On Monday, April 9, at 7 PM, there will be a SSAG reading at Mills College. I’ll be hosting it, joined by editrixes Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz and contributors Kristin Abkemeier and Roopa Ramamoorthi. The event will be in The Bender Room on the second floor of Mills’ Carnegie Hall. To get there, see directions, or practice!

Yesterday morning, Cambridge computer science professor Karen Spärck Jones died — she was one of the pioneers in the field of computer science and a staunch advocate of women in tech. According to the Cambridge University announcement:

She had worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s when she co-authored a paper in one of the great founding collections of the discipline, the Proceedings of the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington, DC.

She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners.

Jones is famous for saying that computer science is too important to be left to men.

Regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised to discover that the announcement of Jones’ death also includes a detailed description of her CS researcher husband Roger Needham’s work:

Karen married Roger Needham in 1958 when both were studying for PhD’s. Roger, who died in 2003, joined the Mathematical Laboratory, now known as the Computer Laboratory, in 1962. He eventually became its Head in 1980 for 15 years. In 1997 he started up the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, which brings talent from all over the world to the city, and which is now housed in The Roger Needham Building at West Cambridge.

It’s all too typical that biographers consider a woman’s husband and family to be relevant to her professional life, while a man’s wife and children will be given but a footnote in a description of his scientific accomplishments. Here Needham is so far beyond footnote level that his work is actually described before we get any comments from colleagues about Jones’ work, and before famous quotes from Jones are mentioned.

Karen Spärck Jones 1935-2007 [via University of Cambridge News Service]

The 2007 Hugo nominations are in, and out of 20 fiction writers, only one woman was nominated: Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty’s Dragon. Well, gosh! I mean, I’m thrilled that the judges voters have found a sure-fire way to keep women from having their breasts fondled at the podium — just don’t let them up there in the first place! Or maybe it’s the other way around — next time, the women will learn to keep their mouth shut, or they don’t get to play in the sandbox at all.

One person comments here:

[Y]our stereotypical Hugo voter is unlikely to have read many books by women in the first place. Put it another way: I doubt there are many people who nominated Novik and Vernor Vinge. And I suspect a lot of people who nominated Vernor Vinge are looking at the shortlist going, “well, I know who Stross and Watts are, but who the hell is Naomi Novik?”

And here, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

That’s really remarkable. And remarkably stupid, considering how much good SF is written by women these days.

I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out. The essence of sexism is that “male” is the unremarkable “default state.”

Also, Ide Cyan notes:

And there are no Japanese nominees either, although Worldcon, where the Hugos are awarded, is taking place in Japan this year.