Women's Month

Women’s Month: Celebrating pioneering women in the information field
This Women’s Month, we celebrate 5 women who have been instrumental in changing how the world accesses, manages, stores and processes information, and how we think about those critical activities in Library and Information Studies. These short profiles encourage us to remember the frequently under-acknowledged influence of women on all aspects of society. At the same time, while we commemorate their significant contributions, their stories highlight the continuing dominance of (white) patriarchy and Western knowledge systems and the persistence of Gender-Based Violence.

[Content generated with the assistance of Claude AI.]

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852)
English mathematician and writer, often called the first computer programmer. Working with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine, Lovelace wrote detailed notes in 1843 that included an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers, recognised today as the first published computer program. More strikingly, she envisioned that such a machine could go beyond pure calculation to manipulate symbols and even generate music, anticipating the general-purpose computer by a century. Her insight that machines might process any information expressible in symbols, not just numbers, foreshadowed core ideas in modern computing and information theory.

Image source: Public Domain

Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350–415 CE)
A philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer in late antiquity, Hypatia headed the Mousaion in Alexandria, Egypt, then a major centre of learning. She edited and wrote commentaries on works like Ptolemy's astronomical texts and Diophantus's Arithmetica, helping preserve and transmit classical mathematical knowledge. She taught students from across the Mediterranean world and was renowned for her expertise in mechanics and instrument-making, including astrolabes. As one of the last major scholars associated with the Library of Alexandria's intellectual tradition, she symbolises the organisation, curation, and transmission of information in the ancient world, cut short by her murder amid political and religious conflict.

Image source: https://aprendeinglestoday.com/hypatia-of-alexandria/

N. Katherine Hayles (b. 1943)
An American literary and cultural critic, Hayles is a foundational figure in the field of literature, information, and technology studies. Her influential book How We Became Posthuman (1999) traced how information came to be conceptually separated from its material embodiment in the mid-20th century, and critiqued that disembodiment. Trained in both chemistry and literature, she brings a rare cross-disciplinary lens to questions of cybernetics, digital textuality, and human-machine relationships. Her work has shaped how scholars think about the cultural and philosophical implications of information theory, influencing fields from media studies to the philosophy of technology.

Image: Photo Credit: David Pape (Public Domain)

Dorothy Vaughan (1910–2008)
An American mathematician, Vaughan worked at NASA's Langley Research Center, where she became the first Black supervisor at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1949, leading the segregated West Area Computing unit. Anticipating the shift from human "computers" to electronic ones, she taught herself and her team the programming language FORTRAN, ensuring their skills remained essential as machines took over calculations. Her leadership and technical foresight helped bridge the transition from manual to digital computation at NASA. Her contributions, long overlooked, gained wider recognition through the book and film Hidden Figures.

Image source: https://www.futureblackleadersinc.org/future-black-leaders-blog/dorothy-vaughan

Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001)
An English composer and sound engineer, Derbyshire was a pioneer of electronic music at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She is best known for her 1963 composition of the Doctor Who theme, constructed painstakingly from individually recorded and manipulated tape loops of oscillator tones, years before electronic synthesisers made such sounds easy to produce. Her innovative techniques for manipulating audio information (splicing, filtering, and layering analogue signals) prefigured digital sound synthesis and sampling. Though under-credited during her career due to gender bias and BBC policy, she's now recognised as a key figure in the history of electronic and information-based sound art.