TECH on Tuesday, October 11, we celebrate Ada Lovelace, the first programmer of history. The opportunity to remember that women have long had a very important role in computer science…
Ada Lovelace ? Unless you’re studying computer science, chances are slim to have that name (if class… you want the same) have something to tell you. It is, however, to the countess English, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, that we owe the invention of the first computer program in history. In the middle of the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm intended to be executed by a machine, and predicts the future of computing, of which she is the first to consider the applications well beyond mathematics…
forgotten a Long time ago, his pioneering role is recognized today, and celebrated since 2009 by the ” Ada Lovelace Day “, a day set to October 11, by Suw Charman-Anderson to celebrate the contribution of women in science, and that there are more mentioned in the English press.
An area that is déféminise
The opportunity to ask why women have gradually deserted an area in which they have been so important in history, making it one of the few disciplines to be masculinized instead of feminizing…
>> also read : “Ada”, the novel in which an artificial intelligence (name well chosen) is a writer
” When I tell students that the first computer programmer in history was a woman, the amphitheater tomb of the clouds “, tells Isabelle Collet, who, ten years ago, signed The computer does it have a sex ? (Paperback, 2006).
She explained how it had come to be regarded as a profession male while he had many women in his early years and would never have been what it is without an Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper (developed the first large calculators and been witness to the first ” bug ” of the story), to name just two (here the other eight).
Ten years have passed since the book. And ? “Since then, it’s worse!” slice the lead researcher at the university of Geneva. “The more the figure of the “geek”, yet little represented in 2006, is spreading (in the media, the series…), the more it freezes the figure as being male”.
free Fall
In France, ” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 30 % of women are enrolled in engineering, and some courses are even at 50 %, reports Isabelle Collet. With the sub-sector of the agri-food industry, the computer industry was the most feminised. Today, it is the one that, with the aeronautics, is the least. The percentage has dropped to 12-15 %, which is a division by two. Therefore, the free fall, which is general throughout the West. “
The number of women has remained stable, but ” these are the men who are gobbled up in mass in the industry.’
Why ? For two reasons, writes Isabelle Collet. First, because of ” the increasing prestige associated with the business of it.” “In the 1970s, the computer, we didn’t know what it was. These are not courses prestigious, the competition is low. And then we move from a world of business without computers is a world where they are everywhere. The one who knows how to make it work and understand it inherits suddenly of a power, a lot of jobs are created all of a sudden, the wages go up. The men invest the field. “
The second reason ? “It is the arrival of micro-computer in the 1980s,” continues Isabelle Collet. Teens begin to tweak it, it is the birth of the figure of the “geeks”. The representation is transformed completely. Of the large machines in banks and in insurance, one passes to that of the hack : by a whole bunch of stereotypes, the computer enters into the domain of men. And we arrive today at the IUT of computer science where there are 6 girls in the promos of 120. “
major issue
at the End of September, Melinda Gates announced his project to encourage women to return to the studies of computer science, where they are nothing more than 18 % in the United States, against 37 % in 1987 at the time where she even got his degree at Duke university. She stressed the importance of counting women among the architects of tomorrow’s world, and especially among those who will be at the helm of artificial intelligences “, in which we release soon our elderly parents”…
A statement which is obviously not isolated at a time when many women’s networks have been formed in recent years to bring more parity in the tech (Ladies of Code, StartHer…)… but that would applaud certainly Ada Lovelace.
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