Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an even more packed schedule than usual.
I may be a bit biased but I had a thoroughly lovely day.
In a packed (standing room only) room in the Main library, we started with some lightning talks by students and staff which were amazingly interesting. Milly (PhD researcher, the Paleontology Society) talking about the challenges of being a woman while digging up dinosaurs in the Badlands of Montana. It was a really brave and honest discussion of topics rarely discussed and she came prepared with solutions! Next was a talk by Anna (CompSoc Vice President) about fleeing her war-torn home in Ukraine and sharing a stage with President Bill Clinton. Anna’s positive mindset made me feel quite emotional – always turning challenges into opportunities. A truly inspiring young woman.
Ariadna (PhD student, Natural Language Processing NLP) gave a really informational talk where she compared her time in industry to her time in academia. I found it particularly interesting from an NLP perspective, Ariadne worked on text to speech and in particular voice cloning which could be controversial but was also an absolute game changer for disabilities where people lost their ability to talk. Not only could they speak but they could get their own voices back.
I was also pleasantly surprised that Lucia (EFI) was doing a talk with Beccy (Society of Scottish Antiquaries). Lucia was a PhD student who I supported in my days working in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and I remembered her love of data and databases! She and Beccy are now working on a project to get more female Scottish antiquarians of the 19th and 20th centuries into Wikipedia, trying to navigate around complexities such as name changes after marriage, a difficulty I hadn’t considered at all prior to their talk.
We then had an editathon, arts and crafts (I made myself some new stickers for my computer), badges, our women in STEM interactive tour and Cari worked with staff in uCreate to provide women in STEM activities such getting your photo taken with a well known woman in STEM. Here, Satu is showing exactly how it’s done, hanging out with another amazing woman in STEM, Mary Sommerville. I feel like Satu and Mary would be firm friends if Mary was still with us. Kudos to Cari Romans for the great photo.
And after all that excitement, as if that wasn’t enough, the evening concluded with a panel of women climate scientists.
Our Director, Melissa, chaired the panel which featured Elva Bannon Research and Engineering Manager at Wave Energy Scotland), Hermione Cockburn (Science communicator with a career spanning television, radio, teaching and writing), Gabi Hegerl (Professor of Climate System Science) and last but not least Encarni Medina-Lopez (Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering who leads the ‘Coastal and Environmental Remote Sensing Group’). The conversation explored imposter syndrome and confidence, the importance of having male allies in STEM subjects, how to balance being a leader but not losing your own femininity and personality, the impact of climate change on women and girls and even the marketing and consumerism targeting women and how to resist it. I’m sure Elva then said it was ok for me not to clean my house. I’m sure she did. Or was it a warning about harsh cleaning chemicals and their impact on the environment? Either way, I got the message. Less house cleaning, more reading, blogging and litter picking.
It was such a great panel and I felt we could have continued to talk for many more hours but all good things must end. We finished on a high and had some snacks and individual chats. I had a thoroughly lovely time and felt the panel really chimed with my own experiences as a woman in IT. It gave me some other food for thought with respect to our own work in the area of digital sustainability too.
When I got home, I was exhausted but relieved it had all went well and so happy to have been part of the experience. I’ve got a recording of the panel and will try to make at least bits of it available for a listen. Watch this space.
