On the Wings of Ada Lovelace by Camille Crittenden
In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, Camille Crittenden wrote an important reflection on increasing equity in STEM for the Berkeley Blog. Ada Lovelace (1815- 1852) was a mathematician and the first computer programmer. Nearly two centuries after Lovelace's life, Crittenden, Executive Director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, argues that more is needed to increase gender diversity in STEM, both at the educational level and in the workplace.
From the article:
What to do? Assure girls and young women that their contributions are needed in STEM fields, a message for parents and teachers to impart from the earliest age. Encourage them to bring their aptitude and talent for verbal reasoning and abstract thinking typical of humanities fields to engineering; Ada herself serves as a model, as she declared “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly,” a view she characterized as the “Poetical Science.” (Similarly, we also need men’s perspectives and creativity in the humanities and social sciences – their professional pursuits shouldn’t be shoehorned into more quantitative fields just because it may be intellectually more comfortable or promise greater economic security. But this is a topic for another day.)
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