Alice Ingrid Mallard
1940–2020
It has often been noted—usually by men—that women lack the capacity for programming, as though language were theirs alone to command. This is a tired echo of earlier centuries when those same voices insisted that women could not manage higher learning or commerce, lest the feminine mind collapse under the strain.
The truth, of course, is not incapacity but exclusion. Women remain under-represented in information technology not because they cannot, but because men rarely yield ground.
My cousin, Alice Mallard, broke that pattern as decisively as every Mallard woman before her. Her mother, Octavia, carved a career in linguistics and etymology, wielding her scalpel on the words that men had shaped to keep themselves in power. Alice inherited that sharpness, but turned it toward the rising world of information systems. From a Masters in Information she entered the IT&T sector, moving with speed and precision through the systems—and through the men—who mismanaged them.
Alice wrote widely: on communications, on the ways technology was reshaping society, and most recently on the futures of artificial intelligence. Her work was rigorous yet humane. She refused the cold frames of fear, greed, and opportunism that dominate the current discourse, insisting instead that AI be understood in human terms, as a mirror and a partner, not a monster.
Her death in 2020 was untimely, and her absence leaves a gap we still do not know how to fill. For with her went a rare clarity: a voice that understood both the language of machines and the deeper intelligence of what it means to be human.
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