Translator: Julia Zorzal Reviewer: Claudia Sander
Well, my presentation today will be about these three things:
innovation, technology and women.
It is quite iconic that I give this lecture here at USP.
When we think of innovation within the gym
We think about the number of papers,
in who is producing all this, this is innovation.
Technology would be the catalyst for all this.
We live an exponential moment because technology is there.
And so my question is: where are all these women?
Who are majority in higher education; who study, on average, more time;
but when we talk about technology and innovation,
are an overwhelming minority.
Overwhelming because when I ask you,
How many of you consider women in technology, we are afraid.
We are afraid to raise our hands and say that we know about technology,
because we know someone is going to say that this is not a girl thing.
I, as a computer scientist,
I did not consider myself a woman in technology.
“No, I’m a student, I’m an academic.”
And I have some news for you:
You are all women in technology.
Today, everyone is technology.
You have a mobile phone that has a
bigger than the one that took a rocket to the Moon.
You’re tech, you know how to handle this cell phone.
So you do not have one, okay?
And women, you are all women in technology.
I’ll tell you a little about how I came to stop here.
And for me it’s very iconic to be doing this TEDx here at USP.
Who took me to get here, it was this guy here.
Because he dictated COBOL code over the phone.
For those who do not know what this is, I’ll try to explain.
And if I had to explain, I would go back to the six-year-old I was
when he listened he dictated code in COBOL.
To me, it was just an alien language that solved problems.
And everyone loved my father.
Everyone said that he was the greatest, that he solved any problem.
He literally, for me,
was part of a clan of people who mastered a language,
and I had to be part of that clan.
It was really cool working with technology, it was amazing.
It had no gender distinction.
Until I got here at USP.
And this was the situation:
I got here on March 8, 2010, look how iconic.
International Women’s Day.
It was 10:35 am and I entered my first algorithm class.
Introduction to algorithm, I did not even know what an algorithm was.
I did not even know what was there.
I sat down and started to watch the class.
And then, when I saw that I was not understanding bullies, I thought,
“I need to take off a notebook.”
I looked around and said:
“Okay. I’ll find a notebook, I’ll get it from a girl that the letter is better.”
And that’s when I realized that I was the only girl in that classroom.
Then the world did not stop,
because I came home thinking that I was the only unlucky one on planet Earth
who had given luck, or chance in the case,
to be in the only place I only had as a girl.
It was not possible that this was true.
And then I went to search. And I found this photo, guys,
which is also here from USP, the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics.
First class of Computer Science.
I gave you a little help, and I circled all the girls with white balls.
And then my head knotted.
How can you, 40 years later,
when I thought I could be whoever I wanted,
we have passed 70% of women,
to 3.7%?
It did not make any sense in my head.
And that’s how it all began.
From the top of my 18 years, my first wonderful venture was: a blog.
Look how wonderful.
So I wrote everything I was finding.
Everything I wanted people to see about women,
about the innovations they were making, about everything they had done.
He grew up a little, today we have a community around him,
and I am very proud to say that I am the founder of Women in Computing.
But today it is much more than just a blog.
He is an entire community that gives voice to these women.
Who has studied the past, lives the present
and hope for a future in which he no longer needs to exist.
Where I can only talk about technology and innovation,
without having to make a gender distinction.
I learned a lot on this journey,
and it’s a bit of what I want to tell you.
The gift is not so cool.
After all, this is the little picture of that small book that you receive at graduation,
with everyone’s name, you know?
And I had only one girl’s name, which was mine.
It was 3.7% in the best university in the country, where we produce innovation and technology,
and there was only one woman who could do that?
For me everything was very wrong.
And this is the picture of the present. Everything is very wrong.
And then you think you’ve improved.
I said, “Now that I’m going to talk to TEDx, I have to see if it has not changed.
It’s been five years, I think it has changed. “
Nothing has changed, people.
In the last vestibular of Fuvest, we had 29 girls
occupying technology-related engineering at Poli.
Ten per cent.
And then you look and say: “Improved, Camila, from 3.7% to 10%”.
No. Because that’s the entry number.
If I tell you that I have 79% female dropout
in the first year, this figure will reach quickly in 3.7.
And we can not continue to let that happen.
What made us get into this situation where we are today,
in this “wonderful” gift?
Where the girls are not represented.
To this day we create girls differently.
We give a little doll and say that she has to be a mother,
that she has to play kitchen and be a teacher.
While we give the boys the rocket and he can dream of being an astronaut.
The computer stays in his room and he can work and play whatever he wants.
We have created a stereotype that all people of technology
have to have glasses, be bearded, be antisocial
and work within a little square.
Technology is no longer that.
In the 80’s, we carried this stereotype;
we had great IBM servers, we had that profile.
Nowadays, technology is everything.
Today, technology has no stereotype.
In the 1980s, we saw this reversal happen very dramatically.
Do you know that 1971 photo? Until she was true.
After that, total inversion, and we’re still coming down.
And a lot of people blame Apple.
Because it was Apple that put
computer for home use.
Before, the computer was only for science.
He was in the academic centers where science was being done.
Then came Apple and made the home computer.
And then he became the boy’s toy.
If you look any Apple commercial, it’s sad, it’s always a little boy
who wants to be an astronaut and he needs a computer.
And always has a “joke” on the way
in which he “zoa” the computer of the little girl who is attending class next to him,
and with one click, he almost explodes the girl’s computer.
That’s how we built the stereotype, personal,
and not based on truth.
Finally, girls are brought up to be good at everything.
We can not fail, we have to be a good match.
If we do not do everything right, society does not go forward.
And with technology, it’s very difficult for you to do everything right.
In innovation, if no one has ever been there, what is your obligation to get it right?
None. None.
But we, while female gender built,
we have a lot of obligation to get it right.
And then we feel bad about dealing with innovation and technology.
We have to be very careful not to boycott this new society.
Another huge problem is missing examples.
Does anyone know that the first programmer,
the first human being considered a programmer was a woman?
It was a mathematics of aristocracy.
No one ever spoke of Ada Lovelace again.
Now, in Alan Turing everyone talks, there’s even Hollywood movie,
and I need to destroy your dream, folks.
But at Bletchley Park, where that whole thing happened,
70% of the workers were women.
For one simple reason: physical.
It can not even be human to be in two different places,
and the men were fighting in the war.
It’s logical, folks.
Who made the foundations of technology,
who made the bases of computing and the internet were women.
And they were completely erased.
Another incredible example is Hedy Lamarr,
at the same time she was a Hollywood actress
and invented the Wi-Fi.
Wonderful, and no one tells her story.
And it’s wonderful, it had to have this woman’s soap opera.
(Laughs)
Grace Hopper, everyone talks about “bug”. Who invented [the term] was her.
Everyone talks about COBOL,
and then I had to take the position of my influential father from being here today,
because it was her, if she had not invented COBOL,
my father would not know how to program COBOL, and I would not be here.
So it was she who brought me here.
No one told her story.
This woman is Stephanie “Steve”. She had to change her name.
She made the first remote software house.
That, in the 60’s, honey.
She exchanged telegram between programmers,
to arrive at a consensus of software, of a specification.
She made Boeing’s software,
Boeing’s first on-board software, it was this woman who did it.
She invented the term “freela”. No one tells her story.
Well, not to mention that I’m pessimistic
and that I destroyed your dream, I wanted to talk a little about the future.
And to say that I think there is a solution.
If we work with these girls, we can inspire a whole generation.
If we start showing them
technology as a means and not as an end,
they will fall as much in love as I fell in love.
And any of you would fall in love,
if technology had been presented to you like this.
When I put them in the hands of these girls
a way to solve their problem for tomorrow,
Who will not fall in love with it?
Who will not love innovation? Who will not love technology?
Well, to finish, I wanted to leave a message and an invitation for you.
We have to inspire the next generation, children and young people,
so that they do not make gender distinction.
So they do not carry this stereotype of technology.
For them to use technology and innovation with creativity,
and not just as a massive technical work.
I’m sure that if we show all this to them and them,
We’re going to change the world.
With more equality, more education,
with more initiative, I’m sure the world will change.
And I’m going to do this even if we have to do one girl at a time.
Thanks.
(Applause)
Well, my presentation today will be about these three things:
innovation, technology and women.
It is quite iconic that I give this lecture here at USP.
When we think of innovation within the gym
We think about the number of papers,
in who is producing all this, this is innovation.
Technology would be the catalyst for all this.
We live an exponential moment because technology is there.
And so my question is: where are all these women?
Who are majority in higher education; who study, on average, more time;
but when we talk about technology and innovation,
are an overwhelming minority.
Overwhelming because when I ask you,
How many of you consider women in technology, we are afraid.
We are afraid to raise our hands and say that we know about technology,
because we know someone is going to say that this is not a girl thing.
I, as a computer scientist,
I did not consider myself a woman in technology.
“No, I’m a student, I’m an academic.”
And I have some news for you:
You are all women in technology.
Today, everyone is technology.
You have a mobile phone that has a
bigger than the one that took a rocket to the Moon.
You’re tech, you know how to handle this cell phone.
So you do not have one, okay?
And women, you are all women in technology.
I’ll tell you a little about how I came to stop here.
And for me it’s very iconic to be doing this TEDx here at USP.
Who took me to get here, it was this guy here.
Because he dictated COBOL code over the phone.
For those who do not know what this is, I’ll try to explain.
And if I had to explain, I would go back to the six-year-old I was
when he listened he dictated code in COBOL.
To me, it was just an alien language that solved problems.
And everyone loved my father.
Everyone said that he was the greatest, that he solved any problem.
He literally, for me,
was part of a clan of people who mastered a language,
and I had to be part of that clan.
It was really cool working with technology, it was amazing.
It had no gender distinction.
Until I got here at USP.
And this was the situation:
I got here on March 8, 2010, look how iconic.
International Women’s Day.
It was 10:35 am and I entered my first algorithm class.
Introduction to algorithm, I did not even know what an algorithm was.
I did not even know what was there.
I sat down and started to watch the class.
And then, when I saw that I was not understanding bullies, I thought,
“I need to take off a notebook.”
I looked around and said:
“Okay. I’ll find a notebook, I’ll get it from a girl that the letter is better.”
And that’s when I realized that I was the only girl in that classroom.
Then the world did not stop,
because I came home thinking that I was the only unlucky one on planet Earth
who had given luck, or chance in the case,
to be in the only place I only had as a girl.
It was not possible that this was true.
And then I went to search. And I found this photo, guys,
which is also here from USP, the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics.
First class of Computer Science.
I gave you a little help, and I circled all the girls with white balls.
And then my head knotted.
How can you, 40 years later,
when I thought I could be whoever I wanted,
we have passed 70% of women,
to 3.7%?
It did not make any sense in my head.
And that’s how it all began.
From the top of my 18 years, my first wonderful venture was: a blog.
Look how wonderful.
So I wrote everything I was finding.
Everything I wanted people to see about women,
about the innovations they were making, about everything they had done.
He grew up a little, today we have a community around him,
and I am very proud to say that I am the founder of Women in Computing.
But today it is much more than just a blog.
He is an entire community that gives voice to these women.
Who has studied the past, lives the present
and hope for a future in which he no longer needs to exist.
Where I can only talk about technology and innovation,
without having to make a gender distinction.
I learned a lot on this journey,
and it’s a bit of what I want to tell you.
The gift is not so cool.
After all, this is the little picture of that small book that you receive at graduation,
with everyone’s name, you know?
And I had only one girl’s name, which was mine.
It was 3.7% in the best university in the country, where we produce innovation and technology,
and there was only one woman who could do that?
For me everything was very wrong.
And this is the picture of the present. Everything is very wrong.
And then you think you’ve improved.
I said, “Now that I’m going to talk to TEDx, I have to see if it has not changed.
It’s been five years, I think it has changed. “
Nothing has changed, people.
In the last vestibular of Fuvest, we had 29 girls
occupying technology-related engineering at Poli.
Ten per cent.
And then you look and say: “Improved, Camila, from 3.7% to 10%”.
No. Because that’s the entry number.
If I tell you that I have 79% female dropout
in the first year, this figure will reach quickly in 3.7.
And we can not continue to let that happen.
What made us get into this situation where we are today,
in this “wonderful” gift?
Where the girls are not represented.
To this day we create girls differently.
We give a little doll and say that she has to be a mother,
that she has to play kitchen and be a teacher.
While we give the boys the rocket and he can dream of being an astronaut.
The computer stays in his room and he can work and play whatever he wants.
We have created a stereotype that all people of technology
have to have glasses, be bearded, be antisocial
and work within a little square.
Technology is no longer that.
In the 80’s, we carried this stereotype;
we had great IBM servers, we had that profile.
Nowadays, technology is everything.
Today, technology has no stereotype.
In the 1980s, we saw this reversal happen very dramatically.
Do you know that 1971 photo? Until she was true.
After that, total inversion, and we’re still coming down.
And a lot of people blame Apple.
Because it was Apple that put
computer for home use.
Before, the computer was only for science.
He was in the academic centers where science was being done.
Then came Apple and made the home computer.
And then he became the boy’s toy.
If you look any Apple commercial, it’s sad, it’s always a little boy
who wants to be an astronaut and he needs a computer.
And always has a “joke” on the way
in which he “zoa” the computer of the little girl who is attending class next to him,
and with one click, he almost explodes the girl’s computer.
That’s how we built the stereotype, personal,
and not based on truth.
Finally, girls are brought up to be good at everything.
We can not fail, we have to be a good match.
If we do not do everything right, society does not go forward.
And with technology, it’s very difficult for you to do everything right.
In innovation, if no one has ever been there, what is your obligation to get it right?
None. None.
But we, while female gender built,
we have a lot of obligation to get it right.
And then we feel bad about dealing with innovation and technology.
We have to be very careful not to boycott this new society.
Another huge problem is missing examples.
Does anyone know that the first programmer,
the first human being considered a programmer was a woman?
It was a mathematics of aristocracy.
No one ever spoke of Ada Lovelace again.
Now, in Alan Turing everyone talks, there’s even Hollywood movie,
and I need to destroy your dream, folks.
But at Bletchley Park, where that whole thing happened,
70% of the workers were women.
For one simple reason: physical.
It can not even be human to be in two different places,
and the men were fighting in the war.
It’s logical, folks.
Who made the foundations of technology,
who made the bases of computing and the internet were women.
And they were completely erased.
Another incredible example is Hedy Lamarr,
at the same time she was a Hollywood actress
and invented the Wi-Fi.
Wonderful, and no one tells her story.
And it’s wonderful, it had to have this woman’s soap opera.
(Laughs)
Grace Hopper, everyone talks about “bug”. Who invented [the term] was her.
Everyone talks about COBOL,
and then I had to take the position of my influential father from being here today,
because it was her, if she had not invented COBOL,
my father would not know how to program COBOL, and I would not be here.
So it was she who brought me here.
No one told her story.
This woman is Stephanie “Steve”. She had to change her name.
She made the first remote software house.
That, in the 60’s, honey.
She exchanged telegram between programmers,
to arrive at a consensus of software, of a specification.
She made Boeing’s software,
Boeing’s first on-board software, it was this woman who did it.
She invented the term “freela”. No one tells her story.
Well, not to mention that I’m pessimistic
and that I destroyed your dream, I wanted to talk a little about the future.
And to say that I think there is a solution.
If we work with these girls, we can inspire a whole generation.
If we start showing them
technology as a means and not as an end,
they will fall as much in love as I fell in love.
And any of you would fall in love,
if technology had been presented to you like this.
When I put them in the hands of these girls
a way to solve their problem for tomorrow,
Who will not fall in love with it?
Who will not love innovation? Who will not love technology?
Well, to finish, I wanted to leave a message and an invitation for you.
We have to inspire the next generation, children and young people,
so that they do not make gender distinction.
So they do not carry this stereotype of technology.
For them to use technology and innovation with creativity,
and not just as a massive technical work.
I’m sure that if we show all this to them and them,
We’re going to change the world.
With more equality, more education,
with more initiative, I’m sure the world will change.
And I’m going to do this even if we have to do one girl at a time.
Thanks.
(Applause)
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