News Announcing Award Winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering Web Pages

 

A conversation with Fran Allen held several years ago has blossomed into a new career resource women in technology.  This is to announce the availability of the Anita Borg Institutes’ “Award-winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering” web pages, at URL http://anitaborg.org/award-winning-career-timelines/

The web pages present the biographies of a variety of successful technical women whose careers can serve as a touch point and model for other women working in technology. The women presented have succeeded in industry, government, and the academic world (and some of them in all three areas!). All of the women on this timeline have won major awards and been recognized over many years by a range of admirable organizations and institutions. This material was developed in part to address questions such as: What difference does it make if you get awards? What awards are appropriate for your career? How do awards fit into a successful technical woman’s career? We hope that this resource will encourage more women students, professionals, and academics to get into the awards queue and on the lists of those honored.
The first six women whose remarkable and inspiring life stories are presented include:

  • Fran Allen, IBM Fellow Emerita, first female winner of the ACM A.M.Turing Award (2006)
  • Helen Greiner, CoFounder iRobot Corporation
  • Mary Jane Irwin, Distinguished Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State
  • Radia Perlman, Fellow at Sun Microsystems, Fellow at Intel, Awarded more than 100 patents
  • Lucy Sanders, Co-Founder & CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)
  • Jeannette Wing, President’s Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Want to learn about how you can become an award winner?  Come to the GHC 2010 panel “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”.

There are hundreds of awards available to women in computing, from the TR35 (MIT’s award for top young innovators), to the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professionals, to Senior Member or Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, or National Academy, to the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision awards. In industry, promotions and high-status titles such as Fellow or Distinguished Engineer serve the same function as awards.

Awards are a public acknowledgment of success and excellence. Awards are good for both the honored individual as well as their company, institution, or university. Award winners serve as role models for women entering the field. Moreover, awards build on each other: award winners are more likely to be noticed and considered for additional awards.

However, despite this importance, awards often go begging for lack of good nominations and a great woman is often overlooked because no one mentioned her name or took the time to carefully craft an effective nomination package. This timeline shows the value of awards and should encourage us in the technical community to develop an increased focus on awards for great technical women at every stage in their careers. Our goal is for more remarkable technical women to consider how to prepare for and pursue awards early in their careers.

The genesis of these pages was in 2006.  At an ABI Advisory Board meeting, Fran Allen and Katy Dickinson discussed how few major awards go to women and how that situation could be changed.  The External Awards Committee was created to investigate that need.  The first product of the group was a 2008 flyer distributed at an ABI Tech Leader’s conference.  This was followed by a Grace Hopper Celebration 2009 panel called “The Value of Awards and How to Get Them”.  An expanded version of that panel will be offered at GHC 2010 next month, called “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”.  The “Award-winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering” web pages are the latest product of the committee, ably supported by ABI’s Web Goddess Alison Abreu-Garcia:

  • Katy Dickinson (Committee Chair) – Chief Analyst, Huawei Techologies
  • Fran Allen – IBM Fellow Emerita
  • Jerri Barrett – ABI, Vice President of Marketing
  • Christine Chiu – ABI, Program Content Manager
  • Chandra Krintz – Associate Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara
  • Kathy Richardson – Consultant
  • Robert Walker – Professor, Kent State University

Special thanks to the first six women whose remarkable and inspiring life stories are presented:

  • Fran Allen, IBM Fellow Emerita, first female winner of the ACM A.M.Turing Award (2006)
  • Helen Greiner, CoFounder iRobot Corporation
  • Mary Jane Irwin, Distinguished Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State
  • Radia Perlman, Fellow at Sun Microsystems, Fellow at Intel, Awarded more than 100 patents
  • Lucy Sanders, Co-Founder & CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)
  • Jeannette Wing, President’s Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Thanks to the ABI Advisory Board for their time and advice in reviewing these web pages.