Notable women in history who inspire the technologists at MNIT
3/19/2021 2:01:38 PM
Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) is celebrating Women’s History Month with a two-part series on women in technology, both around the country and in Minnesota state government. This week, we are honoring notable women in history who inspire the technologists at MNIT to innovate and relentlessly pursue technology solutions to improve the lives of all Minnesotans.
“It’s not just hiring, but also including people of color and women on all levels: as middle managers, in leadership positions, even as founders. If we aren’t seated at the table, the product, policies, and whole strategy has the potential to come from a narrow lens.”
Kimberly Bryant
Kimberly Bryant is the Founder and CEO of Black Girls CODE, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching girls of color about technology and computer programming. Bryant spent over 20 years in the technology and engineering world before creating the nonprofit organization. Her goal is to educate one million girls by 2040 and ensure that girls of color who are interested in technology find mentors that reflect their background throughout all levels of the workplace.
Read more about Kimberly Bryant
“You have to iterate before you’re successful, you’re always learning with each step.”
Megan Smith
Megan Smith was the first female Chief Technology Officer at the White House, under the Obama administration, and only the third person to ever hold that position. In that role, Smith helped build programs to build the tech talent pipeline, and foster relationships between technology companies and a future workforce. Before her work for President Obama, she was part of a team that designed early smartphone technology and was Vice President of Business Development at Google.
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“There is a real need in our culture to introduce girls to technology-based products and electronics at an early age. It not only increases girls' self-esteem, but helps to broaden the opportunities available to them in the future."
Dr. Janese Swanson
Dr. Janese Swanson is an inventor, STEM advocate, and CEO of Girl Tech. Founded in 1995, the company is focused on giving girls opportunities to use technology to bolster curiosity in math and science. Swanson started her career as an educator, spent some time as a flight attendant, but found her passion always lived in innovation. Girl Tech started out with connecting girls to STEM through toys and gadgets like the voice-activated Password Journal, but grew to include a website, books, and magazine, specifically targeted towards girls, GirlZine.
Read more about Dr. Janese Swanson
“Information access has become so critical for our daily lives. It’s not a privilege; it’s a human right.”
Chieko Asakawa
Chieko Asakawa has dedicated her life to digital accessibility research and innovation. Working with IBM, Asakawa developed early technologies for those who are blind or visually impaired, including a digital braille editor and a network for braille libraries to upload and share documents. In 1997, she began IBM’s Home Page Reader, which was one of the first tools that allowed those in the blind community to access the internet. After encountering accessibility impediments based on how information was designed online, Asakawa created a software that allows web designers to experience sites as a user who is blind or visually impaired and recommend ways to improve the site’s navigation.
Read more about Chieko Asakawa
“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in. It’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”
Susan Kare
Susan Kare’s graphic design career permeates into the everyday lives of every computer user in the world. She developed the fonts and icons for the Apple Macintosh in 1984. Her designs were the definition of iconic – a trash can for recycling, a computer disc to save files, and a smiling computer at start up. Kare focused on user-friendly designs that demonstrated how to easily operate early computers. She went on to pioneer many other computer designs, including the Windows Solitaire 3.0 in 1990, Facebook gifts in 2007, and Pinterest in 2015.
Read more about Susan Kare
“Give the world the best you’ve got. And you will get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.”
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was an actress and inventor. While best known for her leading roles with MGM in the 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was also an inventor whose work in telecommunications paved the way for WiFi and Bluetooth technology development. Working on inventions while on set and at home, Lamarr began to collaborate with George Antheil in 1940. Their partnership led to a telecommunications system, patented in 1942, using “frequency hopping.” The system was built to enable transmitters and receivers to hop between frequencies, designed to allow torpedoes to hit their targets without being intercepted over radio waves. The U.S. and Allied forces decided not to use the technology in WWII, but Lamar and Antheil’s contributions were later recognized for their contribution to the field. Lamarr was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Read more about Hedy Lamarr
“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able to fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.”
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace is known as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first person to outline the steps it would take for a computing device to make a calculation that hadn’t been worked out in advance. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, Lovelace worked closely with the mechanical engineer and inventor Charles Babbage on his theoretical device the “Analytical Engine” to develop papers, instructions, and outlines of computation programs. In 1843, Lovelace published notes on the Analytic Engine, which included a series of operations for a computing device to calculate Bernoulli numbers.
Read more about Ada Lovelace
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