Today is international women's day. What has this got to do with developers, code, algorithms and datascience?
Quite a lot actually.
What we chose to do as developers, data scientists and general digital transformation magicians plays a huge role in the kind of society that we are building for ourselves and those who will follow.
Technical talent can be deployed in any which way. Some are good and improve our lot and some are not. It is our responsibility to ask which of the two.
What about that Florence Nightingale?
Well, she is seen as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics". She is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram. It is also called the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Today she would probably have distributed an open source javascript library - but computers were still one hundred years away back in 1850!
But what did she do with the graphic she invented? Well, she illustrated seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed during the Crimean war.
Because she also invented modern nursing, also known as "taking care of people".
A role model not just for women in tech, but EVERYBODY in tech!
Top comments (0)