International Women’s Day 2020: The women who shaped geek culture

The 8th of March is International Women’s Day, and I think the art of Andrew Dobson makes a good point. Women have always been part of geek culture.

There’s Ada Lovelace who created the first computer program, Mary Shelley who created the sci-fi horror genre and Emma Orczy who created the masked vigilante genre with the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Wonder Woman was inspired by Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, then there’s Lucille Ball who helped greenlight Star Trek and Bjo Trimble who helped save it.

In the last row in the comic strip, we find Marcia Lucas who saved Star Wars with her editing skills and a reminder that gatekeepers have no right to applying their misguided insecurities.

Dobson writes;

So much of geek/nerd culture has been shaped by women over the years, and yet people often overlook it all. They’ve not part of some new “SJW agenda,” they’ve been there since the beginning.