Hidden figures are not just forgotten women from history whose stories were not told, or were told through the perspective of the men around them. Our current stories are filled with hidden figures — especially women who are sidelined or who have to fight for a seat at the table.
Today I am celebrating women in tech, and highlighting the women of Ada's List — named after Ada Byron, known as Lovelace, the first computer programmer. She set the course for women to blaze the trail after her: the Bletchley Park decoders who helped shorten the Second World War; the Harvard Computers who processed astronomical data and sorted stars into categories; the human computers at NASA such as Katherine Johnson and the West Area Women who helped land humans on the moon, among many others.
After computers started becoming an accessible commodity in the 1980s, they were marketed exclusively as a toy for boys — which brought about the decline of women in computing and technology that we are still living with today.
As Churchill said: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they continue to shape us." Technology is a built environment. It has the same continuous impact on our lives — yet in an even more invisible and hidden way, as it transcends the modality of space and time and is more global in its reach.
Like the built environment, and like policy — including economic policy — technology has a profound impact on the way we live our lives. Yet the majority of those shaping the world we inhabit, driven by technology, are young, white men designing a world for their own lived experience. An experience that is, in many cases, disconnected from the lived experience of most people — and especially of women.
The mission of Ada's List is to rebalance the equation: to bring girls in, to highlight and amplify the work and voices of women who are working in tech and STEAM, or who are influencing it. The annual conference brings together those who are challenging, thought-provoking and determined to change the systems we live within.
We shall not squeeze a seat at the table. We shall reshape it.