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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in computing | 7/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:17:23.795787+00:00 | kb-cron |
By the 1990s, computing was dominated by men. The proportion of female computer science graduates peaked in 1984 around 37 per cent, and then steadily declined. Although the end of the 20th century saw an increase in women scientists and engineers, this did not hold true for computing, which stagnated. Despite this, they were very involved in working on hypertext and hypermedia projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A team of women at Brown University, including Nicole Yankelovich and Karen Catlin, developed Intermedia and invented the anchor link. Apple partially funded their project and incorporated their concepts into Apple operating systems. Sun Microsystems Sun Link Service was developed by Amy Pearl. Janet Walker developed the first system to use bookmarks when she created the Symbolics Document Examiner. In 1989, Wendy Hall created a hypertext project called Microcosm, which was based on digitized multimedia material found in the Mountbatten archive. Cathy Marshall worked on the NoteCards system at Xerox PARC. NoteCards went on to influence Apple's HyperCard. As the Internet became the World Wide Web, developers like Hall adapted their programs to include Web viewers. Her Microcosm was especially adaptable to new technologies, including animation and 3-D models. In 1994, Hall helped organize the first conference for the Web. Sarah Allen, the co-founder of After Effects, co-founded a commercial software company called CoSA in 1990. In 1995, she started working on the Shockwave team for Macromedia where she was the lead developer of the Shockwave Mulituser Server, the Flash Media Server and Flash video. Following the increased popularity of the Internet in the 1990s, online spaces were set up to cater for women, including the online community Women's WIRE and the technical and support forum LinuxChix. Women's WIRE, launched by Nancy Rhine and Ellen Pack in October 1993, was the first Internet company to specifically target this demographic. A conference for women in computer-related jobs, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, was first launched in 1994 by Anita Borg. Game designer Brenda Laurel started working at Interval Research in 1992, and began to think about the differences in the way girls and boys experienced playing video games. After interviewing around 1,000 children and 500 adults, she determined that games weren't designed with girls' interests in mind. The girls she spoke with wanted more games with open worlds and characters they could interact with. Her research led to Interval Research giving Laurel's research team their own company in 1996, Purple Moon. Also in 1996, Mattel's game, Barbie Fashion Designer, became the first best-selling game for girls. Purple Moon's first two games based on a character called Rockett, made it to the 100 best-selling games in the years they were released. In 1999, Mattel bought out Purple Moon. Jaime Levy created one of the first e-Zines in the early 1990s, starting with CyberRag, which included articles, games and animations loaded onto diskettes that anyone with a Mac could access. Later, she renamed the zine to Electronic Hollywood. Billy Idol commissioned Levy to create a disk for his album, Cyberpunk. She was hired to be the creative director of the online magazine, Word, in 1995. Cyberfeminists, VNS Matrix, made up of Josephine Starrs, Juliane Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt, created art in the early 1990s linking computer technology and women's bodies. In 1997, there was a gathering of cyberfeminists in Kassel, called the First Cyberfeminist International. In China, Hu Qiheng, was the leader of the team who installed the first TCP/IP connection for China, connecting to the Internet on April 20, 1994. In 1995, Rosemary Candlin went to write software for CERN in Geneva. In the early 1990s, Nancy Hafkin was an important figure in working with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in enabling email connections in 10 African countries. Starting in 1999, Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder began to work with Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) in Sweden. She later made sure that the domain, .se, was the world's first top level domain name to be signed with DNSSEC. In the late 1990s, research by Jane Margolis led Carnegie Mellon to try to correct the male-female imbalance in computer science. From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, Misha Mahowald developed several key foundations of the field of Neuromorphic engineering, while working at the California Institute of Technology and later at the ETH Zurich. More than 20 years after her untimely death, the Misha Mahowald Prize was named after her to recognize excellence in the field which she helped to create.
=== 2000s ===
In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to reduce the gender disparity in IT and get more women involved in computing again. A 2001 survey found that while both sexes use computers and the internet in equal measure, women were still five times less likely to choose it as a career or study the subject beyond standard secondary education. Journalist Emily Chang said a key problem has been personality tests in job interviews and the belief that good programmers are introverts, which tends to self-select the stereotype of an asocial white male nerd. In 2004, the National Center for Women & Information Technology was established by Lucy Sanders to address the gender gap. Carnegie Mellon University has made a concerted attempt to increase gender diversity in the computer science field, by selecting students based on a wide criteria including leadership ability, a sense of "giving back to the community" and high attainment in maths and science, instead of traditional computer programming expertise. As well as increase the intake of women into CMU, the programme produced better quality students because of the increased diversity making a stronger team.