City of Women London
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
Tags: women
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Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022
When Women Make Headlines
This is a great combination of rigorous research and great data visualisation.
Monday, August 30th, 2021
Representation and what happened to women in Tech
Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.
Marketing matters:
When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.
Tuesday, June 1st, 2021
Broad Band
I like to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is often of the science variety. Actually, so is the non-fiction.
There was a non-fiction book I had queued up for a while and I finally got around to reading. Broad Band by Claire L. Evans. Now I’m kicking myself that I didn’t read it earlier. I think I might’ve been remembering how I found Mar Hicks’s Programmed Inequality to be a bit of a slog—a fascinating topic, but written in a fairly academic style. Broad Band covers some similar ground, but wow, is the writing style in a class of its own!
This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling—a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting—even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.
It’s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.
I absolutely loved it. So did Cory Doctorow:
Because she is a brilliant and lyrical writer she brings these women to life, turns them into fully formed characters, makes you see and feel their life stories, frustrations and triumphs.
Even the most celebrated women of tech history – Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper – leap off the page as people, not merely historical personages or pioneers. Again, these are stories I thought I knew, and realized I didn’t.
Yes! That!
Tuesday, March 30th, 2021
Monday, May 4th, 2020
FEMME TYPE – Celebrating Women in the Type Industry
A treasure trove of case studies and interviews.
Friday, May 18th, 2018
What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
Sunday, January 21st, 2018
Book - Broad Band — Claire L. Evans
Coming to a bookshelf near you in March 2018: the untold story of the women who made the internet.
Sunday, June 18th, 2017
Beyond Curie—a design project celebrating women in STEM
Beyond Curie is a design project that highlights badass women in science, technology, engineering + mathematics.
Tuesday, January 31st, 2017
Less Bro-gramming: Net Natives host and sponsor Codebar | Net Natives
An excellent potted history from Cassie on women in computing.
NASA’s “Keypunch girls” would work in cramped rows translating programming instructions onto paper pads, whilst the machine operators would sit in comfort, feeding the code decks through card readers and enjoying the esteem of the end result (I imagine it a bit like Mad Men, but with more sexism and astronauts).
Wednesday, February 11th, 2015
SpringForward - A celebration of women in digital and technology - March 2015, Brighton
There’s a whole bunch of great events happening in Brighton this March: Codebar, Curiosity Hub, She Codes Brighton, 300 Seconds, She Says Brighton, and Ladies that UX. Lots of these will be downstairs from Clearleft in Middle Street—very handy!
Friday, January 9th, 2015
Abstractivate: Systems Thinking about WIT
As always, systems thinking makes a lot of sense for analysing problems, even if—or, especially if—it’s a social issue.
Monday, February 11th, 2013
Ladies in Tech
A great new site from Jenn and Yesenia: celebrating and supporting female speakers in technology.
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
IT's a man's world? - The F-Word
Sue Schofield plugs Ada Lovelace Day while taking a long hard look at the sniggering sexism endemic to the IT industry.
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
Mike Davidson: Who Would You Be... If You Were A Woman?
Mike follows on from his original question "who would you be?" by adding the subclause "if you were a woman". My answer: Hedy Lamarr.