her advisor. So now these pages are linked together and so neither one… his
page is also not an orphan page, right? So…
Alright, so I’d figured out how to do that. The next thing I figured out how to do is how to add a picture
to a page. So apparently all pictures that are on Wikipedia pages have to be in Wikimedia Commons.
Okay so they have to be… in order to get into Wikimedia Commons, the owner of the photo has to put it
in there, or somebody who has the rights to the photo has to put it in there. And so the next page I
wrote was Tracy Camp, she is also an ACM Fellow who does research on wireless networking and she
didn’t have a Wikipedia page, so I wrote her page and then I said, “Hey, if you have a photo…” ‘cause I
looked, there’s no photo. Most people don’t have photos of themselves in Wikimedia Commons. So I
said, “If you can put a photo in Wikimedia Commons, I’ll link to it.” And by the way, I wrote your web
page… I mean Wikipedia page. And so she put a picture in there, so I figured out how to get a picture in
there.
The next page I wrote was Kathryn McKinley, she’s actually a researcher at Microsoft and I wrote her
page and she also got a picture in Wikipedia… Wikimedia Commons so that I could link that in. She does
work on compilers—if you don’t know who she is—runtime systems and architecture. She is an ACM
Fellow. But it turns out, I still didn’t know what I was doing because I got a warning on her page that
said I had bare URLs. Okay, so there’s a really easy way to put in URLs and there’s a way that takes a
little bit more time, and so what I had done was the easy way, the simplest way is you just put a ref tag
and in ref tag—boom—you’ve got a reference in there. So that’s easy and actually the nice thing is,
there are people that like to do Wikipedia for their hobby or whatever also, and they’ll fix all those for
you, which is kind of nice. But I thought, “Okay, I need to figure out how to do this.” And so a better
way is a full citation and so then you can have all these extra tags where you can do it. And if you look
back here it says, “Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable.” So I guess
the full citation is easier to keep verifiable, if the link no longer works it’s easier for them to find and
figure out where… how to fix that.
Okay, so I figured that, but the other thing that was a little bit intimidating if you’ve ever written
Wikipedia pages is here’s the history page of her page. So I know it’s a little bit hard to see, but at the
bottom here, I wrote her page at 3:54 PM, and at 3:55 PM, one minute later, someone was already
editing the page, someone named Smileguy91. [laughter] So basically, in one minute, someone had
already edited the page. So it’s a little bit intimidating when you write pages ‘cause people are just—
you know—they’re right on you and they’re editing your page. And actually in four minutes, or three
minutes later after I’d written the page, somebody named “I dream of horses” had written… had already
given… put in the warning that said “bare URLs.” So they’d already zoomed in on that right away, even
though they missed them on the other Wikipedia pages that I’d put up.
Okay, now do people create new pages? Well, not many people will create new pages. People will edit
pages ‘cause that’s really easy to do, but creating a new page is a little bit harder. So this is an example
of James Bonk. He’s actually… was a Professor at Duke University. He taught Chemistry for fifty-three
years. That is quite an accomplishment for just to teach for fifty-three years. I can’t even imagine that.
But he’s also famous for the “flat tire story,” if you’ve heard of that. The story goes: there were some
students who missed an exam of his and they came in and they said, “We missed your exam. We are so
sorry, but we had a flat tire.” Okay, and he’s… “Can we make up the exam?” And he said, “Yes, you can
make up the exam. Come back tomorrow.” So they came back tomorrow, the next day, and he put
them in separate rooms and he gave them the exam, and they were flipping through taking the exam
and they got to the last page and the last question was, “Which tire?” [laughter] Okay, so that’s a true
story because I actually taught right after him in one of the classrooms, and he said… he verified it. It is
a true story, but it’s sort of blown up a little bit on the internet, ‘cause it’s floating around the internet.
Anyway, but he died on March 15th and he’s very famous for teaching fifty-three years and also that, but
he had no Wikipedia page. There was tons of articles about him that week when he died. People were
writing all kinds of articles about him. But there was no Wikipedia page. So I waited three days and
then I created his Wikipedia page. Just a short page, put it up real quick. And then, as soon as I created
it, others started editing it. So it’s just really hard for people to get a page started, but once it’s there,
they will add to it, they linked in the newspaper articles. I just had to get something up there and then
other people took over. And he’s known as “Bonkistry.” This is actually his page now.
Mary Jean Harrold was another one, if you’ve heard of her. She was a Professor at Georgia Tech in
Software Engineering. She got… in 2007, ACM named her the top software engineering researcher in
the world. She was an ACM Fellow but she died of cancer in September of 2013. Again, I waited;
nobody had a Wikipedia page for her. She was so notable, I felt guilty, it’s like, “Ah, she has to have
one.” So I wrote her page two days later and then people started editing it, again. There’s her page
now.
Susan Horwitz, she was a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in programming languages, she’s
known for program slicing. She had several best papers awards. She also was an educator. Did work
with the AP CS Program and she basically is the one who founded Peer Led Team Learning in Computer
Science. Nobody had done that before. I actually created her Wikipedia page when I found out she had
cancer so, but she was already… anyway, but then she died of… I guess in June of 2014, so a couple
months later. But she also did not have a Wikipedia page. So there’s her page there.
And then I was sort of pondering, I noticed that Georgia Tech had, their faculty, a lot of them have
Wikipedia pages, so I was asking one of the professors there, you know, “Why do you guys have so many
Wikipedia pages?” And he said some of the grad students have gotten together and just decided to
write all these Wikipedia pages and that was one of the reasons why they’d had so many.
So anyway, I’ve done all this pondering and kind of wrote a bunch of pages and tried to figure this out,
and then I ended up writing a guide on how you can write a Wikipedia page, if you’re interested. So this
is the guide, it’s a CRA-W and Anita Borg Institute Wikipedia Project that tells you how to write
Wikipedia pages. And why did I write a guide for this? Because it took… if you go to the Wikipedia, they
have guides on how to write Wikipedia pages but there’s so many pages for you to weed through. So
this is much more focused, it’s shorter, it’s easier to get started with. If you want to write a Wikipedia
page then get an account. You can start by just editing some pages before you create a page. And then
you have to select someone to write about, make sure they don’t already have a page. Also on this
guide is what we’ve done is we’ve created a database of notable women in computing. For each woman
in the database we have information about if they have a prestigious award or why they’re notable, they
might be historical, or some other reason, and Katy, I think, is gonna talk more about that. And also the
status of their Wikipedia page: whether they have one, whether they don’t, or if they have one but it
needs a lot of work. So that’s available on our website. We also have forms where you can update. If
you write a page you can fill out the form and send an update so we know that that page has been
created. We also have a template for you to get started; you can start with this template and just fill it
in and create a Wikipedia page. And then if you want to put in a picture, again, you gotta put the picture
in Wikimedia. The key things, again, just follow those rules, you have to write facts, you have to make
sure that your sources are verifiable. Like, for example, when ACM announces their fellows they have a
news release. You can link to that news release; you can link to the actual pages where they have ACM
Fellows listed. Those are verifiable sources. And then if you actually do become a writer and write
Wikipedia pages you can actually create your own Wikipedia writer page, it’s not a Wikipedia page
about you, but it’s a writer page. And you can put whatever you want on it. What most people typically
put on is like, I’ve just put—this is my page—I’ve just listed the people that I’ve written their Wikipedia
pages. So that’s something you can do.
And then just a few more here. We’ve got Margaret Martonosi; she’s a Professor at Princeton, also an
ACM Fellow who didn’t have a Wikipedia page. She’s done ZebraNet where she actually does mobile
computing and they put these collars on zebras in Kenya and we’re trying… they have to be really careful
about how that’s gonna last. Anyway, she didn’t have a Wikipedia page so I wrote her page. And this is
her page here. And she has also started writing a lot of Wikipedia pages, so she’s one of the people that
started writing pages after I wrote her page.
Nancy Amato is another person. She’s a Professor at Texas A&M who does motion planning and
Robotics. She’s an IEEE Fellow, also a Nico Habermann Award, and she didn’t have a Wikipedia page so I
wrote her page. Now, on her page, what I did is I tried to also… something new was, I tried to write
more about her research and also linked references to some of her top papers and so that’s why it’s got
a lot of stuff right there, but I was still getting warning messages. So I got this warning message, the
most recent one was, “The introduction is too long.” [laughter] Okay. So that means you basically want
to break it up into more categories. And so then I took her page, and here’s her page again. And so now
the introduction is supposed to be very short, so that’s very short, and I took all of the stuff I wrote
about her career, her research created a category called Career and put it all in there. So still getting
warning messages even though I’ve been doing this now for three years.
And then I finally went back and rewrote Mary Jane Irwin’s page. I just completely started from scratch
‘cause we had totally botched her page. It sat there looking ugly for a year or so and then completely
rewrote it. Now it looks much nicer.
Now, what has grown out of this project is we’ve created this deck of Notable Women in Computing
cards that Katy is gonna talk about. And I just wanted to add… and that project is with Katy Dickinson
and Jessica Dickinson Goodman, and I just wanted to add that we created this deck of cards and on each
card it says the status of their Wikipedia page, in particular for Vicki Hanson, it said she had no Wikipedia
page, you can be the first… you can change that. And then I was just noticing the other day that
somebody wrote her Wikipedia page, so it’s up there. Alright, so I’ll stop here and take any questions.
[applause]
Any questions?
>>: What was that page again, that… your guide on how to write?
>> Susan Rodgers: Oh yeah, so it’s on one of those slides. The guide page, oh here it is. There it is right
there. But you can also probably google it and find it. Notable Women in Computing Wikipedia page.
>>: Thank you.
>> Susan Rodgers: Yep?
>>: So I liked all the different tabs you had open on each of your screen shots of browsers. You had a
lot of browser shots throughout the presentation. Were you trying to send us any secret messages
about your other interests? I saw for example you had a tab open…
>> Susan Rodgers: Oh no, you weren’t supposed to see those; I had [indiscernible] really tiny so you
can’t read ‘em. [laughter]
>>: I saw you had a tab open with the six…
>> Susan Rodgers: I guess you can see my…
>>: Yeah, you had the sixteen-bit ALU that somebody had built in Minecraft. There were all sorts of
interesting things. [laughter]
>> Susan Rodgers: I have two teenage boys; that probably shows through. [laughter] Okay, sorry.
Alright, I’ll redo my slides before you post them, though. [laughter] Yeah, so obviously I’ve done a lot of
searching through on the browsers to get all these pages in there. Okay. Alright, so I guess Katy is
gonna go next.
[applause]
>> Katy Dickinson: Thank you. Good afternoon, so I’m Katy Dickinson and I’m focusing on the Notable
Technical Women Project, which is two decks of cards. We actually brought some if you want to buy
some. You can also buy them on the web. We just did another order. And these… before we start,
these are cards, they’re playing cards, so I’m not talking about greeting cards, I’m not talking about
computer cards, I’m not talking about… I’m talking about playing cards, right? Real cards. And there’s
two decks and you see the backs of the decks. Mostly in this presentation you’re gonna see the front.
So there’s two decks. There’s more in the works.
So I do work in mentoring. I designed and ran the mentoring program for Sun Microsystems for ten
years. I reported the CTO for Sun Microsystems for fifteen years. I worked at Sun for twenty-six years. I
have designed mentoring programs ever since, including the TechWomen Program for the U.S. State
Department. I was the Process Architect working with the Anita Borg Institute which worked with IIE,
the Institute for International Education which runs the Fulbright’s. And we created a program under
Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2010, 2011. It is a big successful program. In fact, Secretary Kerry has just
added five more countries as of this year; so we started six countries when we started in 2010, and here
we are at 2015 and we’re up to twenty-one countries. And so one of them is a general deck and one of
them is specific to a program. And this is about role models, that when I work in a mentoring program,
role models are important—mentors are important, but role models are also important. And one of the
things that we wanted to do with this project was to document role models, to put it out there. Here
are some role models, here’s not just one role model, it’s not just all about Fran Allen. I love Fran Allen,
but she’s not the only one. And it’s not about only the Turing Award winners. We wanted to have a
wealth of role models and we wanted to make it accessible. So we made a poster and it was presented
at the Hopper Conference last year, and that was so exciting that we are generating daughter projects
now and the first daughter project is the TechWomen poster. But we have other daughter projects in
the works. We have one for women in open source, we have one for Latinas, we have various groups—
math, women in math, different groups talking about other projects. So these are what we see as a
project that is creating more children for itself. And the poster is all the deck. So when this poster gets
put up in an incubator in South Africa—which I just distributed fifteen of the posters in Pretoria, Cape
town and Johannesburg in January—and they get put up in incubators, they get put up in places where
young women go. And they… I have pictures, they go up and they put their hand on the po… you know,
they’re somebody like me, somebody from South Africa, somebody wearing hijab, somebody from my
discipline. Like me is important. Like me covers a lot of territory. Like me can be gender, it could be
age, it can be clothing, it can be ethnicity, it can be a lot of things. So you need a lot of people to find
someone like me, because when you’re in a field where you’re in the minority—always have been,
hopefully, not always will be—but very much in the minority, having somebody like me, somebody who I
can feel a connection to, a commonality with, somebody who can be a role model is very, very
important. Now, the poster… the black poster on the left, that’s the original poster. These are women
who are world famous in many cases. The poster on the right were pulled from… those women were
pulled from the three hundred or so who have been in the TechWomen program. These are women
between twenty-four and forty-two, and they volunteered. They said, “It’s important. It’s important
that we have role models, we have pictures.” And so from the sixteen countries, at least one from each
of the sixteen countries—and in the case of Palestine lots more than that because they kept
volunteering over. I had so many from Palestine I actually had to leave some out, but they all said, “I
want to be in that.” Now, I‘ve talked to women who said, “I don’t want somebody touching me like
that.” You know, if you’re on a deck of cards people are touching your picture. You know, and so there
were all sorts of cultural things about it, but fifty-four of them said, “No, this is important.” So we ended
up with two posters and two decks of cards, so there are role models for girls and young women around
the world and a variety of people to draw from… to draw inspiration from.
So the Notable Technical Women Project, you can find out more about it at notabletechnicalwomen.org
or you can go to our Facebook page. The Facebook page has pictures of the project as it evolves, so
there’s a picture from last night. So Susan and my daughter Jessica and I met in person for the first time
last night. We’ve actually been working on this project for nine months together, but we were working
remotely, so we’ve been skyping and connecting in lots of ways. Susan and I have been talking about
the antecedents of this project since 2013, but the three of us actually met in person for the first time
last night and the picture of us in person is up on the Facebook page, but also people send us pictures.
So one of the mentees from Kenya sent me a picture of herself, but then she sent me a note saying that
the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi has downloaded the poster and the cards and is producing them in Kenya,
because they don’t want to buy them from us and pay postage, they just want to get them out there.
And so we have those kinds of pictures. We also… if you go to Washington D.C., the Hall of Innovators
gave an award to Kristina Johnson; she’s actually… a picture of her is on the light posts in Washington
D.C. right now. Jessica was in Washington, she got a picture, we put it up on the Facebook page.
Katherine Johnson, African American NASA employee from 1952 to 1983, did the computations for the
Apollo and Mercury space launches and she just got the NCWIT Pioneer Award so we link to that. So as
we see these women being more and more acknowledged we put it up on the Facebook page. If you
want to buy decks or posters go to notabletechnicalwomen.org and that’s also where you can find all of
the information about how to do your own project. And if you want to donate decks or posters, we
started this to get decks and posters to schools and educators around the world. We did a Kickstarter—
largely Jessica did most of the work—we asked for three thousand dollars, we got fifteen thousand
dollars, we were five times funded, and we had hundreds of people saying, “This is great. I want a deck,
give five to the schools, you pick the schools.” Or, “I want a deck; send three to this school in rural New
Zealand.” And so we’ve been doing that now since we actually started in March… we made the proposal
to Hopper in February/March 2014 and it was accepted and we… and Susan presented it because I was
with TechWomen at the time. So these are some of the pictures from the cards on the left, and the
right are pictures from the technical… the TechWomen program, and it’s not kind of accidental which
pictures I picked. These are some of my mentees, so let me introduce you, because part of this is that
these are personal relationships. Mentoring is personal, it’s a personal relationship in a professional
setting and in picking role models and in picking people to honor we sort of thought about who do we
know, who do we respect, who has the credibility, who has the acknowledgements? Not just who do we
know, but who could we know who have that? And then in picking the TechWomen I started with
people that I knew would trust me to do the right thing with their picture. So Seham is a Master Trainer,
that’s actually a title in Jordan. She runs a training institute in Karak which is eighty kilometers south of
Amman, Jordan. They’re just starting a second one. Mai Temraz runs a program in Gaza where she
teaches children to build radio parts and to become ham radio operators. She’s the first woman in
Palestine… the first Palestinian woman to get a ham radio operators license, and when she was my
mentee here in the United States in the Silicon Valley, in October she passed three levels of Ham radio
license in America, so she’s the only Palestinian who has an American ham radio license, all three levels,
and she’s just started the ment… actually the two of them are working together to do the mentoring
program for Sky Geeks—Gaza Sky Geeks—which is the first incubator in Gaza and they have a mentoring
program and my mentees are running it. Sukaina and Maysoun, Sukaina is… works for the United
Nations in Beirut, she’s actually Iraqi, but her family became refugees, they ended up in Beirut.
Maysoun works for the Palestinian President; she’s the IT director for the Palestinian President. The two
of them went through the program together, the TechWomen program together. They decided to get
PhDs so they… Maysoun moved to Beirut and the two of them are just finishing up their theses now.
And then Adla Chatila is the CFO and CIO for Al_Makassed which is the group, the charitable
organization in Beirut that runs the schools in Lebanon and the hospital in Beirut. So that’s the kind of
honor… that’s the kind of thing that we’re honoring in these cards for the TechWomen and we’ll talk
more about the senior women. But our goal is to present remarkable, successful, and diverse technical
women as role models so that women and girls can see a future for themselves.
So this all started with a list. I was noodling around in about 2008 and I found a list from the University
of Bristol of famous women in computer science, and I was on the advisory board of the Anita Borg
Institute and I was sitting next to Fran Allen, the first woman Turing Award winner, and we got to
complaining that women in computer science didn’t really know what they needed to do to go forward.
And we thought, well, what if we started a project around teaching women to get awards? Well, how
do you do that? You need to have an idea of what are the steps, so we profiled six women, all of whom
are on the list now, but we said this is what they did in ten year increments in their careers so that
women who wanted to get awards and who wanted to grow their careers could see what a mature
career looked like. We worked on that from 2008 to 2010 and during that time we realized, “Wait, we
need a list, we need a list to draw from.” So I took the list from the University of Bristol and I started
adding to it. So we started with eighteen names and we added to it and added to it and we ended up…
well, right now we’re at three hundred and forty-seven, which is a good list. But we have, along the
way, we have presented twice at the Hopper Conference about the career timelines and once at the
Hopper Conference about Notable Technical Women. We’ve also… this card has been distributed twice
by the Anita Borg Institute at the Women of Vision event. We… and we are continuing to develop this
project; in particular, we’re at our third edition of the deck. From edition to edition we make changes,
like we get pictures. We start off with the pictures in Wikipedia, but not everybody’s got a picture in
Wikipedia or it might be a really, really bad picture, and so we have… when we first published the deck
for distribution at the Hopper Conference in October 2014, we had about, what… seven that were
profiles, they were just like black side—you know—pictures, but we didn’t have a photograph because
there wasn’t one on Wikipedia. And since then we have contacted those women and we’ve said, “Could
we have a picture?” or “Could we have a better picture?” So some of the pictures up on Wikipedia were
perfectly awful, and so we’d send them the picture, we’d say, “If you’re not… if you don’t send us
something better we’re going to publish with this.” And they would send us a better picture.
So how do we select who would be in the deck? So we’re talking about the senior deck right now. So
we wanted people who have had multiple acknowledgements. So if you’re a professor, you should have
had an award. Or you should maybe have been a professor at more than one institution. You could be
Ms. Wonderful for a company for thirty years and never get an award. So we didn’t, for example, add
Marissa Mayer until she left Google. She never got an award; she never held a position outside of
Google until she went to Yahoo. And when she went to Yahoo, we added her to the list, because just
one person thinking you are wonderful doesn’t mean you are on the list. So we’re looking for multiple
sources of acknowledgement, by preference, awards. And we’re also looking for diversity of experience,
of geography, of ethnicity, of where you’re from and where you’re going; all sorts of pieces of diversity
including gender identity, orientation, and ability. The first presentation of the poster was in October
2014 at Hopper. We… at Hopper, we sold out. Susan sold out; she had it at the Duke table. She sold
them and sold them and sold them and they were all gone and people wanted more. So we kicked off a
Kickstarter right then and there and we were very blessed when Barb Gee announced it at the plenary
session, eight thousand women heard, eight thousand women bought. We got massively overfunded, it
was wonderful and we have now distributed to twenty-six countries that we know of, over three
thousand cards and we just placed an order for two thousand more cards. A lot of these are going to
schools, schools in rural locations, schools like the school that Seham runs that’s in rural Jordan. We
sent five decks to them. We sent five… or seven, seven decks. We also sent seven to Mai’s radio
training school in Gaza. I carried them to South Africa and Tunisia when I went to visit earlier this year.
Other women associated with TechWomen have taken the cards to Zimbabwe, to all sorts of countries
where they couldn’t get there in the mail and we would be sure that they actually arrived. And one of
the things that people ask about when they look at the deck is they say, “How many of this? How many
women from India? How many Latinas? How many African Americans?” For example, I was at the
Maker Faire, and at the Maker Faire the USPTO, the patent and trademark office, had a booth and they
had cards of their own. One of the cards was the same as one of our cards. And so my husband saw
that, he came home, said, “You have to see this, this is cool.” So the next day I go—they bought a
deck—but they also said, “How many of the women in your deck are notable patent holders?” So we
found this group—I did a search on them—and that’s over four hundred patents just amongst them.
There may be more and… but I told them that some of these women are not going to be patent holders.
The might have existed, like Ada Lovelace exist… did her work before America, but—you know—it’s hard
to be a U.S. patent holder under those circumstances. But also, Katherine Johnson, who worked for
NASA, in her… I wrote her Wikipedia page and when I was researching that with the help of the director
of NASA Langley, we found that she probably had a justifiable case for twenty-one patents, but only one
was issued under her name because she was a woman and an African American in a time when it was
not okay for that combination of person to be a patent holder. So she has one patent, even though she
probably got twenty-one. These are all people who are from different countries. Chieko Asakawa is
based in Tokyo, although she’s currently a Fellow at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. It actually… the first
edition we didn’t have a picture of her ‘cause nobody knew where she was. It took us awhile to find her.
Your own Jennifer Chayes, and so on. That… most of these are Americans, but you’ll notice that one of
them is particularly remarkable: Radia Perlman. So Radia is remarkable in a lot of… and one of the
reasons that she’s the Ace of Spades is she’s remarkable in a lot of measures. She was a Fellow at Sun
Microsystems, she was a Fellow at Intel and now she’s a Fellow at EMC, and I happen to know how
many patents she has because she was one of the mentors in my program. But some of these people I
know, some of these people I don’t know, but you can look them all up and that’s really the kind of thing
we were looking for, was if we’re going to put people out there as role models, we want them to be
people that you can have external measures of success.
This is not all about us making decks, right? This is an open source project, it’s under Creative
Commons, we don’t make any money from this. All the money that is profit goes right back into the
program to buy more cards and more posters. But what we have found is that this is actually benefiting
the honorees, so these are some of the press that we have seen. For example—I know at least one
person can read this one—that’s from Brazil. One of the things that was really interesting is that Valerie
Taylor, when she got into the deck—what is it? She went to tell her dean and the dean was like, “Well,
that’s nice.” And then she ended up with two or three media articles about it, and she’s told us that it’s
actually helped her career. We see people putting the deck… the circumstances on their resumes, on
their web pages. We were very honored to have Business Insider print all fifty-four cards. They didn’t
just print one—here’s an example—they printed all fifty-four. And there was a lot of retweeting of that.
So here are the cards. You’ve probably been curious as to who was actually on the cards. So I
segmented them out. I did the version of this talk at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis in March, and being a
research institution I knew that they would be interested in certain categories, so I sorted them by
various categories. So along the bottom you have the ENIAC programmers. We actually have been
contacted by the son of one of the women who said that in the Wikipedia page the picture’s swapped,
and we got it swapped back, so we’re still in communication with people. So we have Ada Lovelace,
Grete Hermann, Katherine Johnson, and Grace Hopper, who all… all of whom are some of the famous
people, you know, when somebody wants to say, “Here’s a role model,” the top row are often the
people you get. In fact, I’m a blogger, I’ve been a blogger for over ten years, I have a blog that’s called,
“Getting Beyond Marie Curie,” because, I don’t know about you, but when I go to a woman’s conference
and they have an icebreaker and they have “Who do you know that’s a woman in STEM,” it’s always
Marie Curie. Does anybody know anybody else? No. If they do, it’s Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper. I’m
like, “Really? Can’t we do better than this?” Not to be nasty about those three women, but really?
Truly, we can do better. We didn’t have the Bletchley Park women, I didn’t know very much about them
at the time, so we actually have about ten people that we may be putting into another deck, that’s one
of the things that we talk about when we’re discussing what are the next steps with the project. If you
were lucky enough to get a first edition deck at the Hopper Conference, Katherine Johnson’s picture was
a drawing. That was the only picture we had that was in the public domain. I contact… I sent her a deck;
all of the honorees who are alive got a deck. I sent the deck to the director of NASA Langley who sent it
to her. Six months later her caretaker called and said, “She wants a better picture, pick one.” I said,
“Well, I have to have a member of the family or her tell me… I don’t know you—you know—I don’t think
you have a legal right to tell me I can use any picture.” And she says, “No, she says it’s fine.” So that’s
the one we agreed on. [laughter] So there’s a little negotiation on the pictures from time to time.
There’s also Government. So Ellen Ochoa mostly ends up on the list be… everybody gets excited
because she was an astronaut, and she was an astronaut, I personally get excited about her because
she’s the director of the Houston Space Center. I mean, wow, I get very excited about that. Arati
Prabhakar, head of DARPA. Kristina Johnson, who is famous for a variety of things, undersecretary of
Energy, but she’s actually right now working in an advanced hydropower project, very interesting stuff,
she’s very, very creative person. And Hessa Sultan Al Jaber, who is the IT Director or the head of IT for
Qatar and is also a professor. She’s one of the people that we have a picture of that we’ve never been
able to contact. So not all of these people do we know, but most of them we do know.
And then Entrepreneurs and Innovators, one of the questions… when people say, “How do you sort
this?” One of the questions is, “What are the companies? Where did they come from?” So Lila Ibrahim
is… did a stint at Intel, but Kleiner Perkins is where she works now, but what… when you ask, “What’s
she famous for?” It’s Coursera. So sometimes we had to pick amongst extraordinary accomplishments
of which extraordinary accomplishment would we lead from? So in the first edition we didn’t have
these little descriptors where it says, “Known for leadership and offering free online courses as a
venture capitalist and social entrepreneur.” It was one of the pieces of feedback we got from the first
edition was: just because somebody has an ACM Fellowship and an IEEE Fellowship and a Presidential
Award that doesn’t mean anybody knows who they are. So Susan and I sat down and, “Okay, what do
we say about her?” You know, and we wrote the little tag lines about each one of them. These… this
set is for entrepreneurship, starting new things. One of the questions people often ask is the Jokers,
how did we pick the jokers? Maria Klawe is a joker, she insisted, she insisted. I worked with Mitchell
Baker when she was a lawyer at Sun Microsystems before she went over to Mozilla, so I knew she would
forgive me for making her a Joker, and one of her assistants is a friend of mine so we had the
negotiation of, “Mitchell, is it okay? You’re not gonna hate me if I make you a Joker?” Different
people… we still don’t have a picture of Qiheng Hu, but different people were remarkably helpful or we
didn’t hear from them at all. So Sophie Wilson sent us six high-res pictures and said, “Pick whichever
one you like best.” And then other people, we still don’t have a picture. You’ll notice that every single
card has a really tiny type on the bottom, and that’s either the Wikipedia URL or it says, “No Wikipedia
page as of November 2014, but you can change that,” right? We’re trying to get these things written
and, as Susan said, we’re having some success at that.
In the category of Remarkable Leaders: Maria Klawe, very easy to pick as a remarkable leader;
Padmasree Warrior, Denise Denton. Genevieve Bell was the one that we kind of blackmailed, “If you
don’t give us a better picture we’ll use the one we have,” she gave us a much better picture. I didn’t
know Cristina Amon until I was doing the research and I noticed that on the Duke site where we have
the listing, the little box where it says, “known for,” for her was seriously substantial, in fact we could
have picked the deck by the size of that box, right? And she just keeps on getting things. So she’s the
University of Toronto Dean for Applied Science and Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, Spanish Royal Academy,
there’s actually about ten others that I couldn’t fit in. Maria Klawe is similar: ACM Fellow, Canadian
Information Processing Society Founding Fellow, and so on and so forth.
One of the things that we said over and over again when we presented on awards at the Hopper
Conference was: awards breed awards. If you get a major award, you’re gonna be on the list to get
more awards. Another thing that we learned was one of the members of our team—so we had Fran
Allen, and we had Bob Walker at Kent State, and we had different people both academic and from
industry, and we had a professor from the University of California who showed us the HR… well, she
didn’t show it to us, she read to us from the HR binder of the University of California that said that a
major award was equivalent to a major promotion in the University of California Professorial system. So
if you got an ACM Fellow or an IEEE Fellow it was like getting from Associate to full Professor in terms of
pay. And so one of the things that we try and do when, with this focused so much on awards, is to say,
“Don’t be leaving money on the table. Get yourself an award.” It will help in terms of money and it will
help in terms of prestige and it will help in terms of influence and it will help in that awards breed
awards. Oh, and Jennifer Chayes, when the Business Insider did the story where they had all fifty-four,
they picked her card as the focus, and I wrote her back and I said, “Hope that’s okay,” and she wrote me
back, she says, “My parents are delighted.” [laughter]
Okay, Highly Honored Experts, I didn’t know what else you call Radia Perlman, who hates to be called
the mother of the internet, and our three Turing Award winners. Duy-Loan Le who has… is not only the
first woman and the first Asian to be a Fellow at Texas Instruments, but also the same for being a Senior
Fellow, in fact, when she accepted the Women of Vision Award from the Anita Borg Institute, she said
that when she accepted the Senior Fellowship at Texas Instruments, in her acceptance speech she said,
“Not only am I the first Asian and the first woman, but I’m also the prettiest.” And then she said that
the other Senior Fellows had to go and have a vote and they did vote that she was the prettiest. So,
very organized group.
Now sometimes people say, “Why did you pick a card for a person?” We’ve talked about the Jokers, but
I’d like to talk about Fran Allen. Why did Fran Allen get to be the Queen of Hearts? Not just because she
was the first IBM woman to Fellow, and not just because she was the first Turing Award winner, but for
a very particular thing. I was at the Hopper Conference, she got an award, and as I recall there was a ten
thousand dollar purse that came with the award—I think it was the Anita Borg Institute Award. And she
handed that envelope back and she said, “Spend this money to bring three people who couldn’t come to
this conference next year, bring them from places that they couldn’t get there otherwise.” For this she
gets the Queen of Hearts. That program is thriving, it’s been picked-up by Microsoft and Google and
more and more people go every year, and she started it. By handing back ten thousand dollars and
saying, “Do something better with this than give it to me.” That’s why she got the Queen of Hearts.
Irene Greif, we have a picture now, she finally sent us a picture—much discussion, but we have a
picture. And we were still trying to get a better picture of Jean Sammet, but this is the one we’ve got.
Okay, and then Researchers and Academic Stars, we tried to get as much geographic dispersion as we
could so we have Tova Milo from Israel, we have Clarisse—did I say that right? Clarisse de Souza from
Rio de Janeiro, we have lots of folks from Canada, one from Scotland, but of course, being America, we
have lots of people who are from California, but at least from the name you can tell she probably wasn’t
born here. So we have geographic diversity, we have professional diversity; we have a wide variety of
people with the intention that more people could look at this list and think to themselves, “That could
be me. I could do that too.”
Some of these ladies are ladies that I’ve worked with. Susan Landau and I worked together at Sun
Microsystems for many, many years; Manuela Veloso and I have been on a couple of Hopper panels
together; others I’ve never actually met. We never had anybody that we contacted about this project
say, “Take me off your list.” I mean, we kind of felt a little pushy saying, “We’re gonna pick fifty-four
women and we’re gonna say they’re the best, and you’re one of them. Okay with you?” We expected
somebody to say, “No.” To say, “Oh, I am not worthy.” No, they all took it. They all said, “Yes, I stand
up. I will do this. I will be a role model.” We put it all under Creative Commons. If you want to make a
version for Microsoft, we’ve given you instructions, we’ve given you the templates, you can do it. If you
want to pay Jessica to do it, she can do that too. [laughter] But it’s all under Creative Commons. Our
intention is to make this available long term, to make these role models available so that when
somebody is looking for someone like herself, when somebody is wanting—you know—maybe they
can’t get to the Hopper Conference. I mean, TechWomen has people from Libya and Yemen who are
not gonna get to the Hopper Conference anytime soon. But we can get them a deck of cards, we can get
them a poster, we can give them something that maybe gives some encouragement. One of the things
when we give a deck or a poster to a school is that we say, “In exchange, we want a picture. We want a
picture of your students using this.” And we have pictures coning in slowly but surely from all over the
world of girls and boys interacting with the cards. And one of the things that we hear from them,
particularly when it’s young women working with the cards is they say, “It’s very hard to play with this
deck because I don’t want to put… I don’t want to lose Admiral Hopper. I don’t want her out of my
hand; I want to hold on to her. You know, so, but you have to get beyond that when you’re playing. But
we’re seeing a lot of very tender pictures of girls going up and just putting their hand on somebody and
saying, “Yeah, this one’s mine.” Role models may not be somebody that you meet; it may be just
somebody that you see, and getting that word out has been part of this project.
So this is me with two of my mentees, that’s Mai and Seham from last year, and we’re work… we
continuing to work on projects, but if you want to hear more about… if you want to know more about
me you can read my blog, Katysblog.wordpress.com or you can go find out more about my company,
Mentoring Standard. Do you have any questions? [applause]