WIRED:Ada Lovelace's ideas are commonplace in technology today but her gender is drastically under-represented

THIS WEDNESDAY was Ada Lovelace Day. If you haven’t heard of the celebration, I’d be disappointed but not surprised. It’s only two years old and there are only a few thousand of us who have lived up to its pledge: to spend that day writing about the achievements of women in technology in science.

If you haven’t heard of Ada Lovelace herself, consider yourself a philistine of the worst order. Ada was the world’s first programmer. The daughter of Lord Byron, born in 1815, her anxious mother pushed her toward the sciences as a way of protecting her from the influence of Byron’s poetic excesses.

Her fellow scientists mostly disregarded her because of her gender, but she was taken seriously by the polymath Charles Babbage. As his colleague, she became one of the few to truly understand his ambition to build an “analytical engine”, a Victorian blueprint for what eventually became the modern computer.

Most of what we understand of the “analytical engine”, which was never built, comes from Ada’s notes and letters on the subject.

Expanding on Babbage’s conceit – that machines could be constructed that perform complex symbolic tasks, and the operation of these symbolic machines could be modified by changing their software, not hardware – Lovelace spelled out the details and the promise of a digital future.

Lovelace never got much recognition for her work or her insight during her lifetime. It took the rediscovery of Babbage and Lovelace’s work, a century later, by the pioneer of the modern computer Alan Turing, to bring her ideas back into the mainstream.

It also took several serious biographies to shake off the slurs that Lovelace was somehow a stooge (or even a pseudonym) of Babbage and had no idea of what she was writing.

Nowadays her conceptions are commonplace in the world of technology. Sadly, her gender remains drastically under- represented and that imbalance remains particularly bad in the one area of computing that one would expect to be the most open to new ideas and communities – open-source software development.

Anyone can join an open-source project. Communally run, you need no interviews or prior experience to contribute. All you need is a computer and an internet connection to start work on these free-to-join, free-to- distribute, free-to-use,software and hardware projects.

In practice, open-source lags behind other disciplines in its gender diversity.

A 2006 census of the Ubuntu community, one of the more consciously welcoming of open- source projects, showed only 2.4 per cent who were identified as women. This is profoundly worse than the level of involvement by women in technical professions or academic computer science, which has levels of between 10 and 30 per cent.

Why this might be stirs up an amazing amount of sound and heat when discussed within these groups. Almost any discussion of women in free and open software becomes a spirited free-for-all, with plenty of opinion and invective but little practical result.

This seems a shame because there seems to be some fairly basic and obvious steps that anyone can take to make open- source a more open environment for everyone.

One would be for current participants not to assume everyone involved is a man. It is amazing how, even in a room with a sizable number of women within it, speakers at open-source events will assume that everybody there is male. This can range from calling the audience “guys” and referring to their “girlfriends”, to putting up demeaning images of women for a cheap laugh.

Another step to highlight that we have all learned from women in technology is by naming some of our inspirations and influences.

If we don’t do these things, then we risk airbrushing out what the women who work in our space do, neatly erasing the paths that they took and that others might take.

Of course, I’ve very nearly committed the same flaw because I’ve managed to get through this entire column without mentioning a single woman in technology today by name.

I’ll just seed your list by mentioning that the creator of Ada Lovelace Day, Suw Charman- Anderson, has collected all of the last two years of posts by thousands of authors at her FindingAda.com site.

I’ll namecheck Valerie Aurora, the most thoughtful of the Linux kernel hackers, and Limor Fried, who runs the well-named Adafruit Industries, an open-source hardware company.

And talking of well-named, I should also mention my daughter Ada. At seven years old she’s not yet made her mark on the world, but here’s to hoping she inherits all the insight of her namesake’s genius – and none of the prejudice of her life.