Wendy Hall becomes a dame

Wendy Hall has been made a dame, one of an extremely long list of people recognised in the New Year’s Honours List.

Not that I’m exactly keen on the whole concept of all these knighthoods and, um, damehoods (she has, after all, been made a dame “of the British Empire”).

But Wendy Hall definitely sounds like an interesting person – according to the BBC, she invented a forerunner to the internet:

Wendy Hall created the “open hypermedia system” Microcosm with colleagues after joining the University of Southampton computer science group in 1984.

And in 1994 she became the university’s first female professor of engineering.

Professor Hall, 56, was made a CBE in 2000 for services to science and technology and is considered one of the best computer scientists in the world.

So good to see examples of women playing a key role in tech. But it’s also interesting that Hall has been actively involved in encouraging girls’ and women’s participation in her field (although I’ve not been able to find many examples on a quick search, of exactly what this has involved).