Anne-Louise Guichard Radimsky: A French Computing Pioneer in Post-World War II America who Stands among First Women PhDs in her Field
By Lori Cameron
Published 04/18/2018
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Anne-Louise Guichard Radimsky helped blaze a trail for women in tech when she left her native France just as its computer industry was crumbling in the 1960s. She arrived to the United States on a computer science scholarship and never looked back, riding an American computing boom that solidified her place as a computing pioneer, educator, and mentor.
Her extraordinary journey documents how more than one path exists for women seeking careers in science and engineering, says a researcher specializing in gender issues and scientific careers.
The history of women and minorities in tech is fraught with barriers and difficulty. It’s been a topic of great interest to the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and Radimsky’s story is yet one more chapter in that narrative.
Radimsky, who is currently a professor at Sacramento State, is an intellectual who has always gone against the grain.
“Her own identity challenges gender stereotypes and she feels empowered to help students who want to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Direct and humorous, she brought a touch of European education to the training of future computer professionals in the United States. With passion and enthusiasm, she continues to teach at the same beloved institution where she is welcomed and respected,” writes Irina Nikivincze, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of “Anne-Louise Guichard Radimsky: An Educator and a Champion for Diversity in Computing.” (login required for full text)
Nikivincze interviewed Radimsky as part of a project called “Careers and Contributions of the First Doctoral Women in Computer Science,” sponsored by the ACM History Committee.
Born in France during World War II, Radimsky grew up excelling in math, science, and languages.
“As a student, Anne-Louise always tried to challenge herself by looking for the toughest path. Mathematics was her strength. In addition to mathematics and sciences, she chose to study Greek because it was challenging and esoteric,” says Nikivincze.
After high school, she attended École Nationale Supérieure de l’Aéronautique (also known as SUPAERO), one of the best schools for aerospace engineering, majoring in systems theory and specializing in avionics.
“The choice of major proved to be beneficial. It was a popular area of research that saw a lot of developments in previous decades, and it was the foundational knowledge used by engineers developing missile guidance systems,” says Nikivincze.
How Anne-Louise Guichard Radimsky came to U.S.
Early in her career, she conducted research at the Centre d’Études et de Rechershes en Automatisme, taught systems theory to engineers at her school in Paris, and later in the Engineering School of Tarassa, Spain.
Then things changed.
“When she saw a memo about a scholarship offered by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to study computer science in the United States of America, neither the distance nor the undertaking seemed too daunting,” writes Nikivincze.
The University of California, Berkeley’s master’s program in electrical engineering wasn’t difficult for Radimsky, and she completed her degree in one year. It was at a time when computer technology was very much in its infancy. But computers, especially artificial intelligence, fascinated Radimsky very much, and she decided to stay at Berkeley and pursue her doctorate.
How the computing pioneer negotiated her career in an all-male environment
Radimsky went to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) regularly while developing her thesis. And, it just so happened that, next door, “at the SRI’s Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect, Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues were developing future computer interfaces and interactions that they would demonstrate in December 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,” says Nikivincze.
The Cal State Sacramento Retirees Association 30th Anniversary Fall Dinner with President Robert Nelson (2015). Left to right: Chuck & Barbara McFadden, Anna Rita & Bill Neuman, Jan & Anne-Louise Radimsky, Linda & Bob Buckley
By the time she graduated in 1973, Anne-Louise Radimsky had founded the Foreign Student Association at Berkeley, met her husband, Jan Radimsky, and forged life-long friendships. At the time of graduation in 1973 at Berkeley, she was also one of only three women receiving a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science.
Computer science programs at US universities were growing at the time, and Radimsky received numerous offers. After turning down an attractive offer from MIT, she decided on an assistant professorship at the University of California, Davis.
She was the first woman the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science hired, and she remained the only woman at her college until her departure in 1979.
It was not easy working in an all-male environment.
“Being a professor not only was associated with relentless pursuit of publications and career, but it also included privileges, expectations, and formal or informal rules that were associated with being male. Men did not do secretarial work or took time to have children. It was a custom for men to pay for women and, hence, Anne-Louise was a liability to her colleagues if she was to join them for lunch,” writes Nikivincze.
She had little in common with her colleagues’ wives as well.
“It also was difficult to relate to women married to her colleagues because the concerns of a typical faculty wife were all about supporting her husband,” Nikivincze adds.
Meanwhile, she felt her career decisions becoming more clear. She loved applied research more than theoretical research and wouldn’t publish “gibberish” just for the sake of publishing. Moreover, while she enjoyed working for Hewlett-Packard, designing tools for the HP 3000, a scanner and a parser for COBOL 74, she eventually quit industry to return to her first love—teaching.
Anne-Louise Radimsky and George Craft at Cal State Sacramento Retirees Association fall dinner “A Taste of Italy” in 2012.
In 1979, Radimsky joined the faculty of California State University, Sacramento, eventually becoming chair of the Computer Science department in 1992. She has remained active in campus life, mentoring students, and engaging in diversity outreach. She sees herself as instrumental in drawing more women to male-dominated STEM fields.
“Teaching undergraduate computer science classes, she observed that women students do not go to computing. In a cohort of approximately 37 students, approximately 10% of them are women. Having excelled in math, Radimsky was puzzled why other women do not understand math or technology. Her own identity challenges gender stereotypes and she feels empowered to help students who want to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM),” writes Nikivincze.
Related research about women in computing in the Computer Society Digital Library
Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.
