When I first heard about Ada Lovelace Day from Suw I was struck with two things. One, what a wonderful idea it is, and also how amazingly needed it still is. At Rewired State the other week the boy to girl ratio was as it ever is at technology events. At Google I/O last year the band of the conference, The Flight of the Conchords, wondered out loud if they were in the right place and rather politically incorrectly wondered if they hadn’t mistakenly gone to a gay pride rally (albeit with more ironic geek chic T-shirts). 

I find it still sad that there is sexism in our industry. That people like Leah Culver get many comments about their looks and their love life rather than the wonderful things like Oembed and the Python OAuth library that they’ve been heavily involved in the creation of. 

So my first heroine is actually a multiple one. It’s all the women in tech who put up with this outdated misogynistic rubbish day in day out. Come on guys, we’re all allegedly smarter and better than that. Let’s act our age. 

My second heroine is Suw herself for doing this. For putting her head above the parapet and putting out this lovely idea. Putting out an open idea with a goal and also for shooting high (it was originally said that 1000 was too many pledges to ask for, it was exceeded in a week and now there are over 1700). Suw, thank you. Lovely idea, beautifully executed. 

I haven’t really got much time to give my other heroines the full biography treatment they deserve however there are some really great resources out there on the interwebs. They’re both from my former life in structural biology and they both have connections with the place and the discipline in which I first discovered the web in 1992. Birkbeck College. They are Rosalind Franklin and Dorothy Hodgkin.

Rosalind is incredibly important, she captured the images of DNA which lead to the structural model from Crick and Watson. She was the first to categorise the diffraction patterns as helical. The data was handed to Crick and Watson pretty much without her knowledge. That posthumous Nobel Prizes are not possible is a travesty. Everyone now pretty much knows this story, what they don’t often know is that it’s highly likely she should have won two of them. Her work at Birkbeck where she initiated a study on the structure and assembly of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus won Sir Aaron Klug a Nobel Prize. Her untimely death at the age of 37 is a great loss to the world and a great loss of a heroine whose contribution is often overlooked. Her paper on the DNA diffraction paper was the third of the papers to be published in Nature, yet it is the bedrock on which that study was formed.

Dorothy Hodgkin is equally important but poorly known, even less so than Rosalind whose death and the furore about the non-award of the Nobel Prize has made her ironically better known than Dorothy who won one. She was a pioneer in the same field as Rosalind, X-ray diffraction. However her achievements were extraordinary. Using the technique of X-ray crystallography of which she was a pioneer she confirmed the structure of penicillin, solved the structure of Vitamin B12 for which she received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In 1969 after 35 years of work she solved the structure of insulin. She also solved the structure of cholesterol, lactoglobulin and ferritin and then in an amazing but not unsurprising coincidence she solved the structure of Tobacco Mosaic Virus, the very organism that Rosalind had initiated the project for. 

You couldn’t be at Birkbeck and not know the history of Bernal, Klug and importantly I felt Franklin and Hodgkin. A few years ago I was lucky enough to be the architect of Peoples Archive. For years we tried in vain to get women onto the site, they often told us the struggle was too great, they didn’t want it documented. I feel overjoyed that through some footage provided to the project you can hear Dorothy tell her lifestory, I only wish we’d had the same chance with Rosalind, sadly disease robbed us of that honour and pleasure.