Tanya McGinnity

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, I’ve decided to write about Beatrice Helen Worsley. Beatrice is considered to be “Canada’s Female Computer Pioneer” as she was one of the first women to earn a doctorate in Computer Science in 1951.

Beatrice was born in Mexico in 1922 and went on to attend the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, and then to graduate in 1944 with first class honors in Math and Physics from the University of Toronto. Throughout wartime, she worked with the Royal Canadian Navy to design torpedoes complete with small computing devices and then went on to receive a S.M. in Math from MIT in 1947.

She went on to develop a programming system known as Transcode and continued to study at Cambridge where in 1952, she received her Ph.D and became one of the first women to receive a doctorate in computing. Beatrice worked at the University of Toronto as an associate professor for several years and then transferred to Queen’s University where she helped found the Queen’s Computing Centre.

In her final years of life, she took a sabbatical from her work at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science to work on assembler language design related to the logical structure of computers.

Throughout her career she published roughly 17 papers in various professional journals as well as many which appeared in the Quarterly bulletin of the Computing and Data Processing Society of Canada.

Beatrice passed away from a heart attack on May 8th, 1972 at the young age of 52.  The year before her passing, she donated many of her research papers to the Smithsonian Institute.

I was honored to be part of a discussion on “Where the @#$% are the Girl Geeks?” during the recent Festival de Geek Montreal and so happy to have been joined by Debbie Rouleau and Émilie Plante in this panel discussion. Animated by Camille Desrosiers, we covered a wonk-load of topics from what makes for a ‘real’ geek, if girl geeks have a more difficult time in the geek world, how we got started in being a geek and the age old debate of ‘geek vs nerd’. (I honestly didn’t know that there was such division between geek and nerd as this was discussed twice during sessions held throughout the weekend!)

Semantics aside, what I appreciated was seeing so many folks in the audience who were interested in hearing our thoughts, sharing their own and asking questions. It struck me that not enough outreach has been done with my franco-girlo-geeko community here in Montreal and I’m looking into ways to change this (including ramping up my French classes).

I left the session and had an inspiring chat with one of the volunteers at the event who came up to me and said that he thinks that what I’m doing with the Montreal Girl Geeks is awesome. It left me tearing up because after some of the knocks I have taken in my life as the underdog, the goofy geek with glasses -  his shared story of not feeling like he fit in made me feel that I had found my people at this event.

I was thrilled to see an event as the Festival de Geek as it featured such a diversity of information, booths and interests. A heartfelt thanks goes out to the organizers, volunteers and exhibitors and sponsors for bringing the community together.

Oh and to the whole question of “Where the @#$% are the Girl Geeks?” – I came out of pre-internet society, but I still found a way to find like-minded folks to be inspired by – even living in small town New Brunswick. I joined groups, I created groups, I had pen pals who wrote zines (yes, I’m old) and traded cassette and video tapes with them. Life wasn’t as easy as it is now kids. Chances are that if you’re a pagan, Buffy fan over the age of 50 who prefers Star Wars to Star Trek, there’s a group out there for you to be a part of. Connect with folks- online and offline and chances are you’ll find someone who’s just as interested in your passions as you are and from this, a community will grow.

Where the girls are. MTL Girl Geek Dinner. Photo by Simon Law