If you ask most people to name a famous person associated with the internet, they will probably say Tim Berners-Lee. He did create the World Wide Web, but without the work of Radia Perlman, Elizabeth Fienler and Karen Spark-Jones, it would not be half as useful to the everyday person. Let my talk introduce you to 10 women who helped shape the technology we use today and explain why not forgetting them can help us find more hidden voices in our day-to-day lives and use their ideas to move us forward.
For the past forty years, fewer women have enrolled in technology courses. Several articles pinpoint 1984 as the year that enrolment dropped off in a steep decline. There were several factors to this drop off, including just a general view that women did not belong in the field, with Steven Levy labelling them “horribly inefficient and wasteful things” in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.