25 Women in Robotics you need to know about 2013
In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled a short list of some women in robotics that everyone should know about. There are so many many more that we’re already looking forward to featuring them next year. But first, simply creating this post has reopened many arguments about gender and technology and whether we even need to say that there are women who are brilliant at engineering.
From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been amazing women who have fought against massive prejudice to carve themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology. These comparatively few women however can easily be lost from the pages of history and to create a more equal ongoing presence of women in technology, we need to show strong female role models.
Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer and in spite of her undoubted mathematical brilliance, she was reluctant to publish herself and made do with publishing ‘commentaries’ on the works of others. Her commentaries were far longer and more original than the originals and in the process she demonstrated the future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed but never built.
Now in its fourth year, Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.
Professionally, the women on our list are all field leaders with a huge impact on robotics, regardless of their gender. So if you need women for your board of directors, or conference panel etc. then you may need to look deeper, because these women are already super busy. But while there are an increasing number of women in robotics, there is nothing like equal representation so – here are 25 reasons why that should change. Please share.
Many thanks to Robohub contributors for all their great suggestions!
25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)
Sarah Bergbreiter
Aude Billard
Cynthia Breazeal
Elizabeth Croft
Missy Cummings
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Helen Greiner
Heather Knight
Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi
Maja Mataric
Arianna Menciassi
Robin Murphy
Radhika Nagpal
Allison Okamura
Jamie Paik
Lynne Parker
Daniela Rus
Angela Schoellig
Leila Takayama
Andrea Thomaz
Manuela Veloso
Amy Villeneuve
Astrid Weiss
Mary-Anne Williams
