Back in January Simon wrote an article about the excellent Pledgebank service. Those of you who visited the Pledge Bank site might remember seeing a pledge from Suw Charman-Anderson to write a blog post on 24 March about a woman in technology whom she admires. It went something like this …..
Well, Suw managed to achieve her goal, attracting 1890 pledges (and growing by the minute) to do the same, so is probably very busy writing her blog post about Ada Lovelace right now.
Lovelace – which one?
Those with little interest in the world of technology might not know who Ada Lovelace was. She wasn’t a distant relation to the late Linda of the same surname, but in fact one of the world’s first computer programmers. That’s not just one of the ‘first female computer programmers’, but one of the ‘World’s first computer programmers’!
I thought that I had pledged, but looking back through the list it appears that I didn’t finish the sign up procedure, but thought I’d write a post about the whole thing anyway.
Many of those who pledged, have since posted their posts and linked back from Suw’s page.
Variety of pledges
The pledge was “to write about a woman in technology whom I admire”, so as you can imagine there were many other wonderful women celebrated today.
Marjolein Katsma wrote about the incredible Marie Curie, who remembers her as being Madame Curie. Marjolein tells in her blog post of how a book about Marie Curie captivated her at an early age and how she went on to become a biologist.
Caitlin Burns decided to write about Urban Geographer, Dr. Elizabeth K. Burns. The inspirational woman is in fact Caitlin’s mother and although she is now retired, she continues to inspire. Check out Caitlin’s post and you’ll find out why.
As we mentioned there are 1890 (1891 including Suw’s post) blog posts due on this subject so we won’t go through them all.
Closer to home is blog post is about Wendy Hall, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Southampton which has been enthusiastically penned by Angharad V. Setherwood.
As well as being a founding director of Web Science Research Initiative, Prof Hall is also a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in Science and Engineering Technology.
So, I guess if I were to write a piece about an inspirational woman in technology it would have to be Suw Charman-Anderson (pictured left).
One gets the impression that she’s been involved in tech since she was grappling with her pigtails and having followed her online over the past few months, she clearly embraces new technology with vigor.
I vote Suw Charman-Anderson my inspirational woman in technology!
