Hi Everybody!
Happy International Women’s Day! :)
My name is Anna Elizabeth Gant, and I’m the Marketing Communications Specialist at Acumatica. (Some of you in the group will know me, but others don’t--so I wanted to introduce myself!)
In honor of International Women’s Day, I’ve been doing some reading about female STEM pioneers and other calendar days that are important to mark for the history and future of women in tech. I wanted to share something I learned with you all because I found it quite inspiring. What stood out to me was Ada Lovelace Day, which is celebrated on the second Tuesday of October. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of esteemed Romantic Period poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, and is considered the world’s first computer programmer. The work she wrote for the computer conceived by mathematician Charles Babbage is considered the earliest and most comprehensive notes on computing. She created the world’s first program for that computer, and she was the first to state that computers could process both numbers and symbolic operations to perform complex tasks.
And you would think that Lord Byron, being as important a poet as he was, would have been the influence behind her success—but he wasn’t. He had left the country completely right after she was born, and she never saw him in person. Ada’s mother, Annabella Milbanke, was an educational reformer who established the first industrial school in England. She had Ada tutored privately, but those formal studies were interrupted after Ada got measles and was bedridden for a while as a teenager. So, the rest of what she accomplished was mostly self-taught.
And Ada Lovelace accomplished all of this between about 1833 and 1856, when she died at just 36 years old. And this was at the start of the Victorian Period in England, when women “were poorly educated and barred from any form of higher education. Society considered it unfeminine to devote time to intellectual pursuits….Some doctors reported that too much study had a damaging effect on the ovaries, turning attractive young women into dried-up prunes. Instead of intellectual study, therefore, women were coached in ‘accomplishments’—painting, music, a smattering of foreign languages perhaps. The home was their world since they were excluded entirely from public life: barred from universities, from following a profession, and from voting in any election. If they were forced to work due to adverse family circumstances, the job would be low status and ill paid.” Middle class women would be governesses. Working class women would have to do factory or agricultural labor. That was all.
So, on International Women’s Day 2024, here’s to Ada Lovelace and her mother, Annabella Milbanke, for bucking the system! It also makes me wonder what Ada could have done if she had had more than 36 years. I don’t think she would be at all surprised by what computers are capable of now.
I, for one, will be celebrating Ada Lovelace Day this year! And I’d love to hear about other women in tech (past and present) who have inspired you.
