Anita Borg

Founder of the Institute for Women and Technology

• Born: January 17, 1949
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: April 6, 2003
• Place of death: Sonoma, California

Primary Company/Organization: Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

Introduction

Anita Borg, an American computer scientist, is best known for her advocacy for the inclusion of women in technological and scientific fields. She founded Systers, an electronic mailing list made up of women computer professionals, and, with computer scientist Telle Whitney, founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a technical computer science conference inspired by the legacy of Navy admiral Grace Murray Hopper. Most notably, Borg founded the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT), a nonprofit research and development organization with a dual focus on increasing the number and influence of women in technology and increasing the positive effects of technology on the lives of women. She served as the first president of IWT. Shortly after her death, the institute was renamed the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in her honor.

Early Life

Anita Borg Naffz was born on January 17, 1949, in Chicago, Illinois, to a housewife and a salesman. She spent most of the first twelve years of her life in Palatine, a small town about thirty-five miles outside Chicago. Her parents moved with their two daughters for a year to Hawaii, where Borg attended fifth grade in a racially diverse school, an experience that enlarged her ten-year-old view of the world. The Naffz family returned to the Chicago area briefly but later moved to Mukilteo, Washington, near Seattle. Borg credited her mother with teaching her that mathematics could be fun and her father with fostering her spirit of adventure.

Borg entered the University of Washington in 1967 but quit after two years. She married and followed her first husband to New York, where he enrolled in graduate school. The young couple's straitened finances made it necessary for her to find a job. She worked as a “girl Friday” in the data-processing department of a small insurance company. It was during her tenure with the insurance company that her interest in computer science developed. She taught herself Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) and started doing programming for the company. When her marriage ended in divorce two years later, scholarships enabled her to enroll in New York University, where a new computer science department had recently emerged from the mathematics department. Borg saw a degree in computer science as a means to financial independence. She entered the Ph.D. program in 1973 with plans to leave once she had a master's degree, but she soon found her studies a welcome challenge. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the Courant Institute at New York University in 1981.

Life's Work

Borg's first job after completing her degree was for Auragen Systems, a small start-up company in New Jersey. She was assigned to a team charged with creating a fault-tolerant operating system. The work was far removed from the theoretical work of graduate school, but she found working on the operating system challenging and exciting. However, the project was still incomplete in 1985, when Auragen failed.

Borg was hired by Nixdorf, a German corporation and an Auragen investor with rights to the company's technology. She spent a year in Germany working on the computer system that eventually became Nixdorf's TARGON (the acronym for a German joke, translated as “A Thousand Users Go Together: Oh Nixdorf”). In 1986, she accepted a job with Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC's) Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, where she remained for the next twelve years developing tools related to the performance of microprocessor memory systems.

A year after she joined DEC, Borg attended the Symposium on Operating System Principles, an Association for Computing Machinery conference. She was struck by the small number of women among the roughly four hundred conferees. Borg left the conference with about twenty e-mail addresses of women who shared her concerns. That list became the foundation of Systers, the first e-mail community for women in computing.

The name combined “sisters” and “systems,” referencing its founding as a community for women working with operating systems, but the group soon expanded to include women working in all fields of technical computing. Within a decade, the group had grown to twenty-three hundred. By 2012, Systers' membership had reached thirty-four hundred women in fifty-eight countries. More than a quarter century after its founding, Systers continues to fulfill Borg's dream of a safe place for women in computer technology to discuss problems and issues relevant to women in their profession.

During her years at DEC, Borg also conceived the idea of a conference for women in technical computing that would match the industry's best conferences in quality but would be structured with the needs and interests of women in mind. The result was the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the brainchild of Borg and Telle Whitney, then with Actel. The first conference was held in Washington, D.C., June 9–11, 1994, with more than 450 women in attendance. Named in tribute to Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming, the conference has historically featured women leaders in industry, academia, and government as speakers and has offered a forum for researchers to present their work. At the same time, it has addressed common interests such as networking, mentoring, and greater recognition for the achievements of women in computing. The 2011 conference, held in Portland, Oregon, attracted almost three thousand participants from thirty-four countries.

In 1997, Borg read The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century (1996), by Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey, and their ideas prompted her to consider what women in general (not only those working in technical fields) want from technology and what they can bring to it. From these ideas came the concept for the Institute for Women and Technology. Later that year, Borg left DEC for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). She was frustrated by DEC's lack of interest in her idea for an institute that would combine an initiative to attract women to computing with the creation of technology driven by women's real-life experiences. PARC was much more receptive to the idea and agreed to support Borg's development of an independent, nonprofit institute.

The Institute for Women and Technology (IWT) was officially founded in 1997, with Borg as its founding director and president. Systers and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing became programs within the institute. During her years as president of IWT, Borg oversaw the creation of “virtual development centers,” collaborations between the institute and universities such as Purdue, Texas A&M, and Carnegie Mellon in which undergraduates, faculty, and community residents work together to brainstorm ideas for technology projects for which students then create prototypes. She also promoted the international scope and influence of the institute through such projects as a partnership between IWT and the Pacific Institute for Women's Health in order to find ways for technology to be used to connect women's organizations in Africa. In addition to early support from Xerox, Borg won IWT sponsorship from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and dozens of other corporations. She persuaded the deans of engineering at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley to serve on WIT's board of trustees. Ill health forced Borg to resign as IWT president in 2002, but her role as founder of the institute that has born her name since 2003 has assured her place in the history of women in computing.

Borg was recognized as a visionary and leader many times. Her awards include the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing, both granted in 1995. In 1996, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 1998, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. U.S. president Bill Clinton appointed Borg to the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology in 1999. Three years later, Borg was the recipient of the $250,000 Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy, and Employment. Perhaps the most fitting tribute is the Google Anita Borg Scholarship program, established in 2004 to honor Borg's work by encouraging young women to excel in computer science and related fields. More than two hundred women have been awarded this honor since the program's inauguration, and the program has been expanded to include women students not only in the United States but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Personal Life

As far back as her graduate school days, when she insisted that her weekends be free for motorcycle trips, Borg exhibited the adventurous spirit that her parents had fostered in her youth. This would be reflected in Borg's leisure activities as well as in her professional life. Licensed to pilot a small plane, she also enjoyed mountain biking, scuba diving, and sailing. Fond of a T-shirt that proclaimed “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” Borg found driving her Porsche Boxster, a birthday gift, a great way to relieve stress.

In 2000, shortly after Borg was diagnosed with brain cancer, she married Winfried Wilcke, physicist and computer architect, who shared her interest in flying and sailing. Friends said the marriage was motivated by Wilcke's desire to be with Borg during treatment and to empower him to make legal decisions concerning her health. Borg died at the Sonoma home of her mother, Beverley Naffz, on April 7, 2003. In addition to her husband and mother, she was survived by her sister, Lee Naffz, of Leavenworth, Washington.

Bibliography

Camp, Jean L. “We Are Geeks, and We Are Not Guys: The Systers Mailing List.” Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Ed. Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise. Seattle: Seal, 1996. 114–25. Print. An essay about the e-mail community of women in technical computing founded by Anita Borg in 1987. Focus is on ways these women challenge the stereotype of the geek as male.

Edwards, Cliff. “Scientist Works to Give Women a Voice in the Cyberworld.” Black Issues in Higher Education 17.5 (2000): 64. Print. Provides details of Borg's work in her role as founder and president of the Institute for Women and Technology to increase participation of women and minorities in technology. Includes biographical data and quotations from Borg.

Hafner, Katie. “Anita Borg, 54, Trailblazer for Women in Computer Field.” New York Times 10 Apr. 2003: A25. Print. This obituary gives an overview of Borg's life and professional achievements. Quotes colleagues paying tribute to her commitment and influence in computing.

Klawe, Maria, Telle Whitney, and Caroline Simard. “Women in Computing—Take 2.” Communications of the ACM 52.2 (2009): 68–76. Print. This follow-up to a 2005 article focuses on changes, positive and negative, in women in computing. Notes strategies employed by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, with which two of the authors are affiliated. Photographs, illustration.

Misa, Thomas J., ed. Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing. New York: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010. Print. Borg is referenced among the women programmers, systems analysts, managers, and IT executives whose achievements are recognized. The accomplishments of women in technology during the 1960s and 1970s are contrasted with the diminishing number of women entering computer science in the twenty-first century.