Sue Black on women in tech

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Sue Black left home and school when she was 16. Aged 25, she attended an access course to get the qualifications she needed to go to university to study computer science. It was a bit lonely being the only student in a mini- skirt surrounded by a sea of suits, but she came top of the class nonetheless. She signed up to do a PhD (not really knowing what a PhD was) and worked on the ripple effect in software. What happens when you change one bit of code? Does it mess up everything else? A lot of new software is created by building on and adapting existing programmes so these are important questions to ask. In 2003 she embarked on a three year campaign to save Bletchley Park where ten thousand people built some of the first computers and cracked the Enigma code used by the Nazis during World War Two. More than half of the people who worked there were women. No-one had any previous experience of computers. And more than half a century on, there are fewer women working in tech than there were in the 1960s. Sue is determined to change this backwards step. Perhaps another Bletchley Park recruitment drive is needed to encourage more people, women in particular, to engage with tech and help to build our future? Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service.
0:28.0	Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales.
0:31.6	Welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.
0:34.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts.
0:39.0	Rock Bottom is a good place to start, says Sue Black, a software engineer who's passionate about
0:45.0	encouraging more people, particularly women, to engage with computer
0:49.0	technology. Feeling a bit lonely when she was doing her PhD in the late 1990s, she set up the first online network for women in computing.
0:58.0	More recently, she created tech mums to encourage mothers to embrace new technology and make it work for them.
1:05.6	Her own route into software engineering was far from straightforward.
1:09.6	By the time she got to university, age 26, she was a single mom of three small children with a significant
1:16.0	juggling act on her hands. She's worked on the ripple effect in software
1:20.8	exploring what happens if you change a bit of code in a computer program,
1:25.0	will it mess up everything else?
1:27.0	Between 2008 and 2011, she ran a successful campaign to save Bletchley Park from Rach and Ruin,
1:35.0	restoring the place where Alan Turing and thousands of others cracked the Enigma Code in the Second World War
	...

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