Woman invents mobile phone technology but we don't count her as an inventor...

The importance of not just studying the absence of women

Gloria Steinem once wrote how she was not AT ALL surprised by studies showing that women’s intellectual self-esteem tended to go down as their years of education went up.

“No wonder” Steinem wrote “we have been studying our own absence.”

The more years you study your own absence in history/technology/economics/etc, the more SHITTY you feel, according to Steinem. The dynamic is then of course worse for women of colour. IF women are represented, it tends to be white women.

I thought about this Gloria Steinem quote the other day when I stumbled upon this graph showing that at the current pace of change it will take 118 years to reach a 50 percent female share of inventors. The graph is interesting. But I also thought about what it does to women to look at things like this. I guess the graph is just another instance of women studying their own absence…

Which is why I want to tell you a story about a female inventor who does not show up in this graph. Someone who is completely invisible in this type of statistic but who still basically INVENTED MOBILE PHONE TECHNOLOGY.

Here it comes:

In Sweden in the 1970s almost every shop was closed during public holidays. This presented a challenge for Laila Ohlgren on this particular spring weekend in 1979. She knew that if she wanted to test her new idea she needed to travel around between several phone masts making thousands of calls. .

The problem was food.

No grocery store was open. Luckily she found a fruit wholesaler where she managed to buy a supply of bananas big enough to sustain herself and her boss on what would become a historic trip.

Laila Ohlgren was an engineer working on what would become the world’s first fully automatic mobile phone network. There was an assumption at the time that mobile phones should work like other phones. You would lift the handset and THEN dial the number.

But the connection to the phone mast was not that reliable especially if you were moving (which kind of was the point of mobile phones…). What ended up happening was that the signal would be broken before you had managed to dial the whole number.

The idea that had suddenly come to Laila Ohlgren was: “What if mobile phones don’t need to be like other phones? What if you dial the number FIRST and THEN you lift the handset?”

The connection would be much less likely to be broken off, wouldn’t it??

Laila got so excited that she called her boss Östen Mäkitalos. (Note for international readers: calling somebody on the weekend on a work-related matter is considered a no-no in Sweden. We are, after all, not Americans…).

Östen, however, got just as excited. They took off on their banana-fuelled trip to test the idea. It worked!

The rest, as they say, is history…

The sad thing is that Laila Ohlgren often played down her own contribution. She seemed reluctant to think of herself as an “inventor”. Even in Sweden she is still largely unknown.

Östen, her former boss, was of a different view. He said in 2005:

“Very few people can say they have created something that is being used by 3 billion people. I find it sad that Laila never applied for a patent…. Imagine the money she could have made…“

So, whenever you press that call-button on your phone AFTER you dial the number… Think about the woman who came up with it.

Because no, we do not just have to study our own absence.

Happy Thursday!

Katrine

PS. I found the graph on female inventors through Carl Benedikt Frey, you should check out his latest book. It’s great!