Top 10 women of technology

Women who have changed the course of computing

history To celebrate International Women's Day Shaun and I decided to devote the Top 10 to women who have been pivotal in the development of the computing world.
Technology is still largely dominated by men, both in implementation and management. The reasons for this are complicated and still not fully understood. Some say that male brains are better adapted to the concentrated focus that many computing tasks require, while others point to the male-dominated engineering culture that much of computing is taken from. Another theory is that the problem starts in schools, where girls are steered away from computing, either by social pressure or by poor teachers.
But, as this list will show, none of these reasons provide the answer. Women, given the opportunity, outperform men time after time, which suggests that the chief factor holding women back in the industry is men. One note about the list. As we explained yesterday, you won't find the likes of Carly Fiorina or Carol Bartz on this list (with one small exception). Running a technology company isn't too difficult, you simply need to be a good business manager. 

            This list is composed of women who've been involved in the guts of technology - the engineers and visionaries who have changed not only how we used computers but, in some cases, the very cornerstones of computing itself. Honourable mention: Meg Whitman Shaun Nichols: While we've tried to focus on engineers and researchers for our list, a few business types were able to sneak in. Among them is eBay's Meg Whitman.
            Whitman was able to seal her place in technology history by leading eBay through the dot-com boom, the market crash, and the eventual recovery as a market leader. That she did so at a time when the industry was largely a boys club earns Meg Whitman a spot on our list. At a time when many companies did themselves in with overly ambitious agendas and foolish purchases, Whitman turned eBay into an internet icon by focusing on what worked and by building a proven business model. Now she has reincarnated herself as a moderate conservative political candidate and is tempting many left-leaning voters, myself included, to elect her as the next governor of financially-strapped California. Iain Thomson: Well don't get your hopes up, Shaun, I've got my doubts about her ability to be a moderate state governor given the rabid state of the Republican Party at the moment. But it can't be denied that she did a good job at eBay.
            Whitman was a very successful manager. At a time when the rest of the industry crashed, Whitman kept eBay profitable, well-organised, and in the perfect position to capitalise on the wreckage of the dot-com boom. But that's not the key reason in my mind that she deserves to be on the list, rather it's that she broke the glass ceiling on management of tech companies by women.
            There had been women running small technology companies before Whitman, but eBay was synonymous with the internet revolution and accustomed many consumers to the idea of buying online with confidence. To head up such an organisation was an important step in getting senior figures in the notoriously male-dominated technology industry to accept having a woman as boss. B However, it hasn't all been a bed of roses. The Skype acquisition was a mistake but one that she has acknowledged. Nevertheless she enabled a new generation of women to rise and provided an important case to defeat the sexists who say women can't make it in tech. Honourable mention: Caterina Fake
Iain Thomson : Caterina Fake is probably best known as the co-creator of the Flickr photo sharing service but she has been involved in much more than that.

On the Flickr side of things we all owe her a debt of gratitude, since at last a tech fix has been provided to the problem of holiday photos. In days of yore whenever someone went on holiday you could be forced to look at their pictures when they got back. There's only so many times you can say “what a wonderful view” without wanting to strangle someone. Now we just put them up on Flickr.

 But Fake has achieved more of than just Flickr. She's on the board of directors for Creative Commons and was pivotal in the development of Salon.com, which broke much of the ground in making online magazines feasible. She also ran Yahoo's Technology Development group, which nurtured new ways of interacting using the internet. Her latest venture, Hunch, looks very promising for developing ways to make decisions based on multiple data inputs. If it's anything like the rest of her career Hunch could be very effective indeed. 
Shaun Nichols : Ah, the list of great technological university programmes in America: MIT, Stanford and… Vassar? Yes, the esteemed Seven Sister college in New York contributed a pair of names on our top ten list, of which the first is Catarena Fake. Take that, Harvard. Flickr was one of the first photo sharing services that really embraced a social networking approach. Rather than just uploading pictures and embedding a URL somewhere, Flickr allowed users to share and categorise photos both among themselves and with other users through tagging features. Additionally, Flickr offered APIs and more to other web sites and services to help them embed photos in their sites. "Synergy" is an ugly buzzword that we're not allowed to use, but in this case it might be warranted. The integration between Flickr and other services boosted traffic for all parties involved, showing the wisdom of the move.

Mena TrottIain Thomson : Mena Trott and her husband created the tools that have enabled the blogging revolution to take off. They set up Six Apart, so named because they were born six days apart, and that company gave us both TypePad and and Moveable Type. These two tools have turned blogging from something that you needed a lot of expertise to do to something everyone and his dog can get involved with. This ease of creating something in the blogosphere has been one of the milestones in popular engagement with the internet. Trott still works at Six Apart, despite some very lucrative offers to sell out and retire. I await with interest the next stage in the blogging revolution.

Shaun Nichols: It may not have been the early aim of Six Apart, but TypePad and Moveable Type aren't just services for posting your personal blog. Many professional news organisations, including us, rely on Six Apart publishing tools and services.

            The real impact of the platform, however, is at a much lower level than the big newsrooms. While Six Apart and other publishing services didn't invent the concept of the blog, they definitely democratised it. Before blog services, you pretty much had to craft and manage your blog at the HTML level. Not a big deal for more savvy users, but a major hurdle for casual users who just wanted to share their rants. The role these services played in allowing people to communicate online is fairly major.

Hedy LamarrShaun Nichols : No offence to the likes of current techie divas like Olivia Munn, Marissa Mayer and Kari Byron, but Hedy Lamarr was on a completely different level and also definitely gets my vote as the most glamorous geek of all time.

When she wasn't occupying her time as a Hollywood starlet, the Austrian-born Lamarr worked on a side project that more or less laid the foundations for wireless ethernet, mobile broadband and synthesised music markets. The lovely Lamarr helped to develop a technique designed for controlling player pianos that eventually evolved into the frequency-hopping systems which are now used in the Wi-Fi and CDMA standards. Not truly appreciated at the time, the progress of technology seals Hedy Lamarr's place as one of the all-time great combinations of beauty and brains. Iain Thomson: In a classic moment when we compiled the list I mentioned Lamarr, and Shaun looked puzzled. "Isn't there an actress with the same name?" he said, before I explained that they were one and the same. In an age where Hollywood stars like Lindsey Lohan seem to have made careers out of being clueless, Lamarr is a classic example of how you can be a glamourpuss but still have brains as well. She took a break from an acting career during World War Two to do research into ways of protecting radio-controlled torpedoes from jamming.
            The technology was too far ahead of its time to be practical but it was picked up 20 years later and now forms an important part of much modern mobile and wireless technology.
While her technical achievements are not as great as many people on this list, I feel she deserves the place for showing a generation of women that science and glamour are not incompatible. All too often I fear young women are turned off science because it's seen as unfeminine. Try telling that to the star of 'Samson and Delilah.

Danielle Bunten Berry

Iain Thomson : Now this is a tricky area, and one that occurs with one other person on this list. Danielle Bunten Berry was a male to female transexual and had gender reassignment surgery in 1992. Danielle was one of the world's greatest computer games designers and has been pivotal in the development of multi-player games. She created one of the first such games in 1978 for the Apple II. Consider the implications of that: just three years after MITS invented the Altair, the very first PC, Berry was writing multi-player computer games. It's a staggering thought. However, the chief reason for her inclusion on this list is her creation of M.U.L.E. in 1983. M.U.L.E, which stands for Multiple Use Labor Element, was arguably the first true multi-player game, allowing people to play each other over a single console. The game itself was essentially an exercise in economics and allowed users to harvest materials and sell them, or not, for goods and services. Owing to the advanced nature of the economic model, players could gang up on each other or manipulate prices, much like the real world.

Berry was so influential that the world's most popular computer game, The Sims, is dedicated to her memory. Sadly she died of lung cancer (Berry was a heavy smoker) in 1998 while still working on an internet version of M.U.L.E; it would have been fascinating to see that game if she had completed it.

Shaun Nichols : The gaming industry has arguably pulled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as a result of the work of Danielle Bunten Berry. You would think that would at least merit an award or scholarship or something in her honour. Thankfully industry veterans such as Will Wright still pay homage to Berry's work.

Not too many people will trace the online role playing game field back much earlier than AOL's Neverwinter Nights, but M.U.L.E. should definitely be credited for planting the seeds of the field. The basic ideas of economics and the trading of finite resources within the game are seen today in the in-game economies of many massive multi-player online games such as World of Warcraft.

Gold farmers aside, the economic aspect of multi-player worlds add new depth to massive multi-player games and can tie on countless of additional hours of enjoyment (or frustration, depending on which side of the deal you're on.)

Those of you with shrines to Gary Gygax and Will Wright should really consider adding Danielle Bunten Berry.

7.Mitchell Baker Shaun Nichols: When icons of open source software come up, names such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds usually dominate the conversation, but Mozilla president Mitchell Baker deserves a spot at that table as well, and it's a bit embarrassing that we haven't mentioned her before.

Baker has served as the legal head of a Mozilla foundation that was richer in developer talent than business acumen. Through her work, Baker guided Mozilla from a defunct browser technology to the biggest threat to Microsoft this side of Google.

Talk all you want about the engineering and security benefits of the Firefox model, but none of it gains ground without the guidance of legal savvy and you can thank the ethical dedication of Mitchell Baker for that.

It only helps her case that Baker is , like yours truly, a native of the much underrated Oakland side of the San Francisco Bay.

Iain Thomson: You Oakland types, always so insecure. I suppose Baker isn't a technology buff like the rest of the people on this list - her skills are more on the legal side - but her impact on the development and viability of open source technology is too great to be ignored.

Open source is hated by much of the commercial software industry, which has used any means possible to undermine its principles and subvert its core structure. Baker has been its guardian angel, fighting for the rights of the open source community and, in many cases, writing the licences that make open development possible.

Rejoicing in the title of Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla, she is the legal pit bull of the industry. She has guided Mozilla to becoming an organisation that has changed the face of internet use and has done so in a way that will ensure its continuing success.

6. Barbara Liskov Iain Thomson: I'd have liked to see Liskov higher on the list but sadly the competition was too strong. Barbara Liskov was the first woman in the US to be awarded a PhD in computer science, in 1968 from Stanford University. Throughout a career that is by no means over she has invented two key computer languages, CLU and Argus, as well as the Venus operating system and the Thor object-orientated database system.

In the past Liskov has specialised in data abstraction, which has allowed the development of far more powerful and sensitive computer code. She's also been a key player in the development of object orientated programming and is currently working on fault recovery systems that will be key to the future of data security, both in terms of recovering from attacks and from plain old system glitches.

She won the technology industry's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award, in 2008 and still teaches today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where lucky students can learn a lot from this great woman of computer science.

Shaun Nichols: Liskov's doctoral thesis was a computer program designed to play chess games, and for stopping there she deserves credit. A guy named Falken apparently tried that and we ended up with Global Thermonuclear War.

Jokes aside, Liskov deserves a phenomenal amount of credit, and it was great to see her finally receive the Turing Award. Her work was key in the evolution and development of object-oriented programming and she was more than deserving of the industry's top honour.

It's interesting to see the role women have played particularly in the development of programming languages. Engineers such as Liskov brought in different perspectives and approaches that helped to make software development far easier and more efficient. This is yet another example of why we should encourage young women to enter the computer science and engineering fields.

5. Sophie Wilson Shaun Nichols: A few months back we made a huge mistake on a top 10 list. When assembling the countdown of the greatest Britons in technology, we managed to leave off the ARM development team of Steve Furbur and Sophie Wilson.

If you use a smartphone handset today, you owe a debt of gratitude to Sophie (then Roger) Wilson and her associates. While working on a processor for the Acorn Computer company, the British developer group helped to outline the design of what would become the ARM chip, a low-power processor that today runs many embedded systems and most mobile handsets. A variation on the ARM processor is currently powering many of the hottest gadgets on the market, including the Apple iPhone and iPad.

It is interesting that an industry which bears such strong roots to the traditionally conservative military field is so socially accepting, but throughout its history the IT industry has welcomed a number of transsexual individuals who have played major roles in the industry, such as Sophie Wilson and Danielle Bunten Berry.

Iain Thomson: When readers pointed out our mistake in the earlier list we were mortified. We already knew that we'd be doing this list for International Women's Day so resolved that she was a dead cert to make it on.

What was particularly upsetting was that I learned to program on a computer Wilson had a major hand in designing, the BBC Micro. Sure, the ZX81 might have given me my first hands-on experience with IT but it was a bit of a dog, whereas the Micro was a joy to use. It also ran Elite, which harmed my school work but cemented my fascination with technology.

In a lot of ways Wilson reminds me of Woz. Both came up with ideas and were so confident their ideas would work that they designed them from scratch longhand. Woz wrote operating systems by hand; Wilson did the same with the design of the Acorn Microprocessor, drawing circuit boards on her dining room table.

Her achievements on the ARM processor are immense, particularly when you realise that they were done on a shoestring budget. It's proof positive that you can change the world without spending a fortune.

A new report from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) has indicated that there are more IT graduates than there are positions open to them.

The REC said this was good news for recruiters as they had a wealth of possible employees at their disposal, and importantly, these people have the skills needed to tackle emerging systems.

The REC, which represents the interests of recruiters, said "finding IT workers will be easier and allow faster placements by recruitment agencies". Key skills which have increased in demand over the past six months include those relating to SQL, C#, .NET and Linux, it added.

"It is encouraging to see this growth in demand. Our members are showing increasing confidence in the sector and many of them are looking to hire more recruiters as a result," said Jeff Brooks, chair of the REC's technology group.

"It is very encouraging to see that companies will still invest in technology to develop their businesses even when there is a tough economic landscape. I look forward to the upturn developing at an even stronger rate in the months ahead."