The History of the Document

This paper was begun during the spring of my senior year, as a term paper for a course entitled ``Women and Computers'', taught by Prof. Sherry Turkle. Because the paper was so long and because I had other graduation requirements, I did not finish it until the following January, when I presented the paper during MIT's Independent Activity Period. I also distributed the paper through electronic means, mostly to female computer scientists, some of whom further distributed copies. Because of the interest the paper generated and the support of the department, I decided to turn it into an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory technical report, the simplest way to semi-publish a document.

I had expected negative reactions to my report, on the net and at MIT, but I was pleasantly surprised. Only a few netters sent negative email, and nobody at MIT gave me any trouble. In fact, the head of the EECS department, Prof. Paul Penfield, was supportive of the project, providing xerox money, and read the report. The associate head for CS, Prof. Fernando Corbató, attended my talk. A number of computer science professors, male and female, also read the report and expressed encouragement.

I made many changes between the original and this version of the report. In addition to correcting typos, changes were:

• Correcting misleading statistics.
• Incorporating anecdotes and reactions sent in response to the original report.
• Including material from additional articles and books.
• Reworking the section on affirmative action to correct my prior misconceptions.
• Removing an email conversation with a ``flamer'' that had been included as an appendix.
• Adding an appendix on advantages women have.
• Adding quotations to the beginning of the chapters.