The face of the tech industry has, like most industries, tended to be a male one, from scruffy geeks in garages to smug billionaires firing luxury cars into space. But, as is the case with (checks notes) every commercial enterprise ever, the shadows of our connected age hide countless women who are rarely acknowledged for their contributions to the hardware and software that rule our world.
Claire L. Evans, the tech journalist and critic best known as one-half of pop duo Yacht, has spent much of her non-musical career writing for Motherboard and Wired, shining a spotlight on forgotten female thinkers and programmers like Grace Hopper, the mathematician who helped write code for the Mark I computer at Harvard during World War II, and Stacy Horn, the New Yorker who developed the early social network Echo. Those women and many others fill the pages of Evans’ Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, which serves as a historical corrective to the gushing praise heaped upon names like Paul Baran and Tim Berners-Lee.