Ada, Reimagined
Mathematics wasn’t Ada’s prison. Rigid nurturing was.
Ada Lovelace was a girl whose mother wielded mathematics like a weapon against inheritance, whose grandmother held her when her mother couldn’t, and who became the world’s first computer programmer despite (and perhaps because of) a childhood that tried to engineer the poetry out of her soul.
And today is her birthday, a day where most women (and men) in tech credit her with thinking about computing before it was even a thing to be fathomed.
Ada Lovelace was just five weeks old when her parents separated. Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, left England forever, and Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, was awarded sole custody.
What followed was one of the most consequential, and complicated, acts of nurturing in the history of technology.
Lady Byron was terrified that Ada might end up being a poet like her father.
She sought to educate Ada in mathematics and science, believing a rigorous course of study rooted in logic would enable her daughter to avoid her father’s perceived insanity.
Byron had once affectionately called his wife “Princess of Parallelograms” for her mathematical gifts. After the separation, he came to see her as a “Mathematical Medea,” mocking her in his poem Don Juan as someone whose “favourite science was the mathematical.”
When Ada strayed from this rigorous course of education, Lady Byron was known to punish her by making her lie motionless, making her write apologies, or giving her solitary confinement.
Mathematics wasn’t just education—it was exorcism.
But here’s what makes Ada’s story so hauntingly relevant today: Ada did not have a close relationship with her mother. She was often left in the care of her maternal grandmother Judith, Hon. Lady Milbanke, who doted on her.
Later, she was given more time and emotional nurturing by Mary Somerville, whom she met in 1834.
The grandmother who held her. The mentor who believed in her. The spaces between discipline where affection could breathe.
Despite her mother’s programming, Ada did not sublimate her poetical inclinations.
She called her approach “poetical science” and described herself as “an Analyst (& Metaphysician).”
The mathematics meant to suppress her father’s influence became the language through which she honored it.
Fast forward nearly two centuries. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman wrote The Confidence Code for Girls after traveling the country and hearing the same desperate question from parents everywhere: “What about my daughter? I already see this happening to her.”
Between the ages of 8 and 14, girls’ confidence drops by 30%, according to a survey of nearly 1,400 8 to 18 year-olds. The survey also found that three out of four teen girls worry about failing.
Shipman noted, “We were surprised at how quickly, how deep that drop is. And especially because right until age 8, there’s really no difference in confidence levels.”
Why does this happen?
It’s a mix of nature and nurture.
Girls’ and boys’ brains develop differently. Girls, especially at puberty, start to have much higher emotional intelligence. This leads girls to be more cautious.
Meanwhile, boys get a big boost of testosterone that encourages risk-taking.
Thanks to a more active prefrontal cortex, women are extremely adept at big-picture thinking and strategy. At puberty, these brain differences start to become much more apparent.
The girl brain can make it easier to excel in school, but emotional intelligence increases at the same time as the influx of estrogen, making girls more acutely read the emotional landscape around them.
The female brain has a more developed anterior cingulate gyrus—the worrywart center. Combine these attributes with how girls are socialized differently from boys, and you get a blueprint for startling intellectual prowess and emotional intelligence, or on the flip side, the kind of overthinking that is crippling to tween and teen girls.
Sound familiar? Ada Lovelace had the intellectual prowess and the overthinking. But she also had something else.
Here’s what research tells us about building confidence in girls—and what Ada’s story reveals in heartbreaking clarity:
Confidence doesn’t come from removing all softness to make room for logic. It comes from creating space where both can coexist.
Kay and Shipman suggest parents support their daughters by: encouraging girls to push their comfort zone, taking the fear out of failure, helping retrain the brain to avoid rumination and overthinking, and modeling risk-taking themselves.
Ada pushed boundaries.
At age 12, she started experimenting with flight, studying bird anatomy and designing a flying apparatus—but when her mother discovered this deviation from mathematical studies, further research was discouraged.
What if Lady Byron had said: “Mathematics and flight, how fascinating. Let’s study the geometry of wings together”?
What if instead of shutting Ada in closets when she wandered toward creativity, she’d been encouraged to find the patterns in both science and art?
Mothers may struggle to recognize confidence issues in their daughters because perfectionism and worry seem normal—we’ve experienced them ourselves.
Fathers, conversely, were found to be 26% more likely to accurately estimate their child’s confidence, perhaps because this behavior seems more unusual to them.
This matters for how we nurture the next generation of women in tech.
We can’t just push girls toward STEM while punishing the very qualities (creativity, emotional intelligence, holistic thinking) that make them brilliant at it.
We can’t treat technical skill as incompatible with everything “feminine” and then wonder why women leave tech at age 35.
Shipman emphasizes: “It’s not like we want to churn out a bunch of girls who operate like boys. I think it would be wonderful for young women to understand much earlier on, essentially, the world doesn’t operate like school.”
Ada Lovelace became a visionary despite her upbringing, but imagine what she could have become because of it.
If discipline had been paired with delight. If mathematics had been framed as one language, not the only language. If Lady Byron had said: “Your father’s poetry and my mathematics both seek truth: let’s find yours.”
The research is clear: You build confidence by taking risks and struggling and failing and eventually mastering something.
But you can’t take risks if every deviation from the prescribed path is met with isolation.
For the girls in your life learning to code, learning to build, learning to create:
Celebrate the mess. When she experiments and it breaks, don’t punish the deviation: explore what she learned.
Name the pattern. Help her see that her “poetical” thinking isn’t a distraction from technical work: it’s preparation for it.
Model integration. Show her that you can be technically brilliant and emotionally intelligent. That you can write algorithms and poetry. That soft power and technical skill aren’t opposites: they’re symphony.
Provide sanctuary. Be the grandmother who doted. Be the Mary Somerville who believed. Because when the world tries to discipline the creativity out of our girls, they need adults who hold space for their wholeness.
Ada Lovelace envisioned that computing machines “might act upon other things besides number... the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
She saw this because she was allowed (barely, painfully, incompletely) to remain whole.
The apps we need now won’t come from people trained to suppress half of themselves. They’ll come from women who learned early that their emotional intelligence, their creativity, their “poetical science” isn’t something to overcome: it’s their competitive advantage.
Ada died at age 36, requesting to be buried next to the father she never knew.
A woman who spent her life trying to honor both halves of her inheritance (the poetry and the mathematics) in a world that insisted she choose.
We can do better for the girls learning to code today.
We can teach them that the confidence to build doesn’t come from erasing who they are. It comes from nurturing all of who they are, and trusting that integration, not amputation, is the path to genius.
Mathematics wasn’t Ada’s prison. Rigid nurturing was.
Let’s make sure the next generation gets both the structure and the softness, the discipline and the delight, the logic and the love.
Because if we’re raising daughters to change technology, we need to stop treating their wholeness like a bug to be fixed and start seeing it as the feature that will transform everything.