Women and Technology
Why Women?
Technology needs more females and young people; in fact, technology requires more females and young people. Technology is feeding this earth, progressing into what it can take tomorrow, the day later, even the next month. The leading technology geniuses like; Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, they are all men. Women are seldom remembered or praised for inventions and ingenuity, but throughout the world, they have done great things.
In history, women are responsible for creating 9 of the many coding languages still used. We have compiled a list of a few to highlight that since the early days of technology, women were so very important.
- Address Programming Language: The language of Address programming is one of the first high-level languages of programming in the world. Kateryna Yushchenko founded it in 1955. Specifically, the language of Address programming allowed indirect addressing and addresses of the highest rank possible – comparable to pointers.
- SmallTalk: Smalltalk is an object-oriented, reflective programming language that is dynamically typed. Smalltalk was developed as the language that underpins the "new world" of computing, demonstrated by "human-computer symbiosis." It was designed and created by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s at Xerox PARC's Learning Research Group (LRG) for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning.
- Logo: Logo is a language of educational programming, developed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon in 1967. Logo is not an acronym: Feurzeig coined the name while at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman and derives from the Greek logos, which means word or feeling.
With all these major coding languages being partially or fully developed by women, women are just as important in technology as men are.
Gen Z girls are 21 or younger. Typically, those interested in a STEM career start coding before age 16. We've been worrying about millennials at work so far. 2019 will be the first year of entry into the workplace of the first Gen Z women and in fact, between the ages of 16–21, more than 60% of Gen Z women began coding. Before they were 15, 25 percent of all had already coded. This is a direct result of the increasing number of educational opportunities. Coding today is part of the curricula of some universities, and there are all kinds of coding schools and programs for summer coding. Many services also work with kids as young as five.
On a global scale, in the next 5-10 years, we are aiming to 40% of women in tech positions and with good reason – as we have seen, they give the technological progress of humanity a much-needed impulse. Let's hope there will be more and more women in IT and science in the coming years.
Gen Z are virtual people. This next generation of coders, especially women, are going to change the world!
As one of Calgary’s top-rated IT service providers, GAM Tech specializes in delivering “big business” managed IT services to small and medium-sized organizations in Alberta and beyond. From disaster recovery and cloud solutions to VCIO services and strategic around-the-clock network security, GAM Tech has reliable, affordable solutions to keep you up and running.
