Years ago, in her pre-teen years, Adryan set up an international horse lovers’ club for kids on the old BBS system. ‘Send me your lineage and I’ll send you a certificate with dam / sire / foal name’.

I was visiting her in Monroe LA when she was ten; she had written a horse racing game in Basic, but it kept running with the same results. When I showed her a random number generator function, she added it and had a true racing game. I was working with programmers at the time who didn’t ‘get’ that level of programming functionality on microcomputers.

Today she is one of the cofounders of Metaversatility, a company operating in Second Life, with clients like France Telecom and Sony [after initially starting in Second Life as an inhabitant, analyst, snail racer, clothing design and sales {including kilts for men}, marketeer, and event planner].

I’d also like to mention a few women by name. Some of the people on this list might be people you’ve heard of (who maybe are brilliant), and some of them you probably haven’t heard of: Liz Mattijsen, Helen Cook, Arife Vural, Veronica Waters, Revi Sterling, Selena Deckelmann, Allison Randal, and Audrey Tang.

But if I had to pick one woman who has influenced me the most in this area, I would name my mother. Although she isn’t a geek herself, she got the family a computer in 1985, when it was a lot less common to have one at home.

An inspiration to a young woman starting out in a male dominated under resourced technology field. Thank you for pushing me to do more and use technology to take people from ‘We’ve always done it like that…’ to ‘Icouldn’t imagine going bck to what we had before…’

Role model for all women in computer and engineering sciences:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/kkuhn.htm

Although I had no female computer science professors as an undergraduate or graduate, I saw her and others as examples that, yes, women could be respected as computer scientists. Giving Ada Lovelace’s name to the green language was another symbolic step forward. I saw women such as Susan Graham, Barbara Liskov, Susan Gerhart, and Nancy Leveson as computer scientists I could strive to follow. Now, I know that there are so many more.

May we remember that we are all role models of what computer scientists can look like.

Dorothy Hodgkin is certainly remembered by the Royal Society, who have named a grant Fellowship programme after her – a flexible programme designed to support excellent scientists and engineers at an early stage of their career.

Our Dorothy Hodgkin Fellows, Research Fellows and other grant-holders include many women working at the cutting-edge of technology – such as Dr Semali Perera, developing new technologies for carbon dioxide reduction, or Dr Karen Petrie, who is developing an area of computer science called Constraint Programming, where programs solve problems with many requirements. We also support many women who use the latest technology in their research, and offer a Rosalind Franklin Award to promote women in science.

As the UK’s academy of science we seek to play an important role in helping to ensure that the UK is maximising the opportunity for all of the population to contribute to the development of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We hope that our work will ensure that many of our current female fellows, research fellows and grantholders are remembered long into the future, just as Ada Lovelace is now.

Not everyone will become a Nobel Prize laureate, but every day women contribute to technology changes and advancements. It remains important to identify the diverse opportunity open to all people, as well as taking advantage of all the available brain power human beings possess. So, I hope whenever the opportunity presents itself you remember to encourage the girls and women in your life to grow their problem solving skills in a wide range of disciplines, including the sciences. Brains without boundaries should be the goal. You never know where the next good idea could originate, so why limit our choices?

The picture I include today salutes some of the women with whom I work. Development engineers, quality engineers, product owners, technical writers, and project managers who solve technical problems and create solutions. I am sure you know some yourself.