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Engineering

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Edie Windsor

Before Edie Windsor became an LGBT activist, she was a computer programmer at IBM in the 1960s and a mentor to women in the field. When her joyous 44-year relationship with Thea Spyer ended with Thea’s death, Edie sued the federal government to recognize their marriage. She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning recognition for the marriages of all same-sex couples in the U.S.

Jewish Women in Computer Science

From hardware to software, from developing new programming languages to revolutionizing applications, Jewish women have been part of significant projects on the cutting edge of computing in the United States.

2016-2017 Rising Voices Fellow Maya Jodidio Pipetting DNA into a Gel

To Girls Taking Their First STEM Classes

Caroline Kubzansky
Maya Jodidio
If you’re a female-identifying teen and you attend high school, chances are good that you take, or will take, a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) class. Physics, biology, and chemistry are the usual suspects. We’re writing to share some collective wisdom with you from our own high-school experience.

Janet Lieberman-Lu

With her mastery of 3D printing, Janet Lieberman helped create the first successful hands-free couples’ vibrator in 2014.

Safra Catz

As president and then CEO of Oracle, one of the world’s largest software companies, Safra Catz has helped shape the present and future of the computer world.

Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser was honored with the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for her work in revolutionizing the field of cryptography.

Radia Perlman

A software designer and network engineer, Radia Perlman earned a place in internet history for creating the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which governs how information is sent between servers.

Actress Hedy Lamarr patents the basis for WiFi

August 11, 1942

“All creative people want to do the unexpected.” — Actress Hedy Lamarr

Irene Greif

Living by Their Own Codes

Sarah Weinberg

Women who make history rarely feel the need to adhere to others' narratives—and that goes double for Jewish women.  So it's not surprising that when Radia Perlman, architect of many of the routing and bridging protocols that make the modern Internet possible, discusses her childhood, she casually disposes of the standard geek-culture heroic origin story: "I did not fit the stereotype of the 'engineer.' I never took things apart or built a computer out of spare parts."  Irene Greif, a fellow computer scientist who brought ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists into systems design through her field of computer-supported cooperative work, cheerfully admits: "I have a whole history of always choosing marginal roles and in marginal subjects of research and so on for myself."  Her work, though, has turned out to be anything but marginal. 

Judith Resnik becomes first Jewish American astronaut and second woman in space

August 30, 1984

Judith Resnik joined the crew of the maiden flight of the orbiter Discovery

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins “the Nobel Prize in computing”

June 15, 2013

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser won the Alan M. Turing Award for her work in computer cryptography, which revolutionized internet security.

Girls in science, sure. But what about engineering?

From the Rib

I got my copy of Ms. Magazine yesterday and in it, and was excited to see an article called “Girls Love Robots, Too,” about a group of girls in San Diego who started their own robotics team and have won honors in national robotics competitions. It talks about how it’s a big thing for girls to have their own team, since men outnumber women in engineering 73 to 27, and emphasizes that the girls are defying the stereotype that only boys like science and math.

Judith Resnik

The second female American astronaut to travel into space, Judith Resnik is remembered for her death in the tragic Challenger explosion. Her career accomplishments include biomedical engineering with the National Institutes of Health, working for NASA as a specialist in spacecraft engineering, and operated a solar sail during her first space flight with the shuttle Discovery.

Olga Taussky-Todd

A self-proclaimed “torchbearer for matrix theory,” Olga Taussky-Todd made the previously little-known field essential for scientists and mathematicians.

Lillian Ruth Kessler

Lillian Ruth Kessler created a major export company for automobile parts and heavy industrial and military equipment, making her a pioneer in a business that had been exclusively male territory. In 1982, she retired from the presidency of Kessler International Corporation, the company she had founded in 1946.

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