The Critical Computing Speaker Series presents Joy Lisi Rankin

“It’s not pipeline problem; it’s a fratriarchy problem: Lessons from the history of computing”

What can the history of computing tell us about the so-called STEM pipeline problem? And, in turn, what can the pipeline problem tell us about computing, power, and society? To answer those questions, I’ll provide a brief history of the pipeline problem, as well as a history of race and gender in computing. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts on the making of what I call the tech fratriarchy.

Joy Lisi Rankin leads the research program in Gender, Race, and Power in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the AI Now Institute at New York University. My first book, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Harvard Univ. Press, 2018, hardcover, e-book, audio book), has been featured in the LA Review of Books, The Nation, Public Books, and the Australian Book Review and widely reviewed elsewhere. She is currently writing a second book, Most Intelligent, on artificial intelligence, the tech industry, and the meritocracy.

Her essays have been published in popular and academic media, including Slate, Spike, Lady Science, the Smithsonian’s What It Means to Be American series, Information & Culture, and IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, with forthcoming work in (among others) Science News, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and a Princeton University Press book. She has shared tech expertise at venues ranging from the United Nations and Cambridge University to the Computer History Museum and Google and consulted on projects including the pilot television episode of Girls Code, and the documentaries The Queen of Code and The Birth of BASIC. She earned a PhD in History from Yale in 2015; prior to that she also studied at MIT, Duke, UCL, Cambridge, and Dartmouth, where she earned a BA with a double major in mathematics and history.