Love the internet? Thank women!

no girls on the Internet. Jonathan is actually the executive producer of my podcast, and he was kind enough to pass me the mic in honor of Women's History Month, because talking about the ways that women have shaped technology is kind of my jam on my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet. We talk all about the overlooked ways that women, people of color, transpolkes, queer folks, and everybody in between has helped shape what technology looks

like and what it means to be online. Women have architected much of the infrastructure of technology and the Internet, but for lots of reasons. For one, women being more associated with software as opposed to hardware, which is a bit more difficult to preserve, and of course good old fashioned sexism, our contributions go easily overlooked. So in honor of Women's History Month, I'd like to tell you about two women who have been foundational to shaping what it

looks and feels like to be online. So let's start with Macgirls Susan Kare and talk about how a sculptor with no tech background change the history of personal computing. Susan Kare is an artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the very first Apple Macintosh, where she worked from nineteen eighty three

to nineteen eighty six. She was Apple's tent employee. Susan Karer helped design a big part of what it looks like to use a computer, and you can still see her legacy today. Remember hers that iconic episode of Sex in the City when Carrie Bradshaw's laptop computer crashes and she gets that sad Mac face. Well, that sad Mac was designed by Susan Karer. So if you've spent any time at all around Max, then you know Susankare's work.

You should definitely google a picture of what Susan Kare who looks like in the eighties, because there is an iconic image of her that you should definitely see. She's got an amazing like curly afro, She's wearing the slouchy gray sweatshirt and the slouchy jeans. She's got her feet kicked up on her desk at Apple, and her feet are right next to one of those amazing gray boxy early Apple computers. Definitely look it up. It is an

amazing iconic image. So Kara first got interested in graphic design after her mother taught her needle point and embroidery as a child, which works in small grids. It just so happened that I had small black and white grids to work with. She recalls, the process reminded me of

working with needlepoint knitting patterns and mosaics. I was lucky to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts, So needle point and crafting, you know, these pursuits that we kind of think of as traditionally feminine really shaped Susan Kare's work in technology. This is actually one of the reasons why I love Susan Kare's story and legacy so much

is that she didn't have a traditional tech background. I think so often, particularly for women, it can feel like if you're not an engineer or a coder, you don't really have a place in tech. But that attitude is incorrect, not to mention very limiting technology shapes so much of our lives that we all deserve to see ourselves meaningfully

and authentically reflected within it. And Susan Kare is a great example of what I mean, because she didn't really have a lot of experience with technology or even computers when she first started working an Apple back in nineteen eighty three. At that point in her life, she made money and got experience taking pro bono graphic design jobs making holiday cards and invitations. She then started working as a sculptor, but didn't like it because she found it

to be too solitary of an artistic pursuit. A fact that I love about her story is that she had been elbow deep working on a life size sculpture of a hog when she first got the call from Apple's Andy Hurtsfield. Andy Hurtsfield was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team in the eighties, and he had gone to high school with Susan Kare. He asked Susan to hand draw some icons and fonts to help inspire the budding mac interface. This was a completely new concept

for Susan Care. She said that she didn't know the first thing about designing typeface, but Hurtsfeld had an idea. He told Ker to find the smallest graph paper that she could find, then block out thirty two by thirty two inch squares to fill with color to come up with designs since the matrix that she'd be designing in was essentially a grid, and Lucky for Susan, her mother had taught her needle point, and those needle point skills

came to her rescue. Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needle point and other pseudo digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple, she told an interviewer in twenty twenty. Susan Care's legacy endures today. She came up with the concept of associating unique document icons with their creator applications, like a little image of a paint bucket being the thing that you clicked to fill a surface with color, or little scissors meeting cut.

For the copy function, she initially tried using a copy machine that users were meant to drag and drop onto their file to make a copy, but rendering a copy machine was kind of tough to render at scale. She also tried to use a cat looking in a mirror to demonstrate copy. But I guess that was just like too clunky of an image. So she might be thinking, is this really such a big deal? Is this really

a big part of computers and technology? Yes, because keep in mind this was during the very early days of personal computers. At that time, they were still these big, clunky nightmares that seemed difficult to use, and they were really more inclined toward engineers or mathematicians, not regular people

using them in their house. All of the tasks that you want to do in a computer, like throwing a file in the trash or clicking a little disk to save a file or not necessarily immediately obvious to people who were using computers for the first time, and so having those functions be simple and accessible was a big part of why personal computing took off in the first place.

Apple specifically wanted to demystify the process of using computers by having user friendly interfaces that care was foundational to designing, and she also wanted to humanize the experience of using a computer to reduce stress for folks who might have been using them for the first time, which is why when those old school max booted up, the first thing that I use or saw was the happy Mac image of a little computer with a smiley face, or in

the case of Carrie Bradshaw, if something bad happened, you would get the dreaded sad Mac, a computer with a frownie face. Or if you were having a really bad day, you might get that bomb icon for when your system was crashing. A cool thing to know about Susan Care is that even though she is a very much part of tech history, she is very much alive today and still a big part of technology. And I think it's so great when we're able to celebrate our icons and

our historical heroes while they're still here. Susan Care works at Pinterest today or you're probably also familiar with her designs. She designed the image that is modeled after a pushpin to symbolize pinning something on a Pinterest and that spinning button that appears when you refresh the app today. Susan Care's notebooks are part of the permanent collections of the New York in San Francisco Modern Art Museums, and one was recently included in the recent London Design Museum exhibit

called California Designing Freedom. Ellen Lupton Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper Hewbitt Smithsonian Design Museum, told the Smithsonian dot com. When Susan Kare helped create Apple's user friendly interface in the early eighties, computers started speaking in pictures instead of lines of code. Her bitmapped icons made people feel welcomed and safe, even when the system crashed

and gave you a drawing of a bomb. Kara's original bitmapped icons, built from little black squares, were eventually replaced with colorful, more elaborately illustrated icons, Yet the core thinking remains the same, and Karras continued to create warm and accessible imagery for a range of tech companies, including Pinterest, where she works today. What's interesting about Susan Kare's designs are the ways that she's really shaped how we think

of and use computers in general. You know, when I was growing up writing term papers on my dad's clunky gray desktop at our computer room, I had to manually hit the save button every few minutes, and the save button was a little icon of a floppy disk. And even though we no longer use sloppy discs, I have not seen one or held one for many, many years. We no longer have to hit save manually every five minutes because things save automatically. The icon per save is

still a floppy disk. Kara told The Smithsonian about her time and Apple. I loved working on that project. Always felt so lucky for the opportunity to be a non technical person in a software group. I was awed by being able to collaborate with such a creative, capable, and dedicated team of engineers. So I love talking about all the overlooked figures in our history of tech and the Internet.

Their stories can tell us a lot about how their identities often determine who gets remembered and who gets overlooked, even when they literally changed the history of personal computing, like Susan Kerr, or when they literally changed the world like Lin Khanway did. So who is Lin Kanway? Lin Kanway is an eighty five year old professor Emerita at the University of Michigan of College of Engineering. And she had a big hand and contributing to the modern day

Internet and smartphones. And because of her identity and good old fashioned sexism and transphobia, her contributions were almost overlooked completely. Even though Lynn Conway literally changed the world Conway was born in nineteen thirty eight and was assigned mail at birth, but from an early age she knew there was more

to her story as it pertains to gender. Her mom was studying answer apology at Columbia, and she would flip through her mom's text books looking for answers, telling Michigan Engineering News in a really beautifully written profile about her life, it seems like people in other cultures had found different ways to deal with what I knew I was feeling. But then that became scrambled with the thought that what I was feeling was that I was gay, but no

one ever talked about those things. When Lynd Conway was fourteen, she read a news story about a former Army private, Christine Jorgensen, the first person in the United States to publicly announce a gender transition. I knew then what I had to do, Conway said, so, given what we know about how narrowly society of view gender in the fifties and the sixties, and to be honest even today, as

you can imagine, Conway's journey was very difficult. She initially tried to transition while studying at MIT in the fifties. She started taking hormones on her own and asked a friend in medical school if he could help her find a doctor who could help her. The friend took her to the dean, who told her that if she didn't stop taking hormones, she would be put in a mental institution.

Fear of being institutionalized or arrested was a big concern for Conway because being trans was strongly associated with being mentally ill and criminal behavior. If you were openly trans, you could end up institutionalized or even arrested in some places, which again, it's so sad to think that we really maybe haven't come as far as you would like. After this disappointing turn of events at MIT, she put transitioning in the back of her mind. She got married, she

became a parent, and she started working at IBM. At this point, Lynne seemed to kind of have a picture perfect life from the outside. She was making major moves and innovations. She was making major moves and innovations and design at IBM, which at the time was the seventh largest corporation in the world, while there by all accounts, she was kicking ass. She invented a hardware protocol that enabled the out of order command processing that most computers

still used today. But all of this, all of these strides that she had been making, was put into jeopardy because of transphobia, and that transphobia would alter the trajectory of her life. Conway learned about the pioneering gender transition work of doctor Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist known for his clinical work with transpolkes, and decided that she

wanted to work with him. What's very heartbreaking is that, according to this profile in Michigan Engineering, Conway and her then spouse had worked on a solid plan together for how Conway's transition would work within their family. They would get a divorce and Conway would start working with doctor Benjamin to transition. She would pay child support from her

IBM salary and stay in the children's lives. They decided the children would call her aunt, and according to a really compelling Forbes piece by Jeremy Alessandre, Conway's immediate family and IBM's divisional management were actually pretty accepting and supportive

for the time at first. However, when IBM's corporate medical director learned that Conway was planning to transition in nineteen sixty eight, he told then CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. Who fired Conway to avoid the public embarrassment of employing a transwoman. Getting fired from IBM had a huge impact on Conway's life. It started kind of a downward spiral that ended up being completely destabilizing. She had to divorce her spells while losing her income, which made everything that

much more difficult. California Social Services tried to keep her away from her kids, and Conway's Expells decided that she didn't want to have any contact with Conway because she was worried that if Conway was in her life, the kids would be taken by the state. Her children were just babies at the time, two and four years old. This was crushing. Conway recalls that tore me up. Let me tell you, the hardest part about the whole thing was that I felt like a mom to them, she

told Michigan Engineering. So she knew this was going to be a tough process, and she relied on the lesson that she learned from her lifetime love of outdoor adventures like newing and rock climbing to steady herself mentally and emotionally. As she described it, now, I had a plan to get across the river. I could see the steps I had to make. I could see the dangers and how to protect against them. The only problem was I didn't

know where I'd end up on the other side. So even though it cost to her family and her career, she continued to work with doctor Benjamin to transition as a lot of transpokets will tell you the logistics of changing your name. Getting new identification and paperwork can be a big part of navigating trans identity so that you can work and earn an income, have a bank account, get a place to live. But even today this process

is complicated and sometimes prohibitively expensive. Sadly, many trans folks do not have the support or resources they need to navigate it. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, only one fifth of trans folks who have transitioned have been able to update all of their IDs and records, and one third haven't been able to update any of their

ideas or records. Luckily, Conway was able to use connections that doctor Benjamin had in Oakland to get this process done quick, which was especially important and back then in order to avoid suspicion that could turn unsafe. Conway recalls, you were an undocumented alien from Mars. You didn't have a birth certificate. How are you going to get a job? This was the sixties. You can think of it like being a spy in a foreign country. If you were found out, you'd be dealt with immediately, If not by

the police, then people on the streets. So it's probably clear why. After transitioning, Conway started what she refers to as the stealth phase of her career. In nineteen sixty nine, Conway changed her name, hit her gender identity, and started looking for work and computing, eventually finding a job as a contract programmer. Then later worked at Memoires, and then she landed the big account at the Xerots Pello Alto

Research Center, which was a huge deal. Again she started kicking ass like she always did, just like she did back at IBM before being fired. Her work completely revolutionized how microchips were designed. She sometimes called the hidden Hand for that work, and it led to the tech revolution in the nineteen eighties and is the reason why we have smartphones and personal computers. But even while she was accomplishing all of these important innovations, she couldn't really own

them because of her identity. In a piece for the Huffington Post, Conway called this time in her life stealth mode, where she kind of just purposely stayed behind the scenes despite creating innovations that literally changed the world. Because during this time, her fan's identity was not public knowledge, she only told her closest friends, HR administrators and security clearance administrators.

She purposely made herself scarce and stayed behind the scenes, hence the nickname the Hidden Hand, and that meant a lot of her accomplishments and innovations did too. Transphobobia almost kept us from having a full accounting of this important history and technology. So he did. Conway's contribution start being

made public well. In nineteen ninety nine, a computer historian began investigating Conway's early innovations at IBM, which tipped her off that others were taking credit for the work that she had done on IBM under a different name. Conway wanted to correct the record, but in order to do so, she would need to open up about her identity and explain why somebody with a totally different name had made all of these big accomplishments that she was saying were

actually hers. She ended up telling the Computer Historian and then quietly added a quote gender transition section to her personal website. And this decision is what really sparked the next chapter of her life as an advocate for trans writes. The list of ways that Lynn Kanway has advocated for other trans folks is very long. She's given support and assistance to many transwomen going through transition. She's also been

an advocate for employment protections for transpolks. But one thing that I really love is how Lynd Kanway is still making big changes for transpolks working in tech today. In twenty thirteen, Conway successfully lobbied the Board of Directors at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, which is essentially like a code of ethics for the engineering profession to include transpolks, and that means it impacts the world's largest

engineering professional society. Kanway story actually has a pretty happy ending after fifty years of silence. In October twenty twenty, IBM invited staff to an event called tech Trailblazer and transgender pioneer Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gearson. Gearson was IBM's senior vice president of Human Resources. The event started with a formal apology to Conway for her firing fifty two years earlier. Conway said that she struggled to

hold back tears. Not only did they apologize, but they also recognize the immense contributions to IBM's work that had just gone unattributed. Dario Gill, director of IBM Research, presented Conway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who

have changed the world through technology innovations. Gill noted that Lynn's extraordinary technical achievements helped define the modern computing industry and that she paid the way for how we design and make computing ships today and forever change to microelectronics devices and people's lives. IBM acknowledged that after Conway was fired in nineteen sixty eight that her research still aided

IBM success. In nineteen sixty five, Lynn created the Architectural Level Advanced Computing System one simulator and invented a method that led to the development of the super Scholar computer. This dynamic instruction scheduling invention was later used in computer chips,

greatly improving their performance. A spokesperson said Lynn Conway recalls of the event instead of as being a resolution of what happened in nineteen sixty eight, it became a heartfelt group celebration of how far we've all come since then. So Lynn Conway is actually still very much alive today. She lives on twenty four beautiful acres of meadow marsh and Woodlands and Rule, Michigan with her husband, where they spend all of their time exploring and playing in the

outdoors like truly living her best life. And she's still an activist who can follow her on Twitter at Lynn Conway. And one thing I also want to add, transpokes deserve to live full lives that account for their contributions and brilliance, regardless of where they are on their journeys. Transition means

different things to different people. It can be personal, medical, or legal steps, telling one's friends and family or co workers using a different name or pronouns, dressing differently, changing one's name on lead documents, etc. As I mentioned before, it can be prohibitive for many, and trans folks deserve to live full lives even if they are not able to transition the way that doctor Conway did. I just love doctor Conway's story because it's a good example of

how living history is all around us. We can't let sexism, transphobia, and racist systems erase all the accomplishments of marginalized people. And I gotta end lind Conway's story with this great quote from her Huffing and Post piece bottom line, if you want to change the future, start living as if you're already there in. Her story is one that really

inspires me. It's one of the reasons why it's so important to me to really tell the stories of the contributions of women who have shaped technology, even if those contributions and voices go overlooked, because I used to think of technology as a big boys club where women and other marginalized people were trying to break their way in. But that's not actually true. Anytime you use a computer,

it's because of the contributions of women. Women were involved that every single step of the process of personal computing becoming what it is today. And if you don't always hear our stories or our voices, it's not because we weren't there. We need monuments to all the different ways that women have shaped what it means to be online and youth technology. So join me as I build them. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Bridget Todd, host of Iheartradios.

There are no bodiles on the Internet, and thanks so much to Jonathan Strickland and Tarry Harrison for the opportunity to share these stories with you. It really means a lot happy women's history. Mom Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.