Rendering History

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has more than 100,000 members circling the globe, including trailblazing women who created ACM-W (ACM’s Committee on Women in Computing) in 1993. This book, published in celebration of ACM-W’s 30th birthday, divides the history of ACM-W into three parts.

The first section provides a traditional history that details the evolution of ACM-W’s projects. In the next section, Rendering History allows the women of ACM-W to tell their own stories. What motivated them to trade personal time and energy for work that would change the face of computing for women and young girls? Among many others, Sue Black relates a story that spans her escape from two abusive homes to recognition for her computing accomplishments by both the late Queen of England and the current King. Kathy Kleiman describes her contributions to the field, including helping to rescue the wireless spectrum (now used by WiFi) from the (US) Federal Communications Commission’s plan to sell it. Bhavani Thuraisingham writes about her birth in Sri Lanka, an arranged marriage to a man eight years her senior, and cutting-edge research in the integration of cyber security and machine learning. The final section of the book provides an annotated bibliography of the research that launched ACM-W and continued to inform its projects over the next 30 years.

ACM-W advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of the computing field, providing a wide range of programs and services to ACM members and working in the larger community to advance the contributions of technical women. The main theme of ACM-W’s 30-year history as detailed in this book is the organization’s maturation from a US-centric organization to a global leader in supporting the advancement of women in computer science.