Dr. Black is perhaps most well known for initiating – and succeeding – in “saving Bletchley Park” (which is also the title of her book). Bletchley Park was a top-secret center for the famous World War II code breakers, including many women, whose work was credited with shortening the war by two to four years. The center deteriorated rapidly after the war and would most probably have been dismantled if not for the fundraising efforts of Dr. Black and her supporters. Bletchley Park is now a thriving visitors’ center and is co-housed with the UK National Museum of Computing. Dr. Black’s initial involvement with Bletchley Park inspired her to conduct an oral history project to capture the memories of the women who worked there. She met several of the surviving women code breakers; some shared their stories with her, others never revealed the details of their highly secret work.

Since 2006–2007, I have interviewed numerous women in technology careers to understand their motivation for choosing their careers and their experiences in the technical workforce. While the intent of an initial study that emerged from some of these interviews (Adya, 2008) was to compare and contrast the experiences of South Asian and American women in the US workforce, the stories of some of these women were more broadly impactful. Some of these women were inspiring in how they overcame barriers and eventually succeeded in information technology (IT) careers, and others in how they changed the course of their lives, sometimes away from IT careers and into others that they felt they could grow into.

Previous research has revealed surprising cross-national differences in the gender composition of information and communication technology (ICT) fields. In 2001, for example, women’s representation in ICT degree programs was weakest in the world’s most affluent and reputably gender-progressive societies (Charles and Bradley, 2006). Historical trends in the ICT sectors of affluent democracies seem, moreover, to have gone in the direction of more, not less, gender segregation. Despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation and university attendance, US women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science decreased from 28% to 18% between 2000 and 2015 (NSF, 2018, appendix 2-21), with similar declines documented in Europe for the 1990s (Schinzel, 2002).

Prior to the 2010 World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore, a music video called “Semmozhiyaan Tamil Mozhiyaan” made its way to television networks across Tamil Nadu. The video was shot by Gautham Menon and had music composed by A. R. Rehman – both leading figures in the Tamil film industry at the time, with lyrics penned by the then chief minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) headman Muthuvl Karunanidhi. The song was intended as an anthem for the conference, but soon started being referred to as the state anthem.

In 2015 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the latest edition of its Science Report. Published every five years, the Science Report maps the status of science, technology, and innovation and governance around the world. The 2015 edition was conceived as a response to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda, which recognizes the role of science, technology, and innovation as an important contributor to global sustainability. This edition also included the first globally comprehensive presentation and analysis of global data on women’s representation in science and technology outside Europe and North America. This chapter contains an overview of the main findings of the 2015 UNESCO Science Report chapter “Is the Gender Gap Narrowing in Science and Engineering?,” as well as recent analysis of the factors encouraging and constraining women’s participation in STEM fields globally.

Privacy law, especially in the form of the right to private life in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, has addressed police photography, biometrics, and filing systems, including when police identification images are taken in public, outside of the context of arrest. The law slowly came to recognise that the building of institutional identity databases was a meaningful and potentially objectionable practice because it could stigmatise people with information in those filing systems who had not been convicted. This chapter outlines the development of that legal constraint on profiling, as well as its limitations, such as expanding law enforcement intelligence practices. It argues that privacy becomes meaningful for government profiling only when the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test is abandoned, and with a focus on data processing, image identification, and ‘systematisation’.

Popular media has recently given attention to sexist workplace culture and low rates of female employees within large tech companies. Tech companies have released a plethora of diversity reports as part of a commitment to diversifying the workforce. Disability is largely absent from these companies’ PR and resulting media coverage. Diversity and inclusion efforts – whether it is diversity reports to increase transparency, flexible benefits, or feminist stances meant to welcome women – rarely include disability specifically. When TechCrunch asked seven major companies – Intel, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Google, and Salesforce – about the omission of disability from these reports, their responses were not reassuring (O’Hear, 2016). Facebook, Salesforce, and Google failed to respond. Intel and Slack pointed to their inclusion efforts related to disability and indicated they could release data in the future. Apple and Twitter pointed the journalist to their accessible products as evidence that they consider disability in driving innovation. Subsequently, Slack’s 2017 diversity report highlighted that 1.7% of their employees identify as having a disability (Slack Team, 2017). In 2016 LinkedIn included disability in their diversity reporting, highlighting that 3% of their US employees have a disability (Wadors, 2016). Otherwise, there is little attention given to individuals with disabilities, and, more specifically, women with disabilities in computing.

Improving the gender balance among IT professionals by involving more women in IT spheres is a goal in many countries. In addition to achieving gender equality, it is of great economic importance, since there is a lack of IT professionals in many countries, including Russia. One possible solution to this problem is to increase the number of females in IT professions. This chapter will discuss the ICT education system in Russia, its history and major contributors to the field, careers in the field, and the relationship of these areas to gender issues. Below I give definitions of the main terms used in this chapter.

This chapter focuses on computer science (CS) education in Israel, which is known as the “Start-Up Nation” due to its high level of technological innovation and high number of start-ups in the country (Sensor and Singer, 2009). It tells a story, from a gender perspective, that starts in high school, passes through the military service and university stages, and concludes with what happens to female computer scientists in the job market, whether it be in academia or industry. We show that, as expected, external characteristics and cultural aspects matter in determining women’s participation in CS education and CS professions.

Behavioural data collection and analysis, and the beginnings of ‘mass surveillance’, can be traced back to early intelligence surveillance and political policing. Agents would gather information from multiple sources, both trivial and salient, about individuals with no prior contact with the criminal justice system, in an effort to predict their future behaviour. Often this happened in secret, and was justified by the threat of political violence. This chapter argues that much of the political thinking and technical logics of the contemporary intelligence surveillance environment have their origin in nineteenth-century political policing. It also argues that because this information gathering and analysis occurred in secret, it produced substantial social anxiety over the potential for inaccuracy, which ultimately filtered into subsequent legal protections.

Silicon Valley draws many cultures together from nearly all facets of computing to a single, sprawling 1,854-square-mile geographic location, and as of 2017, Silicon Valley boasted a population of more than three million people with over 37.5% of Silicon Valley residents having been born outside the United States (Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2017). Silicon Valley has created a legend that has attracted people – so much so that they leave countries and continents behind to relocate there to work.

As we close this collection of many perspectives from multiple cultures and countries we hope to have shown that women’s participation in computing is largely determined by cultural factors. We hope this book has provided a convincing argument that alternative ways of thinking about, and acting on, gender and computing issues could benefit both the field and the people in it. We have argued for the examination of variables outside a gender dichotomy as possible sources of differences in women’s participation in computing. In particular, we have suggested and illustrated that a cultural approach, an approach that pays close attention to culture and environment, focuses on the many factors that can allow for, or hinder, women’s participation.

Automated profiling, predictive analytics, and data mining represent the extension of nineteenth-century statistical models through the lens of computation. Algorithmic pattern matching also has origins in supermarket management, as well as the discipline of operations research that developed through the Vietnam War. When applied to law enforcement, policing, and criminal justice, this has led to a plethora of systems used by governments, typically developed by private companies, used for intelligence, predictive policing, and criminal justice risk assessments. This chapter argues that the establishment and proliferation of these tools has cemented the primacy of statistical knowledge systems as the primary systems of evaluation by which individuals are interpreted and known by states.

This chapter will provide a current perspective of the gendered nature of computing in Australia. The underrepresentation of women is the most visible issue in this discipline, and may well be a product of the unique culture of the country that is at odds with the multicultural nature of the population. Many initiatives and interventions have been and still are in operation to encourage girls to consider a computing career. However, the proportional numbers of males and females in the discipline in universities and the workforce remains a concern in 2018.