Communications - July 2009

during the early years. “I worked on a language translation project,” she says. “People thought they could solve that in a few years. It was easy to not understand how difficult the problems were.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges tremendous progress. In the 1970s advances were made in defining certain ways of doing things and, she says, “that’s what data abstraction is all about.” But the major challenge still is how to build large software systems. Such huge projects contain millions of instructions and it’s hard to understand something that big, and build them to be correct and organized so that they’re flexible and easy to modify, she says.

Women in computing have also made progress, although they continue to encounter unconscious gender bias, Liskov says. As associate provost for faculty equity, she educates colleagues, including members of search committees, about unconscious bias. She references studies of sexist hiring processes, including one that involved evaluations of résumés. When Swedish researchers changed men’s and women’s names on resumes, the resumes

“The question
of how you know
what’s worth
working on and
what’s not separates
someone who’s
going to be really
good at research
and someone’s
who’s not. There’s
no prescription.”

with a woman’s name were ranked lower than those with a man’s. In another example, a symphony orchestra held auditions behind a curtain and, with the gender of the musicians being unknown, more women were offered

jobs. “Hopefully telling them makes them more sensitive and sophisticated,” says Liskov, “so that they notice when a letter of recommendation compares a woman only to other women, for example.” However, she says the issue involves not only the biased material that hiring committee members see, but also their bias in how they interpret it.

Liskov’s advice for those wishing to pursue a career in research is to avoid taking a certain direction because it is likely to yield many published papers. Instead, she encourages following one’s own star. “It’s much better to go for the thing that’s exciting,” Liskov says. “But the question of how you know what’s worth working on and what’s not separates someone who’s going to be really good at research and someone who’s not. There’s no prescription. It comes from your own intuition and judgment.”