Glad to say that tomorrow night (March 20, 2019) I'm going to join a range of interesting folks at The Marist School (@Marist_School) tomorrow for a variety of interesting talks. Speakers include Johnny Mercer MP, former Army Officer and winner of 'Celebrity Hunted', Marianne Power, author of 'Help Me!', and Rachel Barker, Art Conservator at Tate London.
Since the school is for young women who will soon be entering the workplace, my talk is called #WomenOwnComputing, and it'll reveal the hidden history of how women have been vital to the field we now know as computing, since before we had computers as we now know them. This is something we all need to know, particularly since the percentage of computer science graduates who are female has crashed from around 40 per cent in the late 1980s, to only 18 per cent today!
My upcoming book Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms and How to Stop the Internet from Making Bigots of Us All, covers some of this material, but tomorrow night's talk is specific to something I think is vital for less prejudiced computing: getting women back into a field that they historically own!