TECH WORLD: Successful women in Science and Technology

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Women are still fighting so hard for the world to recognize the hardships they face daily and the continued urgency of the fight for gender equality. Even International Women’s Day which is celebrated March 8 every year itself is evidence of a lack of equality. Someone once asked; if women were equal members of society, would they need their own special day, or month? This day, even in its celebration, is proof of a problem. And yet, women rise.

Women break boundaries in the world of technology and science, of media and innovation, make new worlds possible, and set the stage for the future. Yes, women are fighters; they are visionaries, tireless advocates for change, progress and hope. Women have been key figures in every part of scientific and technological progress though men’s narratives still dominate. Men still hold more STEM jobs and make more of the money. Men’s issues are treated with more respect and funded at higher rates and have more power. To be a woman in science and tech and even media is often to be outnumbered, overlooked, undervalued, or harassed.

Below are the incredible women that have and still contributing to the tech world.

Margaret Hamilton – Mother of Software                          

“It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother,” WIRED wrote in a 2015 profile of Margaret Hamilton. Hamilton was working as a coder at MIT in 1960, planning to apply to graduate schools to get a PhD in math. But before she could pursue that dream, she wound up changing the world. The Apollo space program began, and Hamilton would lead the team at MIT in charge of onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. She did all this with only an undergraduate degree and while raising a toddler. Her work at the time was not only groundbreaking but radical in that it was coming from a woman. Hamilton was the ultimate outlier. Without her, the modern computing era would not be what it is today.

Fei-Fei Li – Artificial Intelligence Researcher

Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li works at the forefront of artificial intelligence. As co-director of the Stanford Human Centered AI Institute, she and her team are trying to imbue artificially intelligent algorithms with human sensitivity. This is the kind of technical work that has an invisible impact on almost all walks of life. Algorithms and other forms of AI are increasingly determining our world; they decide everything from who gets out of prison to what medication patients should take to who gets hired for which job to where your child goes to school. As such, algorithmic bias—that is, human bias that gets transferred, often unintentionally, into algorithmic systems—can undermine social progress and further stratify society. In a field with a documented lack of gender balance, Li is working to obliterate such bias, to ensure that when the computers are making decisions, they are being fair.

Jewel Burks – Entrepreneur

Jewel Burks works every day to try to make the tech industry more diverse and accessible to all people, of every gender, race, nationality, age, and socio-economic level. But Burks is a maker, first and foremost. WIRED featured her in our 25th anniversary issue as someone who will “shake up the next 25 years” of tech. She was nominated by Reddit and Initialized Capital cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who first met Burks when she launched a cutting-edge computer vision app called Partpic. Partpic lets you use a smartphone to snap a picture of a mechanical part you need to replace, and then it helps you order those parts. Though Burks had no background in computer vision, she recognized there was a need for such an app and taught herself how to build it. Partpic went on to raise more than $2 million in venture capital—especially notable given that women, and especially women of color, often face difficulty getting funded. Burks then sold the company to Amazon, where its technology is used to power replacement-part searches in Amazon’s shopping app. Burks now leads a team inside Amazon and advocates for racial and gender inclusion in her industry.

Donna Strickland – Physicist

Donna Strickland might just have the coolest job in the world. She plays with lasers for a living. Her specialty is getting lasers to pulse so brightly for a fraction of a second that they “contain more power than the entire US electricity grid,” according to WIRED’s profile of her work last year. Why were we profiling her in 2018? Oh yeah, because she won the Nobel Prize in Physics for her contributions to the field. She was the first woman to win the prize in physics in 55 years. “Obviously, we need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there,” Strickland said when she won.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman – Code Breaker

Elizebeth Friedman was one of the founders of modern cryptography, the information-security methodology that underpins everything from cybersecurity to digital surveillance. During World War II, she and her husband worked as code breakers, spying on the Nazis and helping the Allied forces win the war. Daily they intercepted and decoded messages about what the enemy was up to, arduous and technical work that resulted in the arrest of Nazi spies. For years, her husband was hailed as the sole creator of cryptanalysis, the field they pioneered together. Now she is finally getting her due, thanks in part to a 2017 biography by former WIRED writer Jason Fagone titled The Woman Who Smashed Codes. You can read an excerpt of that book here.

Cohl Furey – Mathematical Physicist

Cohl Furey’s work is so complex it’s difficult to describe, but her research has implications for the very building blocks of reality. Furey is obsessed with figuring out the mathemat­ical laws of nature. Her discoveries challenge the standard model of particle physics, revealing how octonions—eight-dimensional numbers with special properties—could be at the heart of how atoms hold together. Furey’s work builds on decades of research and seems to confirm widely held suspicions in the field about the relationship between pure math and physics. Now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, Furey could change our under­standing of how the world works.

Jennifer Doudna – Molecular Biologist

You’ve heard about gene editing and the magic “Swiss Army knife for genes” that is Crispr technology. Crispr ushered in a new era for biological sciences, driving a renewed interest in gene therapies for disease, raising the risk of “designer babies,” creating new ways to store information in DNA, and even making crazy-sounding notions like resurrecting the woolly mammoth to fight climate change maybe sort of possible. And it was co-created by two women: UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, who published their work on bacteria in 2012. (The question of who owns the patents to Crispr technology has been the subject of an intense legal battle with scientists at the Broad Institute, who six months later published work using the technique in human cells for the first time. Last fall, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of the Broad Institute.) Doudna, a WIRED 25 icon, has gone on to be a leading voice for caution in the field, urging scientists to think through the ethics of what Crispr enables before following the science wherever it could lead.

Jiwoo Lee – Stanford sophomore

Jiwoo Lee, a 14-year-old from New Jersey and a Stanford sophomore who’s studying not just the science of Crispr but also the social and ethical quandaries it raises. Jennifer Doudna helped introduce the world to the gene-editing tool known as Crispr, turned it loose on a petri dish full of lung cancer cells, disrupting their ability to multiply.

That’s why Lee wants to understand the mechanics of Crispr better before plowing into any more real-world applications. (She’s currently investigating the technique’s unintended consequences in yeast cells.) In a way, it’s the same approach that led Doudna to Crispr in the first place—the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. “When I think about the kind of science we do in my lab, we’ve always asked the ‘how’ questions,” she says. “In the end, when you understand how something works, it opens the door to different ideas.”

“In high school, I was all on the Crispr bandwagon,” says Jiwoo Lee, who won top awards at the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for her work. “I was like, Crisprize everything!” Just pick a snippet of genetic material, add one of a few cut-and-paste proteins, and you’re ready to edit genomes. These days, though, Lee describes her approach as “more conservative.” Now a sophomore at Stanford, she spent part of her first year studying not just the science of Crispr but also the societal discussion around it. “Maybe I matured a little bit,” she says.

Doudna and Lee recently met at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley to discuss Crispr’s ethical implications. “She’s so different than I was at that age,” Doudna says. “I feel like I was completely clueless.” For Lee’s generation, it is critically important to start these conversations “at as early a stage as possible,” Doudna adds. She warns of a future in which humans take charge of evolution—both their own and that of other species. “The potential to use gene editing in germ cells or embryos is very real,” she says. Both women believe Crispr may eventually transform clinical medicine; Lee even hopes to build her career in that area—but she’s cautious. “I think there’s a really slippery slope between therapy and enhancement,” Lee says. “Every culture defines disease differently.” One country’s public health campaign could be another’s eugenics.

Susan Fowler – Writer and Former Engineer

Susan Fowler’s most famous contribution to technology happened when she left the industry. She’d been working as a programmer at Uber, but after facing discrimination and sexual harassment, which the company dismissed, she quit her job and in 2017 published a blog post detailing her experience. That post sparked a national conversation about how women are treated in the tech industry. And it took guts. In the wake of her post, more women came forward with stories of harassment in the tech world. Uber hired former US attorney general Eric Holder to review its policies and culture; shortly after Holder’s recommendations were released, Uber’s CEO resigned. While many tech companies, including Uber, have updated their harassment policies, the changes come too late for some women. Fowler now works as a writer at The New York Times.

Betty Holberton, and the women who programmed the first true computer

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer didn’t look anything like computers of today. It weighed 27 tons and comprised 1,800 vacuum tubes and diodes. But ENIAC was the world’s first computer, and it was conceived as a way to help the war effort during World War II. Since most men were overseas fighting, a team of six women ran ENIAC: Betty Holberton, Kay Mauchley Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum, Jean Bartik, and Frances Spence. They continued to work on it as the Cold War raged, using its computing power to help design a thermonuclear warhead. Holberton went on to codevelop one of the earliest programming languages, without which the internet and modern digital computing would not be possible. But the contributions of these six programmers went largely unrecognized for decades, until a Harvard student researching women in computing rediscovered them in 1986.

Holberton’s work, ENIAC, and other women whose contributions shaped the internet age are highlighted in the book Broad Band, whose author, Claire L. Evans

Culled from https://www.wired.com

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