Women on the Technological Edge

by Heather Cassell (San Francisco)

What do Liquid Paper, the submarine telescope and lamp, Kevlar, the windshield wiper, and the rotary engine have in common? They were all invented by women. Women have been creating innovative technologies that benefit the lives of people worldwide since before the start of the Industrial Revolution; however, until relatively recently, few, if any, women have been acknowledged for such achievements.

The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology is helping to fill the recognition gap with the Women of Vision awards. The Institute, an organization that provides resources and programs to help the public and private sectors recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high tech fields, created these awards nearly three years ago to recognize and honor women’s achievements in innovation, leadership and social impact through technology.

“Women, individually and collectively, have the power to improve our world and change the face of technology,” says ABI President Dr. Telle Whitney. “These women are using that power in ways that have earned them a rightful place as role models for the next generation. They are truly ‘Women of Vision,’ and we are proud to honor them.”

In 2008, the organization received more than 50 nominations, demonstrating that women are indeed leading the industry and affecting positive changes that allow technology to expand its range of impact.

You may have seen the advertisements on television for the Roomba Robot Vacuum, which bounces around the room, vacuuming as it goes. But Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot, envisioned robots as the basis for an entirely new class of products that would improve life by taking on dangerous and undesirable tasks. Robots similar to Roomba have been deployed in Iraq to dispose of IEDs, and others have been put to work in industry instead of risking human lives and limbs.

From her first encounter with Star Wars’ R2D2 in 1977, she set her sights on working in robotics. Using her nearly 20 years in robot innovation and her background with both NASA and MIT, Greiner has created technology that does more than domestic chores, garnering her this year’s Women of Vision award for innovation.

“Technology enables people to make a positive impact on society by addressing the really big problems,” said Greiner earlier this year when she accepted her award. The self-proclaimed “geek” told an audience of more than 700 attendees that “technological and human made world” facilitates 95 percent of human’s daily experience. While highlighting the vast need for engineers, she pointed out that only 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women. “That’s over 100,000 girls who are not given the opportunity to impact the future through invention, discovery, or design or who aren’t taking advantage of this opportunity.”

She advocates implementing technology as a school subject, applying math and science to design challenges. Recalling her childhood when, as an 11-year-old girl working on the computer, no one advised her that she could become an engineer, Greiner says we should encourage children, regardless of gender.

She told the audience to say, “You are really good at building things. That’s a really great idea you came up with. Have you thought about engineering as a career? I really think you’d be good at it. If you want to help people, engineering is the most effective way to fulfill your goal to make a difference.”

“It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game,” says Greiner expressing her concern about girls in the 21st century being overlooked or not encouraged when they demonstrate an aptitude for science, engineering, and technology. “We don’t need to kick the boys out because we need engineers. We need a diversity of perspectives. We need more women’s life experiences…more technologies that will give us work/life balance.”

Another recipient, Susan Landau, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., is focused on a different aspect of technology: the delicate balance between security and privacy. An expert and innovator in encryption, wire tapping, and cryptography, she is often called on as an advisor to Congress, where she comments extensively on U.S. policy. She is a prolific author with numerous articles on the fine line between national security and an individual’s right to privacy, as well as a book entitled Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which she co-authored with Whitfield Diffie. Honored this year with the Women of Vision award for social impact, she told event attendees, “This is the first time I’ve won an award for being a thorn…Not every engineer gets to be a thorn.”

Northwestern University professor of Media Technology and Society Justine Cassell also embraces the thought of being a “thorn”. “Defiance in the face of authority has made me a good scientist and, in particular, a good technologist,” says Cassell, whose goal is to “evoke from humans the most human and humane of our capabilities, and to study their effects on our evolving world.”

Marching to her own beat, the self-described C-student was honored with this year’s Women of Vision in leadership award for her development of the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using interactive and non-verbal behavior.

“To envision in the future and to make it come to pass means believing that the present is not the only way things can be [and] not accepting the status quo,” says Cassell. “It means believing that change is possible. It means that we are all agents of change. It means holding on to a vision of change long enough to persuade others that change is good, that it’s necessary, that we are the ones to do it. It means holding onto one’s passion in the face of adversity or negative feedback, and that passion is key.”

The Women of Vision Awards nominations are announced every winter and the honorees are given their awards at an annual spring gala. Past honorees include: Deborah Estrin, a University of California at Los Angeles professor of computer science with a joint appointment in electrical engineering (2007 for Innovation); Duy-Loan Le, program manager of Texas Instruments (2007 for leadership); Leah H. Jamieson, John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering of Purdue University (2007 for social impact); Radia Perlman, Sun Fellow of network protocols and security project of Sun Microsystems (2005 for innovation); Pamela Samuelson, University of California at Berkeley, Professor of School of Information (2005 for social impact); and Janie Tsao, senior vice president of worldwide sales, marketing and business development and co-founder of Linksys Division of Cisco Systems, Inc. (2005 for leadership).

To view all award winners’ speeches, visit ABI on YouTube.