How do you imagine women in the 19th Century? Sipping tea and walking around some English courtyards talking about how boring the day before had been? There is actually much more than that.
Among the most important women of that century we find of course many writers of books and poems, some active feminists, of course few wives of important Kings and Tsar and unexpectedly scientists and mathematicians.
Nowadays one of the most popular topics is Artificial Intelligence, but not many know that its initiator was an English woman. When you think about AI you imagine young engineers researching and studying algorithms around robots in small and messy laboratories.
Now, switch your perspective. Imagine instead Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) writing her book in which she was sketching the basis of what is probably the future of any kind of industry. She has been considered the first one to recognize the potential of programming a “computing machine” and the first one able to compose the first algorithm to be carried out from such complicated instrument.
Women in the technology industry are often invisible, such as Ada Lovelace, but they might happen to be the starting point as well.
“This science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst.” - Ada Lovelace