5 Pioneering Women Who’ve Changed the Tech Industry
In today's busy and connected culture, it’s arguably impossible to live a day without using something developed from the tech industry. It's also evolving every day (every minute!) to improve our human experience, our processes, our efficiency and even our fun!
Although the technology sector is still dominated by men, did you know that some of the first programmers were not men, but women?
That's right, women have given great contributions in the technology industry since its inception and have been a substantial part of its development.
There are hundreds of women who’ve influenced technological advances, and sadly many of them have seen little or no fame. To honor these brilliant women throughout the IT and Tech history, here are a few of the extraordinary women who’ve left their permanent mark on the tech sector.
Ada Lovelace 1815 - 1852
A brilliant British woman was considered the very first programmers. Her innovative vision of computers and what could be done with them helped to forge the path of programming that know today. Lovelace's work is one of the few that have been recognized in the history of technology and have even been named prizes in his honor.
Karen Spärck Jones 1935 - 2007
Have you ever wondered at the way we can easily "Google" whatever we’d like to know? We owe to this a British computer scientist and her pioneering work that combined statistics and linguistics, who also happened to be a brilliant advocate for women in the technology field. She specialized in computational linguistics and the processing of everyday language that laid the groundwork for the giant internet search engines that we use almost every minute of every day!
Donna Dubinsky 1955 -
From this list, Donna Dubinsky is the only woman without scientific or computational training. However, she is still a powerful business leader in tech that helped forge the path for today’s smartphones. While studying at Harvard Business School, Dubinsky introduced the world to the first prototypes of personal digital assistants, known as the "Palm". You may remember these small personal digital assistants.
Annie Easley 1933 - 2011
Have you owned a hybrid car? Did you know it was a woman who developed the batteries for the first hybrid cars? Annie Easley was the computer scientist, mathematician, rocket scientist and pioneering woman who worked at NASA from the 50s to the 70s. Easley was also notably one of the first African-American women to work at NASA.
Adele Goldberg 1945 -
Adele Goldberg's work at the Xerox Research Center changed the way Steve Jobs was doing things at Apple. Goldberg is a computer scientist who was part of the developing team of the Smalltalk-80 programming language, and helped create and design what is now known as the "Graphical User Interface" (GUI), of which Steve Jobs was completely impressed.
Here at AXOVIA Marketing & Technologies, we appreciate each and every woman in the tech industry and even more our very own female programmers, designers, copywriters, SEO experts and administrative co-workers - ¡Feliz Día de la Mujer!
