Professor Sue Black, OBE, busts the traditional computer scientist mould wide open, with her bright red spiky hair, contagious smile and self-confessed Twitter addiction. She didn’t follow the usual path to academia either, leaving school and home in Hampshire in England’s south at 16 years of age. By 25, she had escaped an abusive partner and was living in a women’s refuge with three kids, no job and few qualifications.
Just over three decades later, Black is Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University in the UK – a post she’s held since 2018 – and on a mission to change perceptions of women in computing and empower them.
In 1998 she founded the women’s specialist group of the British Computer Society, which is still going strong with more than a thousand members, and developed an award-winning program that teaches digital skills to mums. Along the way, she was also instrumental in saving Bletchley Park, the estate now famous as the Allies’ codebreaking centre during World War II, and helped record the stories of the thousands of women who worked there.
So how did a single mum-of-three lift herself and her family out of poverty to embark on a career that would inspire thousands of women and girls into computer science?
Looking back over her life, Black acknowledges her resilience. “Even though I was ridiculously shy early on, I somehow managed to battle through all these difficult things that happened to me, lots of which were quite traumatising,” she told The Brilliant
Before she left school, Black’s favourite subject had been maths. (“I don’t think I was amazing at it, but I just liked it more than anything else,” she laughs.) So, once she and her children moved into a council flat, she enrolled in a maths course at night school. The program allowed Black to enrol in an undergraduate computing degree and, in 2001, she graduated with a PhD in software engineering from London’s South Bank University.
And while she relished her PhD studies, she felt insecure as one of very few women at computer science networking events and conferences. Plenty of men didn’t take her seriously or ignored her altogether – all because of her gender.
So in 1998, she set up an online group for women in computing, based in London, which in 2001 become the UK-wide BCSWomen. Not everyone thought it worthwhile, though.
One of my male mates at work said to me, ‘why are you ghettoising yourself?’” she recalls. “I thought … ‘I’m getting all these women together. We all love technology. We can all have a fun time together, and he thinks I’m creating a ghetto.’ I think there are still people like that around, obviously, but I also think the whole atmosphere has changed.”
Wrack and ruin to restoration
Black discovered the power of social networks years before the likes of Facebook launched. And as social media platforms started changing the way people connected and interacted, she realised she could harness them to campaign for causes she held dear.
On a trip to Bletchley Park in the early 2000s, Black was surprised to learn more than 5,000 women worked there during World War II. They had made up more than half of the workforce, but there was almost nothing written about them.
After raising money to fund an oral history project that recorded some of their stories, Black also learned that the historical landmark was on the brink of collapse. The huts in which the likes of Alan Turing broke German codes were falling down, and the estate had no money to restore them. Black needed to do something about that too.
“Because I was head of a computer science department, I emailed all the heads and professors of computing in the country. I found my peer group that I thought would care about the same thing as me,” Black says. This group of 100 academics signed a letter about the sorry state of Bletchley Park, which helped launch the Saving Bletchley Park campaign.
Back then, Black admits, “I was basically following my nose trying to work out what next, what next, what next. How can I get out to more people?”
Twitter came to the rescue. Black searched for people tweeting about Bletchley Park and contacted them. She persisted, day by day, and it paid off. “Gradually you’ll build up a critical mass of people that care about the same thing that you do,” she says.
This meant that when she reached out to English comedian and actor Stephen Fry, he could see the existing groundswell of support for the campaign. He then tweeted his support to his half a million followers – which was, in 2009, an enormous Twitter following.
“If I’d contacted him six months earlier, he probably would have been like, ‘Who’s this? Nobody’. It only worked because of the year of work that we put in before that happened,” Black says.
“And in the end, Bletchley Park was saved. I’m very proud of what we managed to achieve.”
Empowering mums
It’s not just buildings Black helps lift to another level. In 2012, she founded an education organisation called #techmums that teaches women how to code, use social media and other digital skills. Its mission: to create and connect kick-ass, tech-savvy mums. Today @techmums delivers face-to-face workshops through schools and libraries around the UK plus online support. Ultimately, Black wants a million women around the world to become a #techmum.
“It seems like a simple thing to do … but there’s so much more going on,” Black says.
At a #techmums graduation event last year, Black heard from a woman whose husband had left her to raise four small children on very little income. A friend had suggested #techmums as a way to “get her out of her situation, if only for two hours, and do something different,” Black recalls.
At the end of the program, “she’d made friends … and had a great time. She said she doesn’t feel depressed anymore. And that, for me, is just incredible.”
A couple of years ago the organisation launched #techmumsTV, a live-streamed weekly show to reach disadvantaged young mums in remote areas. The magazine-style TV program from Facebook studios in London featured mums who talked not just about tech, but also their family and interests.
In months, #techmumsTV reached 300,000 people. Audience engagement was high, too, Black says. “The studio crew at Facebook said that we had a higher percentage engagement than David Beckham.”
Next: shift society’s attitude
In the years since she took night classes in maths, Black has seen perceptions of women in tech change, thanks in part to initiatives like women in tech and diversity awards. But when it comes to employment figures, not much has shifted.
I feel like the world is definitely moving on from where we were in the 1980s, but … we’ve still got roughly the same percentage of women in tech – around 20%.”
Black points to hiring quotas and developing training programs that target not only women, but diversity of all types, as the keys to change.
Quotas need only be in place long enough to create a step-change where companies and people realise a more diverse workforce can help them understand and better serve their customers, she explains.
Reaching that tipping point is no small challenge:
It’s about changing our whole society, and our whole culture in different countries,” says Black. But, the rewards are undoubtably worth it, she adds: “The whole tech industry would be a much richer and more successful place.”
Follow the Sue Black on Twitter | LinkedIn | Website
Photo credit: Ali Tollervey