It is no surprise that the data industry still has a long way to go – in the latest Harnham Diversity report, the gender wage gap increased from 10% in 2022 in the UK, to 16% in 2023. Across the seas, the US saw only 12% of entry-level data positions taken by women, compared to 36% in 2022. The UK had just 11% female-filled entry-level positions, diving from the 2022 levels of 35%.
There is much work to do – one organisation spearheading the way in this arena is Women in Data, whose mission it is to change the cultural and systemic roots that result in the worsening of such a divergence. Through large events that bring together the greatest data leaders driving value today, to professional networking and knowledge transfer and their Women’s Health Commission, this Women’s History Month we champion the inclusive and important efforts of an ally in the data space.
It is also important to recognise that the mission to get more women into the data space is not an attempt to shoehorn women into one role. For this reason, on International Women’s Day this year, DataIQ wanted to shine the spotlight onto three female historical figures who had an early material impact on analytics and data processing, though this is not exactly what they are remembered for. By showing that women can, will, and have lived a life dedicated to data and other passions, DataIQ hopes to encourage a widening of the door into this industry, built upon the brains and dedication of countless women like the three in discussion here.
Hedy Lamarr
Born in Austria in 1914, Hedy Lamarr was the daughter of a pianist and a banker. Hedy is known most for her career in the Hollywood Golden Age, as she starred in adventure epics like “Algiers” (1938), “I Take This Woman” (1940), and “White Cargo” (1942). However, it is less known that Lamarr loved inventing; she even had an inventing table in her trailer, allowing her to work on designs between takes.
Operating during the turbulence of the Second World War, with the help of friend and composer George Antheil, Hedy created a communicative system which involved the use of frequency hopping amongst radio waves, in attempt to ultimately direct torpedoes to their targets in battle. This system was unique in its ability to prevent enemy squads intercepting these radio waves.
Though the pair were able to patent this, the military rejected the invention and Lamarr had to instead support war efforts with her celebrity status by selling war bonds. It was only in 1997, three years before her death, that Hedy received any sort of recognition for this, as The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded the duo their Pioneer Award. Eventually, this frequency hopping technique would be used in Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth technologies that have benefitted billions and has become the bedrock for modern communication technology and data sharing.
Sister Mary Keller
Mary Kenneth Keller was born only a year before Hedy Lamarr in 1913, and devoted her life to Roman Catholicism, more specifically the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. While a devoted nun, Mary received degrees in mathematics and physics from DePaul University, Chicago. Soon enough, Mary enrolled in the new computer science programme in the University of Wisconsin-Madison and she received what is regarded as the very first computer-science PhD on June 7th, 1965, alongside a fellow student. On her way to this great achievement, she worked in the male-only computer centre at Dartmouth College.
Mary’s greatest input to the tech, data, and analytics space is her development of the BASIC programming language; in short, BASIC translates the binary ones and zeroes of coding into a simplified version, which helped democratise computer programming by making it accessible to fields outside of maths, science, and data.
The theme of this years’ Women’s History Month is women who advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion; Mary’s commitment to inclusion by breaking down barriers here shows she was extremely ahead of her time. Mary continued with this commitment to education as she also headed the computing department at Clarke College, Iowa, for 20 years, advocating for a computer’s ability to increase access to information. This is pivotal in the way we collect, store, and disperse data today.
If this was not already enough, according to the Vatican Observatory, “Keller also anticipated the ubiquity of computing in fields outside of computer science, as well as the development of artificial intelligence”. As the word generative AI bounces around and across countless webpages online, it is Mary’s commitment to computer science and coding that we should hear in its echo.
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale, also known by the epithet “the lady with the lamp”, is best known as the founder of modern nursing. During the Crimean War, it was Nightingale who noticed the impact of living conditions, sanitation levels, and malnutrition on the death rate of wounded soldiers. While improving these conditions, she kept a record of the death toll.
Upon returning to Britain, Nightingale created the polar area chart, a massive stride in data visualisation; in this chart, each segment has the same angle but differs in radius dependent on the value being represented, indicative of contextual scale and offering the ability to compare change over time. Florence was not only able to save the lives of many of the wounded soldiers, but through data collection, analysis, and storytelling, was able to highlight how preventable diseases were the main cause in death rather than battle injuries.
Nightingale first used this visualisation in the report she put together made of statistics, qualitative reportage and accounts of her own experience. Reaching over 1,000 pages, the report was named the Coxcombs. Interestingly, within this massive work it was this instance of data visualisation in particular that resonated so greatly with readers and historians that the graph has come to bear the same name. Data is everywhere – in our approach to sanitation and infection, in our language, and in our shared histories.
