Wanoah

24^th March 2010 is Ada Lovelace Day.

Ada Lovelace Day is an inter­na­tional day of blog­ging to cel­eb­rate the achieve­ments of women in tech­no­logy and sci­ence. The idea is to write some­thing about a woman in tech­no­logy or sci­ence that you admire.

Mar­vel­lous! This is some­thing I can get behind. Hav­ing worked in IT for over a dec­ade now, I can say from my own exper­i­ence that it’s a field that remains heav­ily pop­u­lated by the male gender, with women a dis­tinct minor­ity. I also work for a large man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany, and have wit­nessed the scarcity of women in the engin­eer­ing dis­cip­lines. It seems to me that we need to be encour­aging more women to join these pro­fes­sions. Sign me up.

So, who to write about then? Ah. Hmm. I racked my brains for a few minutes. I was draw­ing a blank. After a while, I man­aged Marie Curie. That was it. It was a pretty effect­ive illus­tra­tion of just how mar­gin­al­ised women have been in the fields of sci­ence and tech­no­logy. It’s clear why this might be when you look at the last few cen­tur­ies of his­tory. Fine: not much that can be done about that. Now though, after dec­ades of fem­in­ism and the battle for equal­ity appears to have been won, we still have this huge dis­par­ity between the genders in some fields. It seems to me that it is largely a ques­tion of cul­ture. Girls tend to out­per­form boys in school when it comes to math­em­at­ics, so what gives? It has to be a ques­tion of atti­tude, doesn’t it? Hope­fully the pub­li­city sur­round­ing events like Ada Lovelace Day will help to change those atti­tudes in some small way.

Incid­ent­ally, I even­tu­ally did think of some­thing to write about. It was more of a struggle than it should have been.

If you wish to join in, this is where you need to go: http://findingada.com/

About Ada Lovelace Day

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24^th march 2009 and was a huge suc­cess. It attrac­ted nearly 2000 sig­nat­or­ies to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Face­book. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Chan­nel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guard­ian, The Tele­graph, The Metro, Com­puter Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hun­dreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24^th March and the tar­get is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.

Ada Lovelace Day is organ­ised by Suw Charman-Anderson, with design and devel­op­ment sup­port from Tech­no­Pho­bia and host­ing from UKHost4U.

About Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Count­ess of Lovelace was born on 10^th Decem­ber 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Anna­bella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first com­puter pro­grammes for the Ana­lyt­ical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Bab­bage had invented.

Ada had been taught math­em­at­ics from a very young age by her mother and met Bab­bage in 1833. Ten years later she trans­lated Luigi Menabrea’s mem­oir on Babbage’s Ana­lyt­ical Engine, append­ing notes that included a method for cal­cu­lat­ing Bernoulli num­bers with the machine – the first com­puter pro­gramme. The cal­cu­la­tions were never car­ried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first descrip­tion of a com­puter and of software.

Under­stand­ing that com­puters could do a lot more than just crunch num­bers, Ada sug­ges­ted that the Ana­lyt­ical Engine “might com­pose elab­or­ate and sci­entific pieces of music of any degree of com­plex­ity or extent.” She never had the chance to fully explore the pos­sib­il­it­ies of either Babbage’s inven­tions or her own under­stand­ing of com­put­ing. She died, aged only 36, on 27^th Novem­ber 1852, of can­cer and blood­let­ting by her physicians.