This is a submission for the WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
Last time, I was tired. This time, I'm angry.
- I'm Angry
- The Black Women Who Made Margaret Hamilton's Work Possible
- Molly Holzschlag
- Alan Emtage
- Mary Ann Horton
- Roy Clay Sr.
- Edith Windsor
- Conclusion
I'm Angry
Today, doublespeak about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is all the rage in America. According to those in power, it's the cause of plane crashes and inefficiency. They crow that it needs to be pulled out by the roots so merit-based hiring is possible.
In reality, civil rights are inconvenient if you want to consolidate wealth in one combination of race, class, and gender. DEI has been an often slow and painful effort to move the needle a little bit towards merit-based hiring. This is especially obvious when you notice how much of the attack on DEI is focused on erasing history.
People feel safe telling me that I had an easier time getting a job because of DEI. They believe the quotas myth. When it works, DEI gives us small benefits that aim to level the playing field - like having to interview more job candidates than just the hiring manager's fraternity brothers. Usually, it doesn't work. Thanks to the DEI efforts of those who came before me, I've actually had a job where I wasn't the only femme-presenting technical person in the room. Now, many companies are openly trying to reverse that trend.
My anger grows when I think about how I have it pretty easy. Though I am queer, I pass as cishet. People are socialized to see my lack of melanin as non-threatening. Generational wealth and connections give me more opportunities and a safety net. I've had support whenever I've had to stand up for myself in the face of discrimination and harassment.
Diversity and inclusion don't stop at race, gender, and class, so accessibility is under attack too. It's no secret that that's something I'm passionate about. Some of that is personal experience - I take on physical and cognitive barriers every day of my life. Accommodations I need are not won easily. Mostly, it's empathy. Over and over again, I have found that empathy makes me a better developer. The results of that empathy - accessibility and inclusion - make better systems. And yet, I can only fume as I watch industry leaders choose money over people. I am stuck seething as people I look up to are told to erase their accessibility work or lose their job.
We took the short-term view with the Cavendish banana. Its lack of genetic diversity means the global banana industry collapse grows more likely every day. In the same way, a lack of diversity of thought in tech will rob us of a more sustainable, more human future. We can combat that by listening to those who see the negative impacts of technology the most - like Amazon Alexa engineer Michael Running Wolf's work trying to revitalize indigenous languages. Let's start by acknowledging that the kinds of people they're trying to erase have been and always will be integral to advances in programming and web development.
The Black Women Who Made Margaret Hamilton's Work Possible
Photo credit: mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university. Academic posts for Black women were highly restrictive, so she explored other options. In 1956, she was working as a computer programmer at IBM. She started out writing programs in the assembly language SOAP and FORTRAN for the IBM 650 computer. In 1957, as part of IBM’s Vanguard Computing Center, she wrote programs that tracked orbits for the Vanguard satellite and Mercury spacecraft programs. In 1962, Evelyn joined the aerospace firm North American Aviation. This time, she was working on celestial mechanics and trajectory calculations for the Apollo project.
Photo credit: nasa.gov
In 1957, Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was manager of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) West Area Computing Unit. She had been managing the segregated unit since 1949. While NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) wasn't even called NASA yet, she was the first Black woman promoted to a managerial role. During the 10 years she managed the unit, Dorothy and the Black women who reported to her contributed to virtually every area of research at Langley. When engineers found that they had a challenging computing task, they would ask Dorothy to handle it personally. In that role, she took it upon herself to advocate for her direct reports and other women who were passed over for raises and promotions.
In 1958, the space race was heating up. This is when NACA desegregated, abolished teams separated by gender, and became NASA. Dorothy joined the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD). The book and movie Hidden Figures covered events in 1961 and 1962.
As part of her work for the ACD, Dorothy learned FORTRAN and contributed to the Scout Launch Vehicle Program. This program aimed to make reliable rocket launches possible. It created the launch system used by many U.S. and international space missions and programs. This includes the first American satellites and the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP). The IMP collected data on spatial and temporal relationships of geophysical and interplanetary phenomena like radiation. The Apollo program required the technological advances made to get the system working and the data collected by it.
Although Dorothy never received another managerial role, Dorothy's legacy lived on through the success of those she supported while she managed them.
Photo credit: nasa.gov
Mary Jackson became the first Black woman to be promoted to engineer. For a long time, she was probably the only one at NASA. To work in the 4-foot by 4-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, she had to get special permission to attend the required training classes. They were held in a segregated high school. After a couple decades and 12 papers on understanding air flow, including thrust and drag forces, she was awarded the Apollo Achievement Award. When she realized she wasn't going to get promoted anymore, she took a demotion. Her new position had impact on the hiring and promotion of the next generation of all of NASA’s women mathematicians, engineers and scientists. She even opened her home to aspiring NASA employees who needed a place to stay.
Photo credit: nasa.gov
When NACA became NASA, Katherine Johnson joined the Space Task Group. Katherine calculated trajectories for America's first manned space flight. She was the first woman in the Flight Research Division to receive author credit on a research report. In 1962, astronaut John Glenn said he would only do the Friendship 7 mission if Katherine hand-checked the IBM computer's trajectory calculations. Katherine also did the calculations that synced the Apollo Project’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. She worked on the Space Shuttle and the first satellite launched to study and monitor Earth’s landmasses. She authored or coauthored 26 research reports. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Molly Holzschlag
Photo credit: tucsonsentinel.com
In 2023, I watched accessibility advocates mourn Molly Holzschlag, the "Fairy Godmother of the Web". A contemporary of Sir Tim Berners Lee, she wrote one of the first blogs, earning her the handle mollydotcom. She was the leader of the Web Standards Group which pushed Microsoft, Opera and Netscape to adopt web standards. After she strong-armed Bill Gates into including CSS in the next Internet Explorer release he called her "the annoying web standards girl".
In other words, during the browser wars, she was the person making sure the browsers agreed on enough standards to make the same website code work on all of them. Many of the standards were also aimed at making screen readers actually usable. Her motivation? The world wide web should be usable for everyone.
Molly died at the age of 60. In her last few years, her husband died, and she grew very ill. She was forced to raise money for her medical bills including selling off her eponymous domain molly.com.
Alan Emtage
Photo credit: internethalloffame.org
Alan Emtage, a gay Black man from Barbados, wrote the first search engine, Archie. In 1989, working on a mainframe computer meant waiting hours for a dot matrix computer to print out what you needed.
"Rather than spending my time logging on to FTP sites and trying to figure out what was on them, I wrote some computer scripts that would do the same thing, and much faster too." - Alan Emtage
Alan co-founded the world's first Internet startup. As a founding member of the Internet Society, he headed up several groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force alongside Sir Tim Berners Lee. One of those groups standardized Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).
Alan is a partner at Mediapolis, Inc., the award-winning web development company that operates LGBTQ+ sites under ‘The Datalounge Network". These days, Mediapolis also helps new startups.
Mary Ann Horton
Photo credit: maryannhorton.com
If you've ever used macros or function keys in a vi editor, you have Mary Ann Horton, a trans woman, to thank. If you've only used other text editors, you can thank her every time the editor shows you an error in a formatted file. Linux/Unix users and developers owe her a lot. Among other things, she developed uuencode/uudecode which enabled email attachments beyond text files.
She was also integral to Usenet, one of the first social media networks. As part of the Backbone Cabal, she set up spam filtering and started content moderation.
After college, she started working for Bell Labs. She developed email, Usenet, and internet gateways for AT&T.
As if all that wasn't enough, she also advocated for transgender employment rights while exploring her own gender identity.
Roy Clay Sr.
Photo credit: Roy Clay Sr. family via usatoday.com
Roy Clay Sr. was one of the first Black men to attend Saint Louis University. After school, he was turned away from an interview because of his race. He spent five years applying to that company. In 1956, they hired him as a computer programmer. In 1958, he moved to California to write radiation tracking software to map the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. In 1965, David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP), hired him to head the software devision for their new computers. Roy was director of the team that built the HP 2116A minicomputer, HP's first computer. With his teams, he emphasized results over set work hours. He invented flex time.
In 1971, Roy left HP to found a consulting firm. The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins relied on his recommendations, like Intel and Compaq.
In 1973, he was the first Black person to serve on the Palo Alto, California City Council. At one point, he served as the city’s vice-mayor.
In 1977, he got wind of new electronic safety requirements. Roy founded ROD-L Electronics, the first company to produce testing equipment that certified products met those requirements. The company was located in East Palo Alto. He hired community residents, who were predominantly Black, earning him the moniker the Godfather of Silicon Valley.
Edith Windsor
Photo credit: nyhistory.org
You may know Edith "Edie" Windsor as the LGBTQ+ rights activist who sued the U.S. government. Her Supreme Court case, United States v. Windsor, established a precedent for marriage equality.
You may not know that Edie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, was a talented and prolific programmer. While she earned her second degree, Edie worked on nuclear steam supply power systems for the Atomic Energy Commission as a programmer at Combustion Engineering. This was in the 1950s, so she worked on one of the country's only UNIVACs. At the time, it was illegal for her to be homosexual and to wear men's clothes. Terrified, she wore "crinolines and a marvelous dress to meet the FBI” to get clearance to work on the project.
Edie began her career at IBM as a mainframe programmer. She was there for 16 years, designing systems architecture and language processors. She eventually reached the company's highest technical rank, Senior Systems Programmer. Known for her "top debugging skills," she owned the first IBM-PC shipped to New York City.
"I could read code until it wrapped around the room and back again. A guy I was working with said, ‘give this woman a roll of toilet paper, she can do anything.'” - Edie Windsor
After she left IBM in 1975, she founded a consulting firm called PC Classics. Among other things, they worked to set up computer systems for LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. Lesbians Who Tech have a scholarship for queer women and non-binary techies in her honor.
Conclusion
The idea that any one race, gender, class, or sexuality is more suited to a technical role is patently false. DEI and accessibility efforts seek to level the playing field, but are slow and currently under attack. We need people to lean into their empathy now.
Don't know where to start? I wrote 8 Ways to Support Women Developers in such a way that you can swap out the word "woman" for pretty much any other identifier.
Top comments (9)
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Excellent! Thank you! We could as well add Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, who was gay (and was injustly prosecuted, with tragic consequences), or Lynn Conway, a bright US computer science pioneer (who was injustly fired by her former 3 letters employer because she was a trans woman). Diversity and inclusivity really matter and I hope that DEI will soon be reinstated.
A powerful read.
I am not an American and I am not aware of the impact of DEI or the lack of it, but if it gives chance to anyone who is underprivileged, irrespective of gender, race or ethnicity, it should be reinstated.
That said, don't take it in a negative way, sometimes to enforce diversity-based quota systems, great talents are overlooked. I am from India, and we have a quota system based on cast, which overlooks accessibility and needs. It often happens that needy and deserving people are not considered to fill in the quotas.
I am not against quotas, but in tech, where talent matters, to both employers and employees, diversity-based quotas are not an ample option. It should be based on talent and needs, irrespective of any bodily features.
In my opinion we should be focusing on neutral hiring and enforcing workplace ethics and a safe work environment for everyone, again, irrespective of gender, race or ethnicity.
In my limited experience with Indian hiring, I have seen hiring based on caste, even when quotas are not used, backfire.
However, I just want to emphasize once again that hiring quotas are illegal in America. So the attack on DEI is an attack on any progress we've made towards "neutral hiring and enforcing workplace ethics and a safe work environment for everyone, again, irrespective of gender, race or ethnicity."
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