Today (24th March) is Ada Lovelace Day, and I, along with >1,500 other people, pledged to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom I admire. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought, not because of a lack of inspirational women in technology, but rather instead due to it being hard to pick one from the many. I could have picked Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley, a British computing pioneer, founder of what was to become Xansa Plc and a past President of the British Computer Society, Dame Stephanie entered the nascent computing industry via mathematics, and had to adopt the name ‘Steve’ in order to help her get along in the male-dominated business world. Or I could have easily wrote about a past colleague, having been fortunate to have worked with a number of inspirational girl geeks. Although writing about someone who I knew would have perhaps felt a little bit weird…

As it happens I’ve failed, since I’ve decided to dedicate this blog post to not one woman, but the thousands of women who worked at Station X during World War II. For those not familiar with Station X this was the code name given to the top secret code breaking operation at Bletchley Park, which processed intercepted messages received by the network of ‘Y’ radio receiving stations. Shrouded in secrecy for decades after the war, much has since been written about the involvement of the key figures, such as for instance ‘Father of Computing’ Alan Turing and Post Office man and pioneer of computer design Tommy Flowers. However, the stories of the many women who contributed to the code breaking effort is rarely told. The thousands of women who with very little training adapted in short order to operating what was then cutting edge computing equipment. Who transcribed messages, with absolute precision punched codes into paper tape, and verified and interpreted codes. Who worked long arduous shifts, for very little pay and without speaking to a soul about their work. The women who were introduced to a secret world of codes, ciphers and computing, and then after the war rarely had the opportunity to build on these experiences.

I wonder what the ICT industry would look like today were these women given the opportunity to build on their experiences, and if they were publicly given credit for their work and their stories were more widely known. Would this have encouraged more women to join the profession? It’s impossible to say for certain, but I suspect it might have.