8 December, 2020 | Women in IT2020

The It Girl By Ann Moffatt

Ann Moffatt

‘The IT Girl: 50 years as a woman working in the Information Technology industry’

This is a remarkable book. It is frank, insightful and at times hard hitting.
It traces the life, loves and career path, in UK and Australia, of a courageous and very competent woman from the earliest days of the computer age, through to the current times.

It reminds us of the discriminatory, and at times downright predatory, behaviour that women were expected to endure in the workplace and in wider society, and the toughness required to combat it. And how slowly things have changed.

Underpinning the narrative is the evolution of the technology from mechanical calculators and slide rule, through the cumbersome vacuum-tube based computers of the first generation, to cloud based computing. We see close up, the rise and fall of IT companies now almost forgotten but which were, at one time, household names.

Along the way, Ann Moffatt takes the reader inside major corporations such as AMP and ASX as they struggled to develop the major IT systems which are core to their operation. The strategies adopted, the pitfalls, and the lessons learned from managing these projects, and coping with the inevitable corporate politics that they generate, are as relevant today as ever.

Very readable – buy it and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

Available on Amazon Kindle and in print from, booksonlineaustralia.com.au/shop/the-it-girl/.

Dr Peter Thorne AM
The Pearcey Foundation