Publicly express appreciation to this evening sponsor, Teresa Crawley dds. [applause] dont get carried away. Shell, you know. [laughter] obviously, i could do this privately come and i have, but i would like to say a public thank you to tarry for her sport terry for her support for her advice over the years, including topics. Suggestions, so would you please stand up . Tonight speaker, claire l. Evans, has achieved notable success both as a musician and as a writer. In the former career, she is the lead singer and cofounder of the conceptual pop group yacht and has recently returned from a tour in europe with that group. But it is her second career as an expert in the area of technology that brings her to us tonight. Cannot regard, she is the former future editor of motherboard and a contributor to vice, the guardian, and wired, among other publications. She is, for example, the Founding Editor of terraform, a sciencefiction article. The thing that particularly commends her to our attention and brings are here tonight is a book she has just written. Ill say more about that in a second, but she has lectured widely about science fiction, art, and technology around the world in such venues as the new museum of contemporary art, Arizona State university, uc, university of california berkeley, herschel museum, and the Riverside Museum of art in beijing among many others. She lives in los angeles where she runs the l. A. Centric culture app. One of the accomplishments that brings her here is her book titled broad band the untold story of the women who made the internet. Published in 2018. One read of that work had this to work to say. Thrilling, powerful stuff. At once an electric feminist history of modern tech and a muchneeded corrective to the hyper valley mythology of Silicon Valley. Her readable work restores credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Said another evansriveting account of female and innovators from the victorian age to today fills in the gaps in the history we should have had all along and provide unique, enlightening insight into some of the most revolutionary technological advances of our time. The comment on that book that i like the best is this one. This is a quote. Claire evans tells a story like a friend who knows you get bored easily. [laughter] it is a generous sort that pulls the reader in. Welcome with me the multitalented claire evans. [applause] hello. Hi, everyone. Im so excited to be here and i know it is a scoop spooky time to be gathering in public so i doubly recognize you for being here in a room with other human beings right now. I hope we are all washing our hands but beyond that, i am very grateful to be part of this auspicious series of lectures about our collective history. First, ive got to start up the old hard drive before i can Start Talking here. I will do something a little different tonight and is customary for the series. Im not going to be talking about a single individuals contribution to history, but rather talk about a collective of people thats me in my best steve jobs outfit. A collective of individuals over a couple of generations spanning a couple of years. I did this for two reasons. One, tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed, often coalesces among multiple emergent paths and not so much in a clear and linear way, but i also know because i am trying to tell a feminist story and to me, the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. It is something a little more nuanced. One that reflects the collective nature of our efforts, our shared goals, and the many subtle ways we influence each other as we go about our lives. Why tell the feminist history of computing at all . For me, it is personal. I am 35, an old millennial, and i grew up in a home that was full of computers. My dad works for Intel Corporation and we always had computers and home. I never felt growing up that computers were for boys or for girls anymore than i thought the television or the toaster was for boys are for girls. It was just an appliance that was in the house. It happened to be an appliance that can transport you to other worlds, as you can see clearly from me as a little girl playing the cdrom game mistt that i was so obsessed with i forced my father to fill me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. But i loved the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside a story, but because it took me across the world. Thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over the world, which was a radically invigorating thing for an introvert and only child. I grew up feeling the World Wide Web was kind of my native country. It was a place where i got find my identity as a young person, learned how to write, learned how to learn, learned how to forge connections with others. It was really a place i thought of as being my home and my country. Something happened in my adulthood between the time this video was taken and the time i stand before you now, and that is that ive changed, of course, but the weather changed social and its web changed too and it felt more inhospitable to meet him when i was young. It felt more inhospitable to me as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe, it stopped being fun, and it stopped feeling like home. I began to ask myself, had i always been wrong . Had this ever been my country . I looked at the past, as you do. I talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry in the first wave of the web and i researched the history of women in computing. In doing so, i found a lot of things. I found a lineage. I found a great of radical grip of radical tech mothers we can all emulate, indie version of the established history that was different than what i have been told. A version which wasnt necessarily just about people like steve jobs and bill gates, but rather about a great number of untold heroes and heroines. The thing i found that was most important, i think, was and i dont know how to say this, really, but i found the seeds of a different future. Well get to that. We should probably start at the beginning. Like the very beginning. The history of women in computing is very long. For the sake of brevity, ive chosen 1892 as our starting point. Lets imagine it is the year 1892 and for the sake of argument, you live in new york city. For context, in january of that year, a new Immigration Processing Center ellis island was open for business and in march, the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor who wanted to keep stir crazy young people from hanging out indoors. Winter is over now and is the first of may. Just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. It is long before the screen, the byte, the mouse, the pixel but before any of this, there is a notification in the classified pages of the new york times. Computer wanted. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. It wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone transported to the gilded age. Whoever placed this ad was looking for a computer to hire, not a computed br to buy. A computer was a person, a job, someone who performs computations for a living. The same is true for the word calculator. First, you have to take a math test and if you did well enough, on the first day of the job, you would be placed at a seat on a long table Something Like this and spend your whole day working on complicated largescale mathematics problems. You wouldnt work alone, you couldnt, because the problems you would be tackling would be much too large for any individual to handle. Instead, he would break those down into bitesize pieces and work collaboratively with people come across first cross referencing each others work and crunching numbers in parallel. Together with pen and paper, maybe a tabulating machine, you would advance ballistics or maritime navigation or astronomy or pure mathematics. You would form the underlying copy additional infrastructure of the early scientific age. You would embody it, quite literally. You would make science possible. Computing offices like these word from higher places of learning. They were kind of like stinking factories. Charles babbage called what computers did mental labor. That is a pretty good way of thinking of it. Computing wasnt seen as requiring a lot of intellectual talent for sophistication. It was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you did with your arms. Ultimately, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics trajectories for the u. S. Army. They assisted numerical studies on the manhattan project, crunched astronomical data at harvard, crunched cracked nazi code. They did have one thing in common and i think it is easy to guess what that is. They were all women. Thats right. Commuting computing was so much a womans job that by the time computing machines can long, mathematicians populated how long they took the process problems in girl years or described units of machine labor in terms of kilo girls, which is pretty remarkable in which. From the beginning the women were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. Charles pickering needed an arsenal of computers for stellar data in his lab and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilhelmina fleming. He didnt do this because of some desire to nurture women in his life. He did it because he had a lot of data to process and he needed to employ twice as many workers to code through it all. Women were paid half as much so he could get more for his buck. The harvard computers, who are known to history as pickerings harem, his maid discovered the horse head constellation. These were prodigiously talented at what they did but their wages were equivalent to unskilled workers, between . 25 and . 50 an hour, which is more than a factory worker but less than a clerical worker. Women were not the intelligent workers of synthetic men, and were desk workers earning their way for their skills and numbers. That might have been common in the 19th century, but things change in wartime. The major wars have always affected gender and work. The American Civil War brought battlefield widows into office work and the first and second world wars ushered thousands of women into the workplace, most famously as mechanics but also as typists, clerks, telephone operators, primarily. Telephone companies with first major employers of a female workforce. In 1891, just one year before that computer wanted ad, 8000 women worked for the Telephone Companies by 1946, nearly a quarter million. Women were capable of working collaboratively, in fluid networks. We still talk about secretarial pools. These are female bodies and minds serving as the physical infrastructure for an emerging technological age. Patching networks which are patched electronically by bots and Automated Systems and, of course, ai, many of which still speak by default and female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear roughly around the 1940s although in some domains, notably in aeronautics, important cancellations continued to be done by hand and checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally dissolved its human computing division. Sound work programming the machines which emerged in the Computer Science research during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. These machines, the earliest electromechanical computers, were developed in secret during the war to crunch numbers for the war effort, primarily to run ballistics for the boys at the front. The first people hired to operate these machines were the women who had already been doing that work for centuries before hand, but basically the work of catalytic ballistic trajectories by hand. Because software wasnt really seen a something that was more important than handling punchcards and paperwork like a secretary or doing math like a computer, programming was a job that was given to women without much thought. Of course, these women accepted the work gladly because here was finally something they could do with their Mathematics Education that wasnt just becoming a teacher or becoming a secretary. Except, of course, that operating one of these computers was not at all a simple proposition. These were the first of their kind. There was no precedent, there was no instruction manual. There was no information about how to run the things. They were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an afterthought. When the mathematician grace hopper, who had a phd from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark when computer at harvard in 1944, she was given no extracts instruction and she reverse engineered the machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wiring diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood the workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers who had built the machine. The same was true for the six women assigned to the first electronic programmable computer by the u. S. Army at the university of pennsylvania. Here, were talking about programming at the machine level. When you talk programming now competing sitting at the program, typing symbols. This is not what programming was in the 1940s. This is a computer the size of the room. To program a machine like this, you had to crawl around inside this giant room sized machine making an ephemeral connections in time with patch cables and punchcards. It was something that was very physical, replacing burnedout vacuum tubes, and fixing shorted elections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished setting up, it could run differential calculus equations, but these women were officially classified in their employment as being so subprofessional. Sub professional. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1946, the women who operated it were never introduced and although the mathematical demonstrations, and it ran, especially for its first public demonstration of the press, or completely programmed and put on the computer by women, none of them were mentioned in any of the subsequent articles. Contact come the emphasis and a lot of the early press about it was it was this miraculous machine made by brilliant men that could process problems in 15 seconds, not a knology and weeks of labor that went and is setting up those problems and devising how they do work on the machine. In some historical images, they are credited as models and cropped out of the images entirely. Let me introduce them to you now. Although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contributions, i think eniac 6 would make a infernal girl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here all girl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here. During the war and shortly after, software wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. What these women did was referred to as coding or operating, like a telephone operator. One of the eniac 6 called their job a cross between an architect and a construction engineer. There was no name for what they did or no clear definition. It comes pretty close to defining what programming is like even today. It was through the work of women like betty snyder and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the stateoftheart, how it would work both during and after the war that programming became something with its own value, a value that was separate from the menial manipulation of hardware for. Because of them, it became many languages. It became an art form. After the war, grace hopper and her peers went on to careers in the early computer industry, heading up the programming teams of the very first commercial Computer Companies in the u. S. Emcc was responsible for the univac, synonymous with the word computer in the 1950s. People said univac to mean computer in the 1950s. Because the only world in the world who knew how to program are women, they ran the Software Side of things entirely. They headed the Software Side of the operation. They did the univacs logical design, wrote its construction set, custom programs for every client at every installation and debugged those programs when necessary. It was a huge workload and it is because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women like grace hopper and her contemporaries first started bush the art of programming forward by looking for ways to streamline what was becoming a tedious and complex process. During the war, they had coded at the machine level using the most elemental instruction sets. After the war, because of their workload, they began to develop the idea of automatic programming, which is a fancy way of saying programmers should be able to step above that machine level and with the help of intermediaries like assemblers and compilers and generators, be able to code a higher level of abstraction. The process of writing programs that could write other programs to make it easier for human beings and machines to interact. That move toward systems level thinking changed the industry completely and influenced its entire development. Grace hopper spearheaded the effort to create one of the earliest and most important shared computer languages, cobalt, the common businessoriented language, which is nobodys favorite language today, and is partially responsible for the y2k crisis. But it did the job of opening up computing to another generation. The grace hopper and many of her contemporaries understood that computing as it originally developed could never continue to develop different remained in the purview of experts. If it remained in the hands of a shadowy priesthood of coders. Grace wanted to see programming made accessible to as many people as possible regardless of Technical Knowledge and new that could only be possible if users, humans, could communicate with computers using Something Like natural language, not just numbers but recognizable words. If that language was hardware independent, meaning it could run as easily on ibm machine as it could univac. This interoperability regardless of expertise is something that comes up again and again in the history of women and computers and what i would like to emphasize to you today as being one of the primary contributions women make. I mentioned at the beginning of this talk to women i came across in writing this book are the seeds of different future. It sounds highfalutin but i mean that. I cant tell you how many times i found myself reading about a technology or an approach to technology or philosophy that hadnt been implemented early enough that scale, been listened to, would fundamentally have changed how we operate today. These women arent just role models, not the sticker book characters of cool, bass ladies from history. They are glimpses of another way of being and another way of building things that is amicable to the world we live in. We will jump significantly forward in history from the 1950s to the 1980s. Otherwise, we will never get through it all. This is my friend, stacy horn. When this photo was taken in 1989, she had just founded an Online Community. 1989 is before the World Wide Web, so in those days, online generally meant a Bulletin Board system is exactly what it sounds like. A tech window you would call on the phone and read conversations similar to a Bulletin Board in the back of a coffee shop. The well is often cited as being the first social network. The well was deeply embedded in the technological culture of the bay area and populated mostly by guys, mostly working in the tech industry, mostly emerging from this technoutopian commune list 1970s attitude about technology and alienating to someone like stacy who was a new yorker, a real, cynical new yorker and she could buy all this hippie stuff. And she started her own machine never wanted to talk about computers. She couldnt understand how you logged into a Service Using a Service Using the computer you had to talk about computers. She wanted to connect with people and talk about theater, writing, art, and the things she didnt care about. She didnt want to talk about specs or hardware. She founded echo, the east coast hangout, one of the first social networks on the east coast of the u. S. Ecowas really gen x, cynical, snarky intellectual, and funny. She didnt run it in some office funded by big telecom money. She ran it in Greenwich Village surrounded by 20 figurines of gumby and photos of friends. Which is fascinating, but what makes her interesting to my history is that echo was founded at a time in 1989 when the percentage of female users on the internet was vanishingly low. Rapidly 10 to 15 , which effectively means if you were a woman signing onto the early internet in one of its many guises, youd usually get a lot of undue attention if you use to female alias. A lot of female years of the early internet would use genderneutral or mail aliases to avoid trouble, which made it hard for women to find one another in these early social spaces of the internet. We didnt know who anybody was which was part of what was beautiful about the early internet. The rich anonymity of it all. It also made it difficult to form a community with people you were looking to find. Echo, during a time when the entire internet was 10 female, almost had gender parity. She was at 40 female users, which made it one of the earliest spaces online to be hospitable to women in any way. Although stacy always resisted the idea she created a safe space for women. Bite me, she wrote in 1998. I wanted to get women on echo to make it better, not as some concession to women, a refuge, accommodation to a vulnerable population. She understood diversity isnt some favor you do to the under representative, it is an asset that serve the entire community. She was building a system predicated on healthy and exciting communication. She was building a social network and knew if there was more perspective, it would be a more exciting, dynamic conversation and that translated to a better product and it was. Anyway, she had all those he know users because she was actively trying to court women to come online. Women didnt come online in large numbers and should pass the male population of Internet Users until the World Wide Web, significantly later. She would do stuff that was out of the box. She would recruit people from nontechnical spaces that go to Art Galleries and happenings and shows in new york city and find interesting looking people and try to convince them to do the thing that sounded insane at the time, which was spent 100 on a modem and join her fledgling Online Community. If a woman left her service, she would call her personally and ask her what happened. She made access to women free for an entire year. She gave womens groups their own areas of service, she created private spaces on her network which allowed women to communicate with each other in the absence of men the way women do sometimes in the absence of men and also report instances of harassment, if necessary. She taught out of Greenwich Village so a lack of knowledge would be an inhibition. This is her on charlie rose in 1994, teaching charlie rose how to use echo, ever the teacher. Her main strategy for recruiting female users wasnt just an outreach, which worked really well, but was baked into the design of her system. Back in those days, online communities were always moderated by host. We still kind of have this on the internet they were users of the service who were deputized and given free access to the service in exchange for the responsibility of moderating conversation. Although we still have some corners of the internet that have a host like this, most of this role has been outsourced to contract workers. A shadow world of traumatized employees that are viewing the worst of humanity all at once. Every conversation always had to hosts. A man and a woman. Sometimes logging onto the internet for the very first time, you immediately see yourself represented. This made women less reluctant to jump in and enter the conversation. It was a very a gala terry and space. This still exists today. This is what it looks like. She never made the jump to the World Wide Web. She never even indulged in the idea when the first web browser came along, she could not afford to create a hypertext interface. She had a paid service that people dial into. She never got rich. She never got famous. Her accomplishment remains massive. She achieved gender parity on a almost completely male dominated internet. And her platform has remained online for decades. It nurtures a small but devoted family of users. She cared enough to keep it that way. What her legacy represents to me is a different kind of care. It is not caring about, it is carrying after. Caring for. Continuing the commitment. Moments of the pitch beyond the tedious everyday realities. This is something at our culture associates with women. The professional realms that are so shaded with this kind of work. Tend to be filled with people, often with women who skills are not seen as being technical skills. Associated with this kind of work tend to be filled with women whose skills are not seen as technical. Care is very much a technical skill. You have to go beyond simple metrics of growth and user acquisitions and market share. Consider bigger implications like mental health, community, civic life, society at large. We live in a world we were dealing with consequences of tools which are tearing up our social fabric. What it means to, work to live in the city, changing our way of life. And social skills are essential in all of this. By social skills, i dont mean vetting along with people, i mean being able to see a technical object as an extension of and enmeshed with a larger social context in a world of users who are people. And who care about those people. I know that Something Like echo cannot realistically compete it represents to me a great lost opportunity. What if the architects of our present day social media platforms, staceys inheritors, had made the kinds of efforts and representation and Mutual Respect that stacy had, without fanfare, but it seems the right thing to do. What if those values had revoked and baked into the way we make things, after people have already been hurt. What i be standing here for how for me the web is not fun anymore how it doesnt feel like home anymore i dont think so. The thing is, stacey is not an outlier. You are looking for women in the history of technology, it really does help to look first in those places where users are especially cared for. It gives way capital, community, and metrics give way to meaning. I will give you another example. This is another scintillating photograph from the 19 eighties of wendy hall. She is the female the quibble lint of a night hood. When this photo was taken she was a lecturer at the university in the uk. Her field, initially was pure mathematics. Not Computer Science, until she discovered something called hypertext. If we think about hypertext at all today, we think about it in the context of the World Wide Web. The web is written and hypertext language and you have those blue hypertext links. In the days before the wig, back to the 1960s, hypertext was the larger study and practice of connecting ideas, images, social media documents together and Computer Systems for connections. That was already kind of a utopian big deal in a way. As technology progressed and memory increased and the information that could actually be recalled grew and grew, hypertext grew more complex, and its implications that we can swindle connect everything together became something of a utopian cause. But wendy had been turned into hypertext in the mid eighties, through this totally occur in a stick weird british computer system. Spell dumb stay because its another story that we can talk about later. The doomsday project was a country wide project called the acorn Computer Company to digitally document british life. Released in 1986 as to video laser discs this could play only on this one specific computer. But this case were full of all this interesting material. Its all available on archives and online. It had stuff like virtual walks on the british countryside images of british. Cities maps and firstperson accounts. By british schoolchildren what made this interesting to her was not all of this material. But how it was navigated this is a glimpse of what the interface looks like. This was before the web taught us to pointandclick get images in recognizable areas. This was novel to walk around the screen using visual cues. It made all of the impersonal seeming data. Feel intuitive. It made it comprehensible to people outside of Computer Science. She realized it might make this an Accessible Information accessible to a large number of people. This idea of accessibility. It felt revolutionary and exciting. She decided to throw herself into this field of hypertext. Her colleague in the Mathematics Department and later the Computer Science department told her about it. She made it possible for people to Browse Library materials. She began. With the archive at her University Library her team had built entire system. It demonstrated this new and exciting and intuitive way of accessing information it was not like the web. In many ways it was better. This is what a paid what page look like in 1992. Links, hyperlinks are contextual. They are embedded in the documents. Which means effectively when the destination of a link is taken down, we get what is called the web is full of 404 errors. The average lifespan of a website is nine years. This is not insignificant when we get a 4 04 or it means the piece of information is gone forever. This is not in significant information. That is meaning, that is context. That is the essence of what makes knowledge knowledge. A microcosm didnt do this. It kept all the links separate in the database called the link base. But it effectively did this all the links and microcosm were able to communicate with the underlying documents without making a mark on them. It served as an overlay rather than a structural change to the material. Information. A link could have many different. Destinations it could go into directions. Different players could happen. The system was designed to be adaptable to people and to encourage natural human learning and connection. It valued that most important piece. The nature of the connection between things. Again web bad microcosm good. There were a lot of systems like this in the late 80s and early 90s. They were coming out of Research Labs like apple and ibm. They do not look that glamorous now. But they were exciting and different ways. Hypertext as a discipline were welcoming people from outside of traditional classic Computer Science backgrounds. If you went into an early hypertext conference in the 80s or 90s you would be surrounded by humanists, historians, but wendy calls it was an all just hard nosed engineers and programmers it was people interested in making meaning out of data. All of these systems shared that value. This idea that the association between people was the most important thing. It was so much what the discipline was about. When he presented the very first demonstration of the World Wide Web at the hypertext 91 conference in san antonio, which was the first time the web was shown in the u. S. , his paper was not even accepted. He had to bring his own demo on his own 10,000 computer. Even then, most people were highly disinterested in what he was showing them. They saw the links were all contextual and embedded into the documents, that mean that could actually break. What good is a hyperlink if they were so limited and could easily break. On top of that it was built on the backbone of the internet which was highly cost prohibitive in the time. Easily breakable, how complex system. If you look at these women in the photo they are not having it. In one detail about this story that is so wonderful is that because this comfortable was held in the summer in san antonio texas, one of the prime diversions after the conference was over was a massive margarita found in the courtyard outside. The very first time the World Wide Web was being shown to scholars in the u. S. , everybody was outside getting drunk on margaritas. Nobody cared. There is a margarita on the table. This person just wandered in from the courtyard with a margarita in hand. It is such a snapshot. We all know what happens with the web. It very quickly outpaced everything in the hypertext world. By 1992 tim published the first image to ever be clicked in a web browser which happened to be a photo of a due up band. It was a group of female employees at the certain lab who sang satirical songs about life in a lab. This is not hugely related to the history but i had to share this music video. It gives you a taste of how amazing they were. There is a lot of these videos on youtube i highly suggest them. It is delightful. Anyway that being said. Obviously after this came everything else. The web became standard. By 1994 tim was giving a keynote at the hypertext conference and from that moment forward the web conference and hypertext conference were held in the same week. The more sophisticated high Protection Systems like wendy hauls incredible microcosm system which is highly superior to the web in many ways quickly became a thing of the past. There is no way for us to know if Something Like microcosm could have replaced our web just like there is no wait for us to know what would have happened if Something Like echo had enough funding to make the transition to the World Wide Web and became our foundational social network. If that does not stop me from dreaming about it. Thats what i mean about the different futures that some of these womens stories present this with. They demonstrate to meet very vividly just how many other paths have laid before us throughout this history. Just as many paths late still lay before us if we could only look for them. It is important to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. New technologies do not fall from the sky unbidden. They emerge from a continuum of ideas. The worldwide web could not have existed without the decades of Research Done by scholars, mostly women, in the ideas and convention of lincoln. Social media as we experience it today could not exist without decades of experimentation and Online Community building from pioneers on the early internet, on platforms long gone and some of which who are still with us. Tech history, like much history, is often told to us as a story of solitary genius working alone. We know about tim burners lee, bill gates and steve jobs. Of course these people are remarkable people. But theyve never been alone. Theyve always been surrounded by people and ideas because making big things requires big communities that is what is so exciting about technology. Its also what makes things so difficult to see where they come from. Also where they might lead. While we do not see the multiplicity of all this we leave out a huge part of the story, a beautiful part of the story. We make it so much harder for all of these other versions of the established history to work their influence on our world and help us to make it better. Machines of course can now perform infractions of a second what would take a human computing office many years to complete. For a few centuries, women working together were hardware. They were the hardware. Distributed biological machines capable of calculations beyond the power of any single individual. These calculations catalog the cause most. They tried the stars. They measured the world. The computer as we know it today is named after the people it replaced. And long before we came to rely on the network as a fundamental part of our lives, our grandmothers and great grandmothers did performing the functions the brought this existent about. In the sixties women were half the workforce and computing, they arent 40 of the degrees until 1984 when the number started to dive and kept diving. Since then, the industry has found many cunning ways to edge women out of the picture, none of which would be surprising to you. Wage disparity of course. Lack of mentorship. Structural unwillingness to make space for childcare. As well as a shift in professional credentials and educational requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. Technology historians suggest that the professionalization of the field of computing led to its implicit masculinization. If it began as something that was womens work, it had to be made masculine through various implicit and explicit efforts. Most notably in effort industry wide in the late 1960s to rename Programming Software engineering which came with its own connotations and expectations of certain educational requirements and professional requirements that were more conducive to men. This has made it more difficult for women to keep their to hold in the industry and it seems to have set a male dominated precedent which has been reinforced by decades of marketing and misconception. If you are someone who was interested in buying or reading about computers in the seventies you would see ads like this. You would search any Library Archive or historical articles. They were wildly sexist in a number of ways. You might also see products like these, the honey well kitchen computer. It was marketed to women as something that could help them organize the recipes in the household. More condescendingly, it came with at copy like this. If you can only cook as well as honey wealth can compute. Extravagantly condescending language. An entire generation of people grew up with this as a kind of default. Im a little bit younger so i grew up with things like this. I did not know. This is the movie weird science which is about a bunch of good boys who designed the ideal woman on a computer. When i was a kid that was a lot of the image around computing. It was something for boys. Something that boys liked to do. Something that boys were naturally good at. Something the boys enjoyed and girls did not. It was something that made people believe that men are somehow natural in the realm of computing and women are at best accessories to it. Its like propaganda. Its a lie. Its not true. Its an anachronism. Many of us are proof. So if you remember nothing else from this top, and i dont blame you if you forgotten everything about the pro hypertext history or automatic programming. Please remember this, if there is a boy club the dominates Silicon Valley today, it is a bona fide historical anachronism. I genuinely believe in a technological world, technological histories are important. If women and girls are able to see themselves in the dna of our planets most transformative technologies as they well should, then they can see them themselves more easily in its future. I write about history and do not know much about the future but theres one thing i know for sure. If youre going to survive it, and dare say restart it, we will need all the help we can get. Thank you. applause thank you. We will take some questions. If you will raise your hand, we will get to as quickly as we can. Do you have a question . Here we go. Thank you. I soon the purpose of your top is to say that a womans brain is as good as a mans brain. I assume that is what you are trying to say . I would hope so. Intellectually. But halfway through, it looked to me like, maybe you will disagree, the lady stacey, who was selling her product echo, was using sex to sell it. Was that true or not . The picture of her, stacy. Was that a sexual picture . Oh sitting on the table . I mean, sure. I dont think it is a particularly sexy picture. I think it was an edgy picture. She was popular in the 90s. I would not say it was a particularly sexy picture. But that being said, a woman can be sexy and intelligent at the same time. She can use whatever she likes to sell her product. Okay go ahead. Not so much a question but some trivia about grace hopper. In the eighties, she was promoted to one star rank of commodore. That is the time when pcs were deployed everywhere. The ibm, radio shack, and the commodore computer. And some quarters, she was referred to as the computer commodore. You mentioned earlier her work as a compiler, assemblers. Trying to take a simple english language and use a machine to translate things into language that computers can work with. She was so focused on making that connection and communicating to people. Among other things, whenever she had a public display, she would distribute what she would call an nanosecond. A nanosecond is and her the distance it takes the speed of light to travel in a nanosecond. It is about 12 inches. So she distributed these as a way to communicate to people that when you see tv reporters talking to each other and there is some delay in the conversation, it is because of satellite transmissions taking time. Clearly, she was a real rule breaker. She trained and tell the people who worked on her team to break the rules that were in the navy and still observe the chain of command. The final rule that she broke was after she retired, she insisted, whenever she went out in public, to wear her uniform. She was so proud of serving their country and that was against the rules. She was one of the greats. One of the interesting thing about her early career was when she was first given a computer, she was entering a male dominated environment. They referred to the computer as a she, like a it was very clipped and rule bound. Ultimately, the uniforms was a structure of hierarchy really effective and dissolving gender boundaries that existed. Everybody was the same and working towards a common cause which ultimately was a benefit of hers, part of why she was so attached to it. She was one of the greats, obviously. Clare, we have a question here. Thank you for your top. It was really wonderful, having a bunch of grand daughters, hoping to lead them into the future, could you name some of the women that you think are an inspiration today and leaders in the tech world that you think we should follow . I would appreciate that, thank you. Of course. Most of my heroes are old school, but there are plenty of really interesting women. I have a good friend named tracey chao. She is an Amazing Software engineer working on a software called block party. It allows women to block party it allows women to block people who harass them. I like the idea. I like the idea of taking those problems that are handed down to us by a model Cultural Company that are not thinking about the implications of tools that they make and finding ways to create your own solutions to them. That is a beautiful way of handling the complexities. I should hope that your granddaughters will be people that i could cite in lectures. Hi clare. Thank you so much for coming. I am such a big fan of yours. Im wondering if you could expand on a point you made earlier about how most of the eight eye that we have is foist by females. Also, you put out a track a wild back called party in the nsa. I wonder how we got this widespread acceptance of surveillance in our homes. Things like google home, voice assistance and such things. Great question. I was surprised when i was doing research for this book to discover there is a clear edge between female operators and the way we are accustomed to hearing female voices on the other side of the phone like operators, gps is, a systems. Announcements and train stations, airports. It often tends to be female voices. Some people say that both men and women respond more positively to a female voice in that context. I dont know if that is true. I heard female voices cut through ambient sounds. I dont think that is true. I think it is a Cultural Association we had now have. I think it is important for us to begin to deconstruct that quickly, especially with conversations with a i, like siri and alexa and all these tools. They are sort of teaching us to automatically assume that the voices will be subservient to our commands. Especially kids, what are we teaching them . That sort of ambient, helpmates that are floating around the house. That is one problem. I recently interviewed a woman who was working on the team that is developing google assistant, and what she thought about that. The builtin system where kids have to say please before they get anything. I dont think it gets to the root of the problem, or making a male voice will get to the root of the problem. But having conversations about how do we design a neutral a i. How does that come through . These are important questions that we should be did thinking about. There are big design problems that next generation designers should be tackling. What is more exciting and designing a voice of an art chief attorney Artificial Intelligence machine. An opportunity to interface in a very intimate way and create social precedents for the way that we communicate with each other and the machines. It is a great opportunity. The flip side of course is surveillance. It is genuinely very scary and i dont have an intellects in my house it gives me that he be gbs. I know i have syrian my phone, it is inescapable. What are we living into our homes . What are we becoming okay with . I think it is a slippery slope for sure. Hi. My question is somewhat similar. Do you think that bias towards a is contributed through that sexism . Things like alexa and siri are brought up, but i see it in film. A lot of ai women are portrayed in a sexist way, where men can be, like there are interfaces, basic humanoid figures . I think it is interesting to me that the most prevalent a i architect we have in film are sexy lady boards, or scary murderous southeast sociopathic men boards. That might be a larger problem about how we think about gender and our society. And a lot of cases we cannot tackle some of these tech problems until we tackle till we look in the mirror. First i hope that there are Technical Solutions to social problems. I think we need to work on ourselves that being said i do think some parts of film and cinema is a really important sight for educating the public about what a technology is. We have a Widespread Lack of literacy about what ai is and how it works. Its based on the idea that it is this sociopathic conversational voice. Even thinking about in ai in such an anthropomorphic way is detrimental to our understanding of how the technology functions. A series of highly specified mathematical operations for classifying data. Its way less sexy but we need to find ways to tell stories that actually represents a for what it is and actually represents the things that are genuine early genuinely scary about ai. Where that were going to reiterate the inherent biases in our data and inflict them on a new generation of people. All of that stuff is way scarier to me then Something Like sky net. I think we have a lot of work to do and i think there may be some more robust conversation between computer scientists and filmmakers, artists and writers to tell a better story about the future. A question from one of my students. This is a jump to the past kind of a guess. Do you have any information about aida lovelace . You cannot write a book and computing without starting with her. Shes one of these characters that is trotted out in this context. Im not sick of her, i love her. Shes a fascinating character. But the whole few first chapters of my book are about her. In a larger context, aida lovelace was the daughter of the poet lord bayern. She was a great mathematician in her own right. She had the same kind of poetic sensibilities as your father. She is responsible for writing the first computer program, 150 years ago, before the computer was imagined as a speculative machine. Shes the first person to understand what that computers could process information beyond just numbers. She made consensual leaps and computing in which computers may operate on music or colors and more abstract entities. It took a really long time for us to catch up to it. Were beginning to understand that no. Do you have a question over there . Oh andy. Okay andy. Obviously you grew up with technology from the time you could walk. My question is, i think we are all marveling as we get our smartphones now and you click to agree to the terms and so forth. Its kind of like your smartphone knows what you are doing. How do you think that will affect society . The fact that our privacy is anticipated. There is a couple of ways of thinking about that. One, our smartphone does not know what we are doing. But the people who are building the software that our smartphone runs on certainly know what we are doing because they are tracking all of our Consumer Habits and tracking what we brows and look at, how long we look at it, what part of the page we look at, whether we open our emails are not. Everything is quantified down to the individual second of our time. Im more afraid of the people who build those tools knowing a lot about me rather than the tool itself. It is scary to me that we have traded privacy for convenience pretty much wholeheartedly as a culture. But it is really difficult. We tend to go for the path of last least resistance. Were trying to connect with other people. Were trying to have the conveniences of the world. Were trying to get places and use maps. Were doing all the things that we do not because we are oblivious to what has happened. Its because we want to be part of the larger world. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is giving up a large measure of our privacy. I dont know if thats a good deal that we have made. It seems to be a deal we have collectively made. I think the Tech Companies are profiting enormously from that. You said something that really sounded scary to me which was making sure that we say police to relax like we are going to hurt her feelings. I noticed that is a Common Thread where you have to constantly treat and machine better and the machine needs food like you do and are you hurting the machines feelings. Should there be some kind of cap . Maybe a protocol or something to make sure that we do not have to treat machines like they have feelings. That always seems to be where they get out of control. I think when we say pleased to alexa its not so much for alexis benefit but for hours. We do not want to get into the habit of being demanding. We want, especially to ingrained in our kids Healthy Habits of boundaries and being respectful to others. If their interactions with alexa are forming their young brains into thinking that is how you behave with other people, you better make sure that respect is built into that. Personally, i know i think its corny, i genuinely feel when im being nice with my siri or delicate with my computer, its more about being a gentle person in general. Its about modeling consistently this empathetic behavior towards all things. I do not think my computer is alive but i know the world is alive. I want to be a respectful participant in this planet. I want to do that wherever i can. I know its dumb. I know syria does not have feelings. But i think it makes meat feel better. It makes me feel like a better person when im respectful of syria regardless. Well said. One more. Looking to the future, do you have any information on the gender of the people who are studying in the colleges and universities and Computer Science fields and engineering fields . Beyond that, do you detect any bias in the hiring of those students . Thats not particularly my field. I know theress still a significant wage gap and Diversity Inclusion problem in tech. The problems are systemic, they go way back. There are also problems of diversity and inclusion in Computer Science programs. In Computer Science education leading up to that. Thats why theres such a emphasis on Stem Education at a young age so we can ingrained in kids the tech is for everybody. Its not just for boys. Its for anyone whos interested in it. I also think the part of dismantling this is beginning to question what is technical . What qualifies as a technical job . I think we associate classical programming with a tech job. All of these peripheral jobs like user interface design or content moderation are seen as not as technical or not given the same economic remuneration in tech places. Those jobs to me are very technical. They are part and parcel of making Good Software products. I think this kind of brick wall we have between front and and back and is very dangerous. It makes for bad products. I think if there is more fluidity in the definitions there, you will see much more movement in terms of gender back and forth on those things. I think sometimes men feel like its somehow stigmatizing for them to work in these somehow more user facing rolls in tech. They stick to what they think is for men versus the other way around. When we break down those divisions we all benefit enormously. We have a lot of work to do. As you can see, it took some generations to get where we are now. It will probably take another generation to get back to where we were in the fifties in a way. Okay clare, do not go away. Let me show you what is coming up on thursday we hope. Lets see. Yes. Great topics, cbs lewis. Cbs lewis. By devin brown. You may recall he did tolkien last year for us and it was very effective. I hope we will all be back for it. Check the website to be sure. We look forward to that. Right now its on and we look forward to seeing it. You are going to go back and sign some books in the back. So before you do that, lets ill show our appreciation. Thank you. Thank you bill. applause rise of the rocket girls i want to introduce tonight speaker the failure holt. Nathalia holt. She has conducted research at Caltech Library and at harvard. She is a founder at