Ada Lovelace is quite the lady of her times. Yes, she is.

If you are wondering who this person is, you might probably not be the only one trying to squeeze the “history- remembering- side” of your brain and coming up with an empty look. For the records, she is the first computer programmer in modern history (would you be surprised if the first programming language was called Ada) that many don’t probably know or have heard of. Actually, women and computers are very much steeped in history. In 1942 the ENIAC was programmed not by men but by six women. Grace Hopper, a woman inspired the development of the COBOL programming language. Fast forward a little bit later, and we are left wondering what went quite wrong in between.

Now give it a deeper thought; pick any “World’s 100 most powerful women” list et al, and you will find, amidst life influencing celebrities and social workers, women who run Fortune 100 companies, women who run countries (Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany for instance) wielding top management skills, and managing the high pressure jobs with a family life to balance, clearly a set of folks who conveniently negate the oh-so popular “women cannot handle high pressure jobs” excuse. Similarly take a listing of tech / digital companies (start ups or otherwise) that have been founded, co-founded or managed by women, and you get the feeling that women who want to be in the tech scene are very much there, but there is still work to be done within our minds to accept them as they come, welcoming their diversity, which could possibly be the reason why there is still clear shortage in their active participation. The same can however be said with men who want to get into the nursing industry for instance, which probably could mean, genetically men and women are suited only for certain kind of industries, but that goes against rational thinking doesn’t it? Discussions have loomed far and wide but the answers have simply dried up on us.

The matter gets complex when you add in a factor called culture. Women from traditional and developing societies are quite much caught in between protecting “what’s considered right” in the culture compared to “what she really wants to do”. Not that the tech scene is tabooed or looked down upon, but it is just unprecedented: not in the culture, not in the history books, and hence considered outlandish, shocking and ridiculous for a woman to pursue such a dream. Partly, we have fiction writers and movie makers to blame the stereotyping. We hardly find women to be the chief computer scientist creating millions of code lines that prevent the aliens attacking the Earth in Hollywood, do we? Movements like “Ada Lovelace Day” by Suw Charman-Anderson, a calling to all bloggers to blog about women in the tech scene who have inspired them on 24th of March this year was definitely a great inspiration for the crowd. (Would be interesting though to analyze how many women compared to men did the pledging and blogging on the actual day)

At SIME, we have had Esther Dyson (SIME Stockholm 2007) the queen of the US internet, Anne Wegelius (SIME Stockholm 2007) Head of Programming SVT Sweden, Eva Lindqvist (SIME 2006), Jeniffer L Schenker (SIME Barcelona, 2009) amongst others carrying the women tech flag high, but yes its true, the numbers don’t even warrant a comparison with the number of men speakers. It goes without saying that women get more inspired seeing other women in the tech scene as compared to men being inspired by other men. Let us all take a moment to celebrate the women in the tech scene, salute their spirit and give them all the support we can, for this industry would not be hurt with fresh ideas, a fresh mindset and some diverse thinking that they can bring in with them.

Influences from:
Tech Crunch UK Geek n Rolla, Guardian’s Naomi Alderman’s, Paul Walsh , The Athena Factor by Harvard Business School