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.

Photo by Jan Tik http://www.flickr.com/photos/jantik/477005319/

I was recently reading Rue Morgue magazine (one of my favourites) and was struck by the dedicated community that surrounds the rabid group of horror fans that follow the genre. The magazine has a great thing going for it and knows fully that its success depends on the participation of its readers.

By following their Twitter feed and listening to their podcast, I’m engaged with their magazine (and the wild cast of writers, artists and fans) long after I’ve stopped flipping though the glossy print pages chock full of gore and creepiness.

A few weeks ago,I watched a program on the Space Network called ‘Pretty Bloody‘ about women in the horror industry. The editor of Rue Morgue, tattooed hell-goddess  Jovanka Vuckovic spoke quite a bit about the close-knit community of hardcore female fans that, although are small in number, are active and supportive of one another.

Over the weekend I finished reading tattoo artist Kat Von D’s book “High Voltage Tattoo” where, rather than write an entire book on herself, she shared the spotlight with others within the tattoo, art and music realm and gave them mention for helping to inspire her along the way. The book is gorgeous and features photos of the tattoos she worked on from those on her friends, family and rock stars to those of her clients.

What I appreciate so much about these two ladies is their commitment to bringing a sense of community and respect for others as well as their desire to inspire others. By sharing the spotlight with others has helped them to shine even brighter in my eyes.

In 1992, Brenda began research on the ways in which girls engage in play behaviours and how many of the games on the market were geared mainly towards the interest of boys (the believed target market). She’s a true pioneer in the study of how humans interact with computers and is credited with studying what it takes to help to make girls more comfortable with computer technolgies and gameplay. Her examination of the motivations of girls, their mind-sets and values helped to gauge the opinions of these mini-girl-geeks and develop games related to their specific needs.

Brenda’s writing has always fascinated me and this passage from “Utopian Entrepreneur” is one of my favourites:

“So when I see signs that say “pray for peace,” I want to post these signs:  Work for peace.  Speak for peace.  Tell stories for peace.  Make music for peace.  Write books and make movies and build websites for peace.  Do culture work that corrodes extremism and intolerance.  Manifest peace.”

For more information, check out this TED talk with Brenda to hear her stories related to her work related to games for girls. The recordings of the girls recounting their stories shows how excited they are about being asked to share their experiences.

Thank you Brenda Laurel. I’m glad you are a champion for girl gamer geeks everywhere.

I have to give serious credit to the organizers of this event as the evening consisted of a panel comprised of several influential and inspirational women who shared their stories and provided tips on how to balance a career with family, network and be seen and heard in the boardroom, conference room and lunch room.

The panel featured the following successful women from Montreal’s business community:

President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia University, Judith Woodsworth

VP Strategy and Business Development, Bombardier, Maidread Lavery

Senior Vice President National Accounts; Laurentian Bank of Canada, Dana Ades-Landy

Principal; Mercer, Kathy Stanczyk Thibault, MBA

Partner; McCarthy Tétrault, Lorna J. Telfer

I wish John Molson’s WIBC much success and believe that they are doing vital work in helping to bring together established female business leaders with young women who are looking to begin their careers in this field.

The magazine admits that they were quite surprised with both the volume of nasty comments generated when they first nominated some top lasses on the fastcompany.com website back in November, 2008 as several trolls went a bit wild with sexist, hateful comments.

The nominees are broken into key categories such as: evangelists, entrepreneurs, gamers, evangelists, activists, bloggers and brainiacs and some of the best of the best are part of Fast Company’s list including:

Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook

Padmasree Warrior, CTO Cisco

Gina Bianchini, cofounder and CEO Ning

Sara de Freitas, Director of Research Serious Games Institute

Tara Hunt, cofounder Citizen Agency

Charlene Li, founder Altimeter Group

Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm, executive director Witness

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing

Jill Tarter SETI Institute

It inspires me to see so many great tech-savvy women being featured in Fast Company and it gives me hope.

Eden (aka Bargainista) writes in this blog post about Women who rock! asking where the tech-gals are and why the ladies aren’t more vocal.

Eden mentions in her post: “Taking stock of the marketing/PR/corporate communications professionals who blog and podcast (I belong to that community too), the content creators are predominantly male… Women who are active in the digital and social media space can’t blame it all on the men. We can and should do a far better job of promoting ourselves and sharing the love. It’s up to us to make our voices heard and get more involved in the community.”

There is quite a bit of discussion being generated in the blog comments and I welcome you to get involved.

Here’s some linklove to girls, sites and organizations that get massive adoration from me for their positivity and geeky girliness.

CATA’s WIT (Women in Technology) Forum is a new community network designed to boost women’s participation and advancement in the high-growth technology sector.

Bust Magazine rocks for being such an awesome read.

President of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo just launched two projects that would help women tap science and technology and give them more opportunities for microfinance.

Debian Women is awesome… and their goal “to is to explain Debian to women and show them ways that they can contribute”.

This article from Comixpedia by Wednesday White speaks volumes!

and last but not least…

Girl Geek Dinners

It seems to me that too much is trying to be packed into this initiative and that in targeting the ladies they are tossing in there every possible tie-in which the execs think a woman would be interested in.

But what do I know? The stats are pretty impressive:

“In the nearly 11 months that the site has been up, the Prilosec-sponsored Bunco game hub on MSN has registered 1.7 million unique visitors who played 4.5 million games, according to the company. The chat feature involved with the game was used 56 million times in that period. And Bunco players on the site are also staying longer than other casual gamers visiting the MSN Games portal. The average playing time is 46 minutes, which is almost six times as long as any other game..”

Click on the link to read more from the ClickZ article