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Claire L Evans: Women and the Internet

Claire L Evans speaking at the Sydney Town Hall

The history of technology is one of men and machines, transformation tales of garages to grand mansions, alpha nerds and ‘brogrammers’. But female tech visionaries have always been at the forefront of technology and innovation, yet they’ve been overlooked, until now.

In her breakthrough book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, VICE reporter and musician Claire L Evans tells the story of internet’s unsung female heroes. From Ada Lovelace who wrote the first computer program back in the Victorian Age (100 years before the first computer was built), to Elizabeth Feinler who helped create the first domain names, women have been a huge part of every significant milestone in web development. These women joined the ranks of pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling shattering entrepreneurs.

Following her solo talk, Evans will be joined by a panel of experts including president of UNSW's RoboGals Sandy Aung, best-selling author Ginger Gorman, cultural anthropologist Alexandra Zafiroglu, and science journalist Natasha Mitchell to discuss how women will continue to shape the technology of our future.

For 200 years, computers and calculators were people.  They were the female bodies and minds that did the computational work that undergirded the development of the scientific age.

Claire L Evans

 

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Photo credit: Prudence Upton

This talk was presented as part of Sydney Science Festival.

Speakers
Claire L Evans portrait

Claire L Evans

Claire L Evans is a writer and a musician. She is the singer of pop group YACHT, the founding editor of Terraform (VICE's science fiction vertical), and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women who Made the Internet. She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a regular contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, WIRED, Aeon and many more leading tech publications. She is an advisor to graduate design students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and a member of the cyber-feminist collective, Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.

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