Notable authorities

 

Fenella Vorpel

On being a smart woman

At the start of my career, I was advised to publish under initials only: FC Vorpel. A woman’s name, I was told, would sink a paper before the first paragraph. Sometimes I even used my married surname—Purslane—having fallen into the romantic trap of sheltering under a man’s name.

Thus disguised, I was hailed as a rising light, a new voice for our times, a public intellectual. I published prolifically, praised for my insight, lauded for my style. My aunt Octavia warned me against the charade, but she was already notorious for her refusal to bend. I lacked her courage.

Then came a keynote invitation at an international conference. When I arrived, I was asked, with great concern, where my husband was. He, I was told, was expected to deliver the address. Slowly, and in words of one syllable, I explained that I was the author of the admired papers; that I, not some phantom husband, would be speaking. One man—shoulders flaked with dandruff—blinked and said: “Oh, but you’re a woman.”

So I delivered my lecture to a hall of men who shuffled papers and whispered through every sentence. At the end, the Q&A was empty silence.

From that day on, I published under my own name. Predictably, I was rebranded: no longer a promising thinker but a virago, an upstart, a woman who had clearly copied her ideas from some more capable man.

So be it. I took Octavia’s advice: to be myself, in spite of being a woman. Better a virago than a ventriloquist’s dummy for men who can barely think, let alone write.

 

Alice Mallard

[1940–2020]

It has often been noted—usually by men—that women lack the capacity for programming, as though language were theirs alone to command. This is a tired echo of earlier centuries when those same voices insisted that women could not manage higher learning or commerce, lest the feminine mind collapse under the strain.

The truth, of course, is not incapacity but exclusion. Women remain under-represented in information technology not because they cannot, but because men rarely yield ground.

Alice Ingrid Mallard, broke that pattern as decisively as every Mallard woman before her. Her mother, Octavia, carved a career in linguistics and etymology, wielding her scalpel on the words that men had shaped to keep themselves in power. Alice inherited that sharpness, but turned it toward the rising world of information systems. From a Masters in Information she entered the IT&T sector, moving with speed and precision through the systems—and through the men—who mismanaged them.

Alice wrote widely: on communications, on the ways technology was reshaping society, and most recently on the futures of artificial intelligence. Her work was rigorous yet humane. She refused the cold frames of fear, greed, and opportunism that dominate the current discourse, insisting instead that AI be understood in human terms, as a mirror and a partner, not a monster.

Her death in 2020 was untimely, and her absence leaves a gap we still do not know how to fill. For with her went a rare clarity: a voice that understood both the language of machines and the deeper intelligence of what it means to be human.