A #WomensHistoryMonth post by Prof. Susan Rodger, a Professor of Practice in the CS Department at Duke University with a PhD in CS from Purdue University.

The Notable Women in Computing project started in 2012 when I noticed that many of the notable women in computer science who are ACM Fellows did not have a Wikipedia page. Many men who are ACM Fellows did have one. An ACM Fellowship is an award given to recognize the top 1% of members in the computer science professional organization for the Association of Computing Machinery. At a meeting I attended in April 2012, a few of us decide to write a Wikipedia page for a particular notable woman, Mary Jane Irwin, a distinguished Professor at Penn State. We spent about an hour and wrote her Wikipedia page. A few weeks later we looked back at the page and it was full of warning messages. That was a bit intimidating! I was determined to figure out how to write Wikipedia pages without warning messages. I spent time on and off the next year writing more Wikipedia pages for notable women in computer science. When a warning message appeared, I would figure out how to modify the page to get rid of it. For example, one time I got the message that a page was an “orphan page.” It didn’t have any other pages linking to it. I saw that the woman’s PhD advisor also didn’t have a page, so I wrote a quick page for him and then linked the two pages to each other! As I slowly figured out how the Wikipedia world works, I wrote a guide on how to write a Wikipedia biography and what to watch out for.

Katy Dickinson with Duy-Loan Le (holding her card) in November 2014. Credit: Computer Science Department at Duke University

As part of the guide I started a database of notable women in computing that currently contains over 300 notable women. For each woman we list their current position, why they are notable (such as a distinguished award) and whether or not they have a Wikipedia page. If they do have a Wikipedia page, we list the status of the page and whether or not it needs a lot of work. Katy Dickinson volunteered to help me update the database, and then she teamed up with her daughter Jessica Dickinson Goodman and proposed creating a deck of playing cards depicting 54 of the woman. For each woman in our deck, we have their picture (if we could find a public image), why they are notable, and a link to their Wikipedia page if they have one. If they don’t have one, we say on the card “No Wikipedia page as of (date), but you can change that. Learn more here: bit.ly/NotableW.”

Grace Hopper’s Playing Card. Credit: notabletechnicalwomen.org

Who is on the cards? We tried to highlight a variety of diverse women on the cards. We have the three women who have won the Turing Award (the highest honor in Computer Science): Shafrira Goldwasser (Jack hearts), Barbara Liskov (King hearts) and Frances Allen (Queen hearts). We have some women who have done a lot for visibility of women in computing, such as Grace Hopper (Queen spades) and Anita Borg (Queen diamonds). We have the six pioneer ENIAC programmers: Jean Bartik (2 clubs), Fran Bilas (2 spades), Kay McNulty (2 diamonds), Betty Snyder (3 diamonds), Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (3 spades) and Marilyn Wescoff (2 hearts). We also have Katherine Johnson (Queen clubs), a NASA mathematician who calculated the trajectory of early space launches. She recently was one of the prominent women in the Hidden Figures book and movie. The two jokers are Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College and a prominent computer scientist, and Mitchell Baker, the Executive Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation. We did ask them if it was ok to put them as Jokers in our deck and they were quite willing! You can find out more about who is in the deck here.

We printed our first run of cards to sell at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, where we also presented a poster of a picture of all 54 cards. We ran a kickstarter in October 2014 that raised over $15,000 for people to buy cards, posters, or to buy decks to donate to K-12 teachers for their classrooms. All of our decks were sold or donated. Since then we have done a few bulk runs of cards mostly at the SIGCSE Symposium (a conference for computer science educators).

Educators asked us for larger cards as they like to hold them up in class, so at the SIGCSE Symposium we sold regular playing cards and a Jumbo size.

We have run 3 editions of the cards and although the featured women stay the same, each time we manage to get more pictures and update the status of the cards. In some cases, their Wikipedia page has now been written! We still need pictures from two women Qiheng Hu, the Founder of the China Internet Network Information Center, and Betsy Ancker-Johnson, who is known for the observation of microwave emission without the presence of an external field. If anyone can help in obtaining a public image of either of these women for our card decks, please contact us.

How can you buy the cards?

We have had a lot of requests for the cards so we hope to put them on the registration form for SIGCSE 2019. If you are coming to that conference or know someone who is going and can pick them up for you, then you can order them on the registration form for the conference. That conference will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota from February 27 to March 2, 2019. Those cards will likely be $6 a deck, and you have to pre-pay for them by the early registration and then be sure to pick them up at the conference!

We also sell them on a website ($10/deck) and ship them to you.

More information on our cards, including how educators can use cards with computer science concepts, how to print your own poster or deck of cards, or where we are currently selling cards, is on our website.