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Successes of women in IT to be celebrated

09/02/2010 Successes of women in IT to be celebratedWomen in IT are to be celebrated on the second annual Ada Lovelace day, which is due to take place on March 24th.

The event is an international day of blogging which calls on people to write about a woman in the technology sector that they admire.

Beginning in 2009, the new tradition hopes to raise awareness of the contributions of women to the sector and to hopefully encourage younger women to think about jobs in IT.

Nearly 2,000 people joined Ada Lovelace day last year, with the event spawning an equally large Facebook group and generating awareness of the impact that women have had on the IT sector.

Rebecca Thomson of the WITsend blog said that, whereas last year's event focused on famous women in IT, this year she hoped that the event would look at lesser known women in the sector and the contributions they make to technology.

She added that she hoped the event would "bring a positive slant to the debate surrounding the lack of gender balance in tech".

Among those celebrated last year were MIT professor Barbara Liskov, Google vice-president Marissa Mayer, IT entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz and Rebecca George, a partner at Deloitte and chair of the Women's Forum at the British Computer Society.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in 1815 as the daughter of famed British poet Lord Byron.

She is credited with being the world's first computer programmer, writing code for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computer designed in approximately 1837 by noted English mathematician Charles Babbage.

In addition, Countess Lovelace was said to have imagined computers as useful for far more than crunching numbers, envisaging that they "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent", according to the event's organisers.

She is also credited with finding an algorithm for the generation of Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers connected to number theory, using Babbage's machine.

However, Countess Lovelace died young, at the age of 36, from a combination of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians. Her work was republished in the 1950s and was accredited as an early form of computer software.

It is thought that the computer language, Ada, which was developed by the US Department of Defense, was named after her.

As of today (February 9th), 365 people have signed up to Ada Lovelace day.

It doesn't matter if you are a regular blogger, what gender you are or what language you blog in - everyone is invited to take part in this event. All you need to do is sign up to the Ada Lovelace day pledge and publish your post at any time on Wednesday, March 24th

Interested in hiring more female technologists into your organisation? Get in touch with womenintechnology's recruitment services for job seekers.
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