June 13, 2019
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival,”
Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Categories: Uncategorized
Uncategorized
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER, by @histoftech
February 26, 2018
I recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post using history to debunk the infamous “Google Memo” and its contention that women are somehow less innately suited to technical pursuits. Truth is, for a long time women were predominant in the field of computing because technical work wasn’t seen as important. Their disappearance has everything to do with structural discrimination and little to do with “innate” differences.
I was also very glad to get a few mentions in The Guardian. See this (delightfully acerbic) article about memogate in general, and this one that’s specifically about the history of computing’s role in helping us better understand power and (the lack of) diversity in our technological landscape in the present.
Read more THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER, by @histoftech
Categories: Uncategorized
WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE FAILURE OF THE BRITISH COMPUTING INDUSTRY? by @histoftech
June 21, 2017
Recently I gave a talk at Data & Society, a think tank in NYC that focuses on issues of social justice and technology. The talk was about how the history of computing of our closest historical cousin, the UK, can help us learn things about the past and 
present of the US–things that we may be blind to, or perhaps just resistant to seeing. The half-hour talk is an overview of what happens when countries build discrimination into technological order, rather than seeking to make equality a core goal of technological progress. In it, I address how the current state of affairs in the US relates to this, and I offer some advice on solving the problems of underrepresentation in STEM fields today. Watch the talk here.
White Heat: A blog about the history of technology and how to teach it. Women, gender and sexuality in history and technology. Queer and feminist analyses of the past. @histoftech
Categories: Uncategorized