Ada Lovelace Day Post

March 24th, 2009, 3:52 pm PDT by Greg

Okay… it’s Ada Lovelace Day and the goal is…

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire…

Having just been (gently) ambushed to post something, I have only been mulling this over for a few minutes. It’s a tall order.

Old profs? All I’d really have to say is “she taught that course well” (and I don’t have many examples since I was a math major in undergrad and took relatively few CS courses). Colleagues? I certainly admire some of the women I work with, but it would be a little weird to write about them.

It took be a while, but I finally figured it out: the SFU WICS girls (but only if I can apply the label “WICSies” to them).

I have hung around university student groups in one capacity or another for the last 15 years. I have seen ups and downs, highs and lows, frantic activity and stagnation. I have never dealt with a group like WICS before.

The whole group is uniformly positive and constructive. They all understand the group’s mission and have a huge variety of ways to work towards it. I count many former members as friends and as some of my most interesting students.

I certainly wish we had 50% women in CS. Still, I can’t help but thinking that if we did, WICS wouldn’t be as wonderful as it is, and I’d be a little sad about that.

Posted in Teaching, Work | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Ada Lovelace Day Post”

  1. Colleen Tsoukalas Says:
    March 24th, 2009 at 5:51 pm

    My women heroes in technology are WICS women and CHIC TECH women, too! A suggestion to increase the numbers of women in CS might be to make a video of one of the meetings, especially those that feature guest speakers from the faculty or industry, the game/problem solving sessions, clips of Grace Hopper Conference attendees’ presentations, Clubs Day sign up, CHIC TECH Awards night, etc. I also have another hero, Linda Hof, a video ethnographer and best research partner ever, in the Faculty of Education at SFU, and if we could have her expertise as a producer and then take it out to the highschools or market it as computer science course resource – we would see some significant increases in enrolment. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!