Age does not wither...

Whoa—it’s Ada Lovelace Day again? Already?

Well, so it is. Ada Lovelace Day being the time to consider women who’ve made stellar contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

I belong to a couple of groups sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute, which puts on the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference devoted to women in STEM. You’ll recall that the GHC last year made headlines because Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella forgot that Twitter exists and gave a ballroom full of technically savvy women with mobile devices and Wi-Fi connections career advice centered on the notion that not asking for raises is some kind of XX-chromosome superpower.

(There was also the plenary panel of four executives of tech companies—all male—that consisted of the quartet talking amongst themselves and taking no questions from another room full of women with connectivity and social media accounts.)

GHC is about as good as it gets for women in STEM, so I hope the programs this week are more on point than last year’s. And one of the issues that I’ve seen emerging in discussions over the past few weeks is that of the invisibility of women of a certain age in tech. There were several threads in which a number of women over 35 who attended previous GHCs said that the recruiters—who attend en masse to try to attract female engineers to make their companies not look so much like frat houses—almost literally did not see them. They looked right past you if you appeared to be more than five years out of college.

And, they added, when they brought up this ridiculous situation to the ABI people, they were met with thunderous silence.

So my subject for Ada Lovelace Day 2015 is Barbara Beskind, whose dream had always been to be an inventor, but had to wait seven decades before she could fulfill it.

When Beskind was planning for college, engineering departments didn’t admit women, so she went into domestic engineering (AKA home economics) and went on to have two careers (one in the Army, then in private practice) as an occupational therapist. During those 60 years, she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance.

Then a couple of years ago she watched a 60 Minutes segment with the CEO of IDEO, one of the true paradigm-shifting organizations of the Valley They Call Silicon. You may not recognize the name, but IDEO is the design consulting outfit that brought us the mouse. You know:

Among other things.

Beskind, who was ready to retire (for the second time) thought, “Hey, I’d like to work there,” so she reached out to them and they agreed that she had a lot to contribute. So for the past two years, she’s been working in just about the most innovative, bleeding-edge tech-designing field, bringing her deep understanding of the needs of aging people to the creation of a whole range of products.

Think about it—the vast preponderance of the devices and apps you find in both the enterprise and consumer markets are thought up and implemented by Millennials, people whose vision is sharp, for whom joint pain is theoretical and who have no notion of mortality. Designing for stiff fingers, failing eyes and slower movements is not in their native vocabulary. Beskind introduces those elements to them.

What I love about Beskind is that she’s living her dream of being in tech, without having come up through tech. She’s a non-engineer making extremely valuable contributions, and she is recognized by the innovation elite for those contributions. She’s a shining example for non-techies.

She’s also a role model for those of us who are not 20-somethings, who are the Brahmins of the Valley They Call Silicon. She’s kicking major design ass at age 90. We all can’t be Barbara Beskind, but if there are any true thought leaders around here, they should be taking on board the lesson that technology innovation benefits from diversity in background and age, as well as in other areas.