Ada Lovelace Day
Oct. 13th, 2015 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellestraAda Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, and part of her reason for doing this was a worry that women in tech were invisible. The idea was a positive one - rather than highlighting the problem, highlight the unseen women and shout from the rooftops about all the amazing things they’ve achieved.
As always it is about getting women into science, especially into programming - like over 200 girls in the Deichmanske, Oslo’s public library, for a packed day of coding. But it's also about the inequalities and stereotypes that still exist in the field. The recent uproar that lead to #ilooklikeanengineer when a tech company put one of their actual engineers on their ad and people started commenting on how she is too pretty to be an engineer. So she fought back and was joined by all those who heard you don't look like/are too pretty to be engineer/coder/scientist. Most of them women. Add to that the fact that women in tech earn 32% less than men and you see all that still needs to be done.
As always it is about getting women into science, especially into programming - like over 200 girls in the Deichmanske, Oslo’s public library, for a packed day of coding. But it's also about the inequalities and stereotypes that still exist in the field. The recent uproar that lead to #ilooklikeanengineer when a tech company put one of their actual engineers on their ad and people started commenting on how she is too pretty to be an engineer. So she fought back and was joined by all those who heard you don't look like/are too pretty to be engineer/coder/scientist. Most of them women. Add to that the fact that women in tech earn 32% less than men and you see all that still needs to be done.
