I had people that came in from NYU—the Courant Institute—who had their own way of thinking about doing things because they’d come through the same graduate school. And then I had a couple people from MIT. One in particular—a woman—was on the very theoretical side and a very wonderful thinker in a different way. The Illinois people had some different characteristics. So even taking out the gender differences or other cultural differences, the fact that they came from these different places provided, in and of itself, a much stronger group.

Seibel: I suppose if we get to the point where undergraduate computer science is split 50/50 by gender we could actually lose some of that experiential diversity, if everyone is going through the same sort of CS degree.

Allen: What makes some of the new graduates very appealing to, say, IBM, is that they’re not staying in one discipline. They move from one discipline to another. And they can be deeply technical but very diverse disciplines. Often it’s done purposefully—a person decides that they want to connect some big fields. I’ve talked to some people like that—they see a connection between working in linguistics and working in computing. They’re very appealing as an employee.

Seibel: So how are you feeling about the “50/50 by 2020” project?

Allen: Pretty discouraged about it.

Seibel: What are the steps that should be taken to get to that goal? Do you need to change math education in junior high school? As I understand it, that’s where a lot of girls drop out of math and science—before that girls still love math.

Allen: That’s been a popular belief, but I don’t believe it. Look at the Westinghouse competitions. Women are winning those. And there are a lot of women in engineering—taking all the tough sciences and mathematics in high schools. At my little high school in Croton, New York, we had a Westinghouse person nationally come in fifth. And they have a nice science program. Six of the seven people in it this year at the senior level are women doing amazing pieces of individual science.

What’s happening with those women is that they’re going into socially relevant fields. Computer science could be extremely socially relevant, but they’re going into earth sciences, biological sciences, medicine. Medicine is going to be 50/50 very soon. A lot of fields have belied that theory, but we haven’t.

Seibel: What is it, then, about computer science that is so unappealing?

Allen: A lot of people think it’s the games and the nerdiness of sitting in front of a computer all day. It’s going to be interesting how these new social networks online will have an effect. I don’t know. But I feel it’s our problem to solve. It’s not telling the educators to change their training; we in the field have to make it more appealing.

We have to give the field an identity that expands it further than the identity it seems to have now—a much more human identity. We haven’t articulated why we like this field and what’s exciting about it and what’s exciting about the future and why it’s a great field to be in.

Seibel: So why do you like it?

Allen: Part of it is that there’s the potential for new ideas every day. One sees something, and says, “Oh, that’s new.” The whole field gets refreshed very frequently. It’s very exciting to think about what the potential for all of this is and the impacts it can have.

Isaac Asimov made a statement about the future of computers—I don’t know whether it’s right or not—that what they’ll do is make every one of us much more creative. Computing would launch the age of creativity. One sees some of that happening—particularly in media. Kids are doing things they weren’t able to do before—make movies, create pictures. We tend to think of creativity as a special gift that a person has, just as being able to read and write were special gifts in the Dark Ages—things only a few people were able to do. I found the idea that computers are the enablers of creativity very inspiring.

Seibel: You have been the first woman in many categories—first Turing Award winner, first IBM Fellow. Do you feel like there were women before you who were overlooked?

Allen: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Seibel: So when you won the Turing, did you think to yourself, “Gee, there’s another woman who should have won this a long time ago?”

Allen: Well, the very first thing I thought about was how wonderful it was. And then I started to think about all the many other women who were never recognized at all for their work. In many cases, their work was stolen. I thought about the women who had done some very amazing things that have not been recognized, even by their peers. When I approach them and say, “You need to join some professional organizations—I’ll write some recommendations for you,” they kind of shy away from that.

Seibel: So you think that part of the problem is they don’t get recognized because they’re not putting themselves in a place to be recognized as easily.

Allen: Right.

Seibel: Are there any particular folks that you would like to name—to give a little recognition now?

Allen: Well, there’s Edith Schonberg, who is a great computer scientist. In terms of technical work, it’s just one first after another on some of her papers. She’s had work stolen—absolutely brutally stolen. She wrote a paper on debugging of parallel code, which is a very hard problem. It was not accepted at a conference and somebody who had been on the program committee made three papers out of it. That kind of thing. It happens in our field and we don’t have good ways of dealing with it.

Seibel: And it happens more to women?

Allen: Yes, I think it does. They were often viewed as not going to put up a fight—that they were more isolated and don’t have the advocates who will deal with a famous thief. He was a famous thief, known but nobody dared touch it. And there are plenty of others way back from the Stretch days. There was a woman who essentially was the inventor of multiprogramming and credit was taken by somebody who eventually became a Turing Award winner.

Seibel: Would you have rather won the Turing Award, but not had to have been the first woman? There were a lot of newspaper stories: “Woman Wins the Turing Award,” which I imagine might be a little annoying. If another woman had won it ten years ago, and been the first, and you could have just won it when you did, do you think you would’ve preferred that?

Allen: Well, I can’t say preferred or not preferred. I feel I won it for a very good set of reasons. And it took a long time because it was not always clear what I was doing in some sense. I always worked with a group. Worked with some great, famous people often. And the work could easily be attributed to somebody else—to John Cocke, who distributed ideas everywhere. Lots of people have received accolades and awards because they picked up on something from him, as we all did.

But I was very glad to get it and partly because it was late for a woman to get it. I felt it was an embarrassment for the community that there were 50 men in 40 years, or whatever it was. So I felt it was certainly overdue for some woman to achieve it, and I was perfectly happy to be the first. But I steered a little bit clear of making a big deal out of that aspect of it. I tried to focus a lot more on the length of my career and the whole history of it.

Seibel: How does it feel to have spent your whole career at IBM?

Allen: Working for IBM Research was one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to me because IBM Research sits between industry and academia. I have a picture of a stone wall that I’m standing on and can look either way and find interesting problems and opportunities in both ways.