ALD News: Introducing three more fabulous ALD Live speakers
Plus organise your own livestream event and sad news from Tech Talent Charter.
Hi there,
With DEI initiatives being deprioritised and defunded across the UK and US, and groups supporting women in different parts of the STEM world announcing their closure or simply stopping operations, it has never been harder to raise funding for events like Ada Lovelace Day.
But with a new government here in the UK, perhaps we’ll start to see a change again, back towards fairness and equality. If you want to be a part of that change, please consider sponsoring or supporting Ada Lovelace Day! Read on for more details on that, plus new speakers and our usual round-up of links from across the web.
ALD Live: Introducing three new speakers
I know I say this every year, but this year might be my favourite line-up yet! If you haven’t saved the date in your diary yet, now’s the time to block out the evening of Tuesday 8 October, whether you’ll be joining us in person or online.
Here are our next three speakers, who will be joining radiation biologist Dr Samantha Terry and crafty mathematician Takita Bartlett-Lashley on stage at the Royal Institution in London!
Prof Anjali Goswami
Prof Anjali Goswami is a research leader in evolutionary biology at the Natural History Museum. She grew up around Detroit, Michigan (USA), but spent long periods of her life in India, where her love of nature was first sparked by seeing a tiger when she was four years old. She now specialises in the evolution of animal shape, especially skulls, and develops new mathematical approaches for reconstructing how and why animals look the way they do, now and in the past.
Website: goswamilab.com | Twitter: @anjgoswami
Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya
Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya is an associate professor of volcanology at the University of Leeds. She researches volcanic emissions of gases and aerosols, and their impacts on air quality, the environment and people’s wellbeing. She is currently involved in the hazard management of volcanic eruptions in Iceland as a scientist on the Icelandic Civil Protection advisory groups.
Twitter: @eilyinskaya
Dr Sarah Bearchell
Dr Sarah Bearchell is a freelance science writer, presenter and trainer based in Oxfordshire. She creates multi-sensory science activities, aiming to engage the whole audience at schools and festivals. This Inclusive Science earned her the 2014 Joshua Phillips Award for Innovation in Science Engagement and the 2024 Beetlestone Award for Leadership and Legacy in Informal Science Learning. Sarah also writes about science for adults and children – encouraging everyone to get involved with science.
Website: childrens-science.co.uk | Twitter: @sarahbearchell
Organise your own ALD Live watch party!
If you can’t make it to the Royal Institution in London on 8 October, then why not host your own event to watch the Ada Lovelace Day Live video stream? You have plenty of time to get organised and we’ve put together a brief guide to help you.
We’ll send a special announcement when the in-person and livestream tickets become available, so keep an eye out for that!
Take our brief audience survey
Every few years we ask our supporters to tell us a little bit about themselves, and that time has rolled around again! I’d be very grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete our questionnaire, which is largely multiple-choice questions so very quick and easy. Doing so will help us plan ahead for both the newsletter and the future of Ada Lovelace Day itself.
Tech Talent Charter to close
Tech Talent Charter, the tech industry non-profit that helped organisations improve their diversity and inclusion programs, has closed after eight years.
Earlier this year, their Diversity In Tech report, which is based on data from over 700 signatory organisations in the UK, said:
Diversity and inclusion in tech is facing a defunding crisis. Three years ago, companies were staunchly pledging to improve equality, posting black squares on their social media and proclaiming their action plans for improving D&I. Fast-forward to today and the message is very different.
D&I strategies are becoming increasingly insular, initiatives are being shelved to prioritise other business goals, and more and more we hear that ‘D&I isn’t relevant because my company isn’t hiring’. Alongside this are countless stories from D&I role-holders and advocates who are battling for support from senior leaders as their teams are decimated, their processes eliminated by mergers and acquisitions or being forced to step back from voluntary efforts due to changing business attitudes and overburdened desks.
The board of directors and co-CEOs Debbie Forster and Karen Blake took the step to close after discovering that their data showed that the industry was backsliding on equality for women. Women in Tech reported that:
TTC has noted a troubling shift in industry priorities. Economic, political, and social pressures have led many organisations to deprioritise their D&I strategies, with some “quiet-quitting” their commitments. Reports from TTC networks indicate that D&I initiatives are increasingly being sidelined in favour of other business goals, with D&I specialists facing dismantled teams and reduced support.
This is terrible news, especially as it comes hot on the heels of the closure of the US-based group Women Who Code a couple of months ago.
The bottom line here is that we can’t take champions of diversity, or even the idea that diversity as a basic concept is valuable, for granted. If we want change, we have to make it happen, we have to fight for it, and we have to keep fighting for it. Which brings me to…
Sponsors and supporters still needed
With just three months left to go, we still need to find more sponsors and paid subscribers to this newsletter to support our work in general and Ada Lovelace Day Live specifically. If your company has a budget of £2,500 or over, then download our sponsorship prospectus from LinkedIn or our website and take a look at the options. I am making the ‘Add-ons’, which include sponsoring our photos and livestream, available as individual packages from now on.
If you have a smaller budget, £80 or more, then you can subscribe to this newsletter at the Founders level. The suggested amount is £240 per year, but you can edit that amount to as much or as little, over £80, as you like.
On a monthly basis, paid subscriptions are £8 per month or £80 per year, but I do have discount codes available on the About page which will take a subscription down to £2 per month or £20 per year.
Every penny really does help, and ongoing subscriptions provide income predictability which is incredibly helpful, so please do consider upgrading or talking your company into becoming a sponsor. And if you aren’t in a position to sponsor or support, please share my LinkedIn post!
Around the web
Here is our round up of links and reading that we’ve found this month!
Ada Lovelace featured: There is an award named after Ada at UNSW - the 2024 UNSW Women in Engineering Ada Lovelace Medal for Outstanding Engineer, which this year was won by Joanna Groves, CEO of inGauge Energy. Ada is also listed in this EuroNews article as an ingenious inventor!
Women of colour: 300 Indian women scientists are set to receive CISR-ASPIRE grants to help them fund their research. Congratulations to Anne-Marie Imafidon, founder of Stemettes, who will become the new chancellor at Glasgow Caledonian University, (featured in The Independent).
Overlooked women: Dr Marian Pettibone is the subject of this article by the Smithsonian, about her work discovering new marine worms, as curator at the National Museum of Natural History and supporting other women zoologists. 2024 marks 75 years since Maria Goeppert Mayer developed her Nobel prize winning theory of the nuclear shell model. A Finnish photographer has created a performance project, The Characters, to bring to life overlooked female explorers, by staging photos of herself in different locations. Olivia Campbell, who writes the Substack blog Beyond Curie looks at the work of natural historian, illustrator and author, Sarah Bowdich Lee.
News: Science reports on the results of Eindhoven University of Technology’s policy of hiring only women for particular roles, finding that the number of women holding faculty positions has risen 7% over 5 years. Axios has some stats on the proportion of women scientists across the world. Sophia Dia Pegrum talks about being a National Geographic Explorer and her work in documentary film, including filming the women working at the Kyrgyz Space Program. Over in the UK, Trish Johnson speaks to the BBC about being the first female bridge master for Clifton Suspension Bridge, and why more women are needed in engineering. Kate Fahy is one of the youngest women in the world to become a tower crane operator, and currently the only female tower crane operator in Ireland. The Women’s Engineering Society has announced the winners of its 2024 Top 50 Women in Engineering awards.
Books: Breaking Through: My Life in Science is the biography from Katalin Karikó, the biochemist who developed a COVID-19 vaccination for Pfizer.
Podcasts and videos: Scientific American has another Lost Women of Science podcast episode looking at ecological restoration with Laura Martin, who has written a book on overlooked women who worked on restoration.
That’s it for this month!
All the best,
Suw & the ALD team