In my novel about Dora, she and John get engaged at the Loch Awe Hotel in the Scottish Highlands in March 1935. Loch Awe is the longest freshwater loch in Scotland, at 41km, but is only 1km wide. It is renowned for its trout and so was an obvious destination for the couple, fishing being …
Continue reading “Dora and John’s Engagement at Loch Awe Hotel”
There is a group of editors called the Wiki Women in Red (WWR) who aim to address the gender bias in Wikipedia’s profiles of ‘notable people.’ Since 2014, when only 15.5% of profiles in English language Wikipedia were about women, they have steadily added more, including Dora, so that now over 20% of profiles are …
I’ve been researching and writing Dora’s story for several years now. Trying to find a publisher for my novel about her is a depressing and, so far, unsuccessful marathon. However, I entered a biography competition with the Society of Women Writers and Journalists (SWWJ), in spite of it all, and found some writing success at …
Celebrating Dora and #IWD2023 #womeninSTEM
The talks I gave about Dora went well and you can watch the presentation I gave at the British Society for the History of Mathematics conference below. It’s a short one – only 17 minutes – but it developed into an interesting Q&A with the participants. Most of them shared my frustration with the lack …
The blog post about Dora at the Women in Tech and Science Ireland tells how she was the founder of the information services industry in the 1920s. Dora quickly learned that most businessmen and government department managers lacked the vision and mathematical skills to understand how to make full use of the new mechanical calculators …
This website tells the story of my great aunt, Dora Metcalf. She was an amazing pioneer in the information services industry and she was the first female tech entrepreneur. I’ve written a novel based on her life, rather than a biography, as there are unknowns and secrets that leave tantalising blanks in her history. Here …
A Bitter Equation 