What would it take for business to really turn the dial on gender equality?

For years, we’ve been asking women what kind of changes they want to see in the workplace, and they have not disappointed.

Reports such as the 2025 Lovelace Report from Oliver Wyman and WeAreTechWomen or Work180’s series of What Women Want reports go into significant detail regarding the problems that drive women from the STEM workforce. They also make actionable suggestions as to what companies can do to move towards a more equal workplace.

But these changes still aren’t happening.

Even with a robust economic argument, eg, companies with women in over 30 percent of senior leadership positions are 15 percent more profitable, business activity on gender has either flatlined or regressed.

TechTalentCharter closed because a review of their data showed “a trend of D&I initiatives being sidelined and given lower priority across the sector.” Ada Lovelace Day closed because of a lack of financial support from industry.

Yet there are still lots of business leaders who believe in gender equality and want to do the right thing. So how can we help them?

I am about to start researching a report which will look at this problem from the other side of the fence: What experiences do business leaders have when working on gender equality? What practical, cultural, or structural barriers are preventing employers from executing recommended changes? What can we realistically fix and how?

I will be asking these key questions:

• What gender equity initiatives have been tried?
• Why did those that failed fail, and why did those that succeeded succeed?
• What prevents you from acting on more report recommendations?
• What cultural or knowledge-based barriers exist?
• What practical, financial or structural barriers exist?
• How could we successfully overcome these barriers?

My aim is to produce a practical roadmap for getting more women into leadership positions so that women, their colleagues and their employers can all benefit.

I’m delighted to say that Digital Science are the lead sponsor on this project, and I’ll be working with them on data collection and analysis.

If you’d like your company to sponsor this report, get results early, have a workshop or call to help you understand how to apply my findings to your company, and have your name/logo on our report, drop me a line!

Hi there,

It’s taken a while, but I’m happy to report that the Ada Lovelace Day website has now been migrated to a new host. I’m grateful to Ben Metcalfe for arranging complementary hosting at WPEngine for us back in 2012, and for WPEngine for honouring that gift up until last September. But companies grow and change, and it’s challenging to maintain a sponsor relationship over the long term when your champion moved on many years ago, so no hard feelings. But it’s good to now be on a platform where ongoing costs are predictable.

Organise your own ALD event!

There are just four weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday 14 October. That’s plenty of time to organise your own event to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM! Whether you’re highlighting the work of amazing women in your own organisation or bringing in a speaker to delight and inspire, or doing something completely different, there are many ways to celebrate ALD.

If you’re hosting an Ada Lovelace Day event this year, please add it to our map – it’s always good to see what people are doing around the world.

And don’t forget, this year’s hashtag will be #ALD25. We’ll be active on BlueSky, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Worldwide events

We already have news of a couple of events:

Auckland, NZ

Long-term ALD supporter Tia Lush is organising an amazing event in Auckland, NZ on 14 October. More details to come.

Nottingham, UK

Skills for the Future: A Conversation with Suw Charman-Anderson, Digital Pioneer & Creator of Ada Lovelace Day. 14 October

I will be interviewed by Kate Whyles, Digital Innovation and Development Coach, and Sue Stack, Head of Student Experience at the Highfields campus of Nottingham Collegeby at Nottingham College.

This conversation will highlight the importance of continuous learning in STEM subjects and the ongoing need to dismantle gender barriers when attracting and supporting a balanced group of students in traditionally male-dominated courses.

We will focus on the significance of skill development and the ability to adapt to career changes. We’ll also address the limitations of AI, highlighting the essential role that human perspectives play alongside the necessary qualifications for women in STEM who wish to pursue their desired careers.

More details to come.

Hinckley’s Ada Lovelace statue

You may remember that Stan Rooney has been campaigning to raise money for a statue of Ada Lovelace to be erected in Hinckley, Leicestershire. Hinckley is just five miles away from Lovelace’s now-demolished childhood home of Kirkby Mallory Hall, and it is known that she loved visiting the town.As Stan told the BBC:

We know Ada would visit Hinckley often as a child and would recognise sme of the buildings that still stand today in that area. She grew up to be such a celebrated and influential figure.

Hinckley was known for its hosiery industry, but that has all but disappeared, and its heritage is now a bit faceless. We hope the statue will help give the town another identity.

The statue, which was originally sculpted by Etienne and Mary Millner to stand on Ergon House on Horseferry Road in Westminster, is now being cast.

Stan has also told me that, “The planning committee gave us a round of applause after approving the application unanimously. The statue is due for delivery [at the end of September and] the plinth is being cut this week.”

Exciting news!

You can follow the project via their Facebook group.

Tram named after Ada Lovelace

Thanks to Kate Whyles for letting me know that one of Nottingham’s trams, Tram 233, has been named after Ada Lovelace! The naming happened ten years ago, but Kate recently saw the tram out in the wild and let me know about it.

If you see Lovelace mentioned in unlikely places, do let me know. Back when I started Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, it seemed like no one had heard of her, so it’s delightful to know that all sorts of things are now being named after one of our computing pioneers!

Fieldwork audio comedy table read

I’ve been working hard on Fieldwork, my comedy podcast project which aims to encourage more women in ecology and environmental science whilst also sharing real science on biodiversity and the environment.

The script for the pilot is finished and we’re organising a group of voice actors to do an initial table read on Zoom so that I can then refine the script before we record a final table read and, hopefully, then professional record and produce a teaser trailer. This is all very, very exciting!

If you’d like to find out more about Fieldwork, take a look a my newsletter and subscribe for future updates!

That’s it for now! Over the next few weeks I’ll keep you up-to-date with regard to news about some of the indie events happening. Don’t forget to let me know what you’re doing, too!

All the best,

Suw

Hi there,

Firstly, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to my GoFundMe so far. I started off with a goal of £1,300 on 29 April, and thanks to your amazing generosity we’re just just £178 away from £4,000!

Much of the news below comes to because of the generosity of Ada Lovelace Day’s supporters, so thank you all! And if you have a tenner, please do consider donating so that I can do more to keep Ada Lovelace Day going and continue making progress on my woman-focused eco-sitcom, Fieldwork.

ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration

If you’re in York this week and free on Wednesday 4 June 2025 from 6.30pm to 8pm, why not come along to ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration, a panel discussion that’s part of the University of York’s Festival of Ideas.

Tickets are free, although booking is required.

Join artist and art curator Dr Helena Cox, digital culture lecturer Dr Richard Carter, biologist and artist Dr Veronica Ongaro, photographer Paul Shields and me as we discuss about the relationship between art and biodiversity and share a bit about our own projects.

I’ll be talking about Fieldwork, my eco-sitcom which aims to engage the public with solutions to the biodiversity crisis, explain a bit about what ecologists do all day, and normalise the idea of women working in the field. Some *cough* years after I was out in the field as a geologist, it’s still seen as unusual for women to be out in the countryside doing sciencey stuff!

Fieldwork at an art/science knowledge sharing workshop

Thanks to my involvement in the ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration event, I’ve also been invited to take part in an environmental art knowledge exchange workshop at the University of York later in the month. I’ll be joining a group of artists, academics and civil society campaigners to explore the role of environmental art and activism in the UK.

It’s amazing to see that the ideas behind Fieldwork are resonating so strongly, particularly at this stage of the project where it’s just a newsletter and a pilot script. I’ve spoken to nearly twenty ecologists, rewilders, birders, bat researchers and others as part of my background research, and so many of them have said that they feel it’s incredibly important to find new ways to reach the public and share both solutions to the biodiversity crisis and the hope felt by a lot of people working out in the field.

Catch up on Ada Lovelace and the Future of Women in Tech

A couple of weeks ago, I was honoured to give an online talk at the Nottingham Tech for Good Festival. I gave attendees a very short history of Ada Lovelace, her parents and her contributions to the history of computing. I then talked about why diversity, equality and inclusion is still really important and what steps you can take to improve DEI within your company.

The recording is now available so you can watch it at your leisure if you missed it last week:

I had some really lovely feedback about it, so I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as the attendees on the day did.

What’s next for Ada Lovelace Day?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do for ALD this year. The day is Tuesday 14 October, so keep that in your diary!

I don’t have the resources to organise an event, but I have been thinking back to the online content festivals that I did throughout the pandemic and am feeling a bit inspired!

My idea is to organise a retrospective and ask people who’ve been a part of Ada Lovelace Day over the years — whether as an attendee, speaker, sponsor or indie events organiser/participant — to write about why they took part and how it helped them and their community. I’d then schedule their posts to be published on our website over the 50 hours of Ada Lovelace Day.

Over the 16 years since I founded Ada Lovelace Day, I’ve never taken a look at it from the outside in and I think it’d be great to explore the impact that the day has had, to perhaps inspire the next generation of campaigners and supporters!

What do you think? Would you be interested in taking part? Please do leave a comment and let me know.

That’s it for now! Please don’t forget to take a look at the GoFundMe and chip in if you can.

All the best,

Suw

It is with great sadness that I must announce that Ada Lovelace Day, as an annual event and year-round project to support girls and women in STEM, is closing. 

Despite the amazing response I have had and continue to have to Ada Lovelace Day Live and other work that I’ve done, and despite the vast number of people around the world who have put on their own Ada Lovelace Day events over the last decade and a half, I have not been able to raise the funding required to keep Ada Lovelace Day Live going. 

This means that there will be no further Ada Lovelace Day Live events and nor will I be able to continue the work I do year round, such as giving talks or writing about notable women in STEM. 

Ada Lovelace Day as a day in the calendar will continue — it has become a day that is celebrated all around the world and I encourage everyone to continue organising their own independent events. 

But there will be no official event, no online blog post marathon and minimal official activity on the day itself. The weekly newsletter will continue, but the monthly newsletter will be put on hiatus for a while whilst I work out what comes next. Our social media presence will now largely be automated and I will continue to mine our marvellous archives for videos, blog posts and articles you may have missed. 

Co-creating the future

I said at Ada Lovelace Day Live that I was interested in co-creating the future of ALD, and I am. If you have ideas for fully-funded projects that will contribute to our mission of getting more girls to study and pursue careers in STEM, and supporting women to flourish in STEM careers, please get in touch. 

There is still a lot of work to be done, but the world has changed a lot over the last 16 years, and I need to find a way to adapt ALD to this new reality. Events have lost their lustre, so I’m looking for new ways to reach and engage people. 

I am particularly interested in talking to individuals and companies who would like to take a novel and exciting approach to inspiring women into STEM, to wit, Fieldwork, my sitcom podcast about women and minority ethnic ecologists working at a field station. Initial development was supported by part of the i-COMET grant, and I will shortly begin fundraising to support script writing/editing and podcast production. Please do drop me a line if you’re interested! 

Why is this happening?

The root cause of our closure is a lack of financial support from the STEM industries. Whilst I have had lots of amazing sponsors, to whom I’m very grateful, on average we lost half of our sponsors every year and some years we lost all of them and had to start fundraising from scratch. That meant I had to spend more time fundraising and less time working towards fulfilling our mission to support girls and women in STEM. 

Furthermore, the big tech companies, such as Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft, have shown no interest in supporting ALD, despite hoarding some $1 trillion in cash and investments. Apple alone is squatting on $167 billion. They could fund the entire women in STEM sector and not even notice.

Those of you who have been long-time supporters will remember that I’ve been in this situation before — this is not a new problem, even if it’s one that has worsened recently. 

I’ve run several crowdfunding campaigns, including one in 2019 which was moderately successful. Despite that, in 2022 I was again looking at a significant financial shortfall. It was only when the BBC covered ALD’s imminent closure that I attracted sufficient sponsorship to continue. 

However, this year I raised a fraction of what I needed and, after many conversations with people across industry, it has become clear that the outlook for 2025 is equally poor. The STEM industries, along with others, are pulling away from gender equality work specifically and DEI in general, defunding or closing programs and firing DEI officers. Indeed, Forbes reports that “Meta and Google have quietly dialed back DEI efforts, and Microsoft made headlines when the company eliminated a set of DEI roles within its events team.”

Ada Lovelace Day is not unusual, we’re just the latest in a long list of organisations that have closed or simply gone dark: Tech Girls Movement, 500 Women Scientists, Women Who Code, Tech Talent Charter and Girls in Tech have all closed or halted work over the last 18 months. I know of another 20 or so groups that have gone dark over the last five years. 

I began working on what was to become ALD towards the end of 2008 and ran it part-time until 2015, when I raised enough money for it to become my full-time job. Over the last 16 years, I have made significant personal sacrifices to keep it going, but I can no longer afford to run ALD and my life on a shoestring. 

Thank you

I’d very much like to thank everyone who has supported me over the last 16 years. There are far too many supporters, volunteers, indie event organisers, advisors and companies to thank by name, but I am grateful to every one of you. Together, we made Ada Lovelace Day a global movement that has reached, supported and inspired millions of people. I feel phenomenally proud of that, and you should too.

— Suw Charman-Anderson, Founder

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths which will be held this year on Tuesday 8 October. Our flagship event, Ada Lovelace Day Live, will once again be hosted by The Royal Institution in London, where seven women will talk about their work or research in front of a packed crowd.

If you’re not able to make it to London, you can still take part by watching our livestream. Indeed, why not organise a watch party? Tickets are available now, with standard tickets at £11.02 and concessions at £5.82. If you want to book a group larger than 10 people we have some significant discounts:

• 11-100: 15% off
• 101-500: 50% off
• 501-1000: 70% off
• Over 1001: 80% off

Email us now to arrange your tickets.

Here’s our handy guide to help you get started.

What’s a watch party?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a watch party is “an occasion when people watch a broadcast event together” or “an occasion when people in different places watch a television show, video, etc. at the same time and discuss it using the internet”.

Watch parties are a great way to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day and to feel a connection to everyone else who has gathered, in person at the Ri or at their own events around the world, to enjoy the show.

Prof Pen Holland, who organised a watch party at the University of York described it as “a fantastic opportunity to enjoy and celebrate Ada Lovelace Day live from your home or office, with your people, and a great way to make cool science and brilliant women in STEM accessible to everyone, everywhere, all at once.”

Tia Lush, creative director and trustee at STEM Wana Trust in Tauranga, New Zealand, organised a breakfast event, and said:

“When you live in a tiny country at the bottom of the world, it can be hard to feel connected to all the marvellous events taking place across the world, often in different time zones.

“By bringing a group of women together to mark Ada Lovelace Day and celebrate the amazing achievements of women, while watching the livestream from London, we were able to feel connected to a global movement.

“It was so successful that STEM Wana Trust has added this breakfast watch party to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, to our annual event calendar and we will be encouraging our friends and partners on this side of the world to do the same.”

Organising an in-person watch party

All you need for an in-person watch party is a room with a screen or projector, an internet-connected computer to access the live stream, speakers for sound, and somewhere for people to sit.

Our performance usually starts at about 19:30 GMT, so how you structure your event will depend on where in the world you are. In Europe, the event will start a bit later, in the Americas it will be mid-morning to mid-afternoon, or breakfast in Hawai’i. In Australia and New Zealand, it will be an early breakfast on the Wednesday.

Key things to consider:

• How many people can your room hold?

• Do you want to provide food and/or drinks, or can people bring their own?

• Do you want to invite a speaker to talk before or after the livestream (which is about 1.5 – 2 hours long)?

• How will you let your community know about your event?

You could even organise a networking session as well, so that attendees can get to know one another.

Organising an online watch party

In 2023, tech company Docker, Inc organised an online watch party for their entire staff. As a fully distributed company, it wasn’t feasible to organise an in-person party, so they bought and distributed tickets for every employee so that they could watch from home.

Online watch parties are, in many ways, much easier to organise. You just provide your staff or community with tickets and use an online chat space for people to talk as the event unfolds. For some that might be a channel in the work Slack, or it could be a specific WhatsApp group or Facebook chat. Any tool that allows people to talk in real time will work.

Ticketing

Livestream tickets are available to buy now, and we are offering discounts for organisers who’d like to buy in bulk and follow Docker’s lead. Get in touch with numbers and we’ll arrange your tickets for you.

For public-facing events where you aren’t sure about how many tickets you will need, you have two choices: Either gather numbers ahead of the event and then buy the appropriate number of tickets, or you can ask attendees to buy their own tickets and check them at the door.

If you’re organising a watch party for any educational institution, or work with an underserved community, or live in a low-income country, then just pay what you can – if that’s one ticket per group, that’s fine. Carers can get free tickets by emailing the Ri.

Equally, if you can pay a little bit more, there’s an option to include a donation which will go a long way towards ensuring that the Ri can continue to support girls and women in STEM.

Let us know what you’re doing

Every year, people around the world organise lots of different types of events for Ada Lovelace Day. Whatever you put on, don’t forget to let us know by adding it to our map so that we can share your events with our community.

Need more help and advice?

Take a look at our Indie Event Organisers Pack, which includes flyer and poster blanks with our logo on, and our Indie Event roundel that you are free to use.

Save the date

Don’t forget to put Tuesday 8 October (or Wednesday 9 October for those in the Antipodes) in your calendar now, and start thinking about your plans.

See you in October!

Long-term sponsorship commitments are a win-win for both sponsors and recipients: Sponsors save money, time and effort whilst enabling crucial long-term financial planning and strategic growth for beneficiary organisations.

At Ada Lovelace Day, we tirelessly champion the achievements of women in STEM while simultaneously striving to find the sponsorship that allows our work to happen, all against a backdrop of a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) defunding crisis in the technology industry and beyond.

According to Tech Talent Charter’s annual report tracking diversity in the UK tech sector, DEI initiatives are increasingly being overlooked in favour of other business goals, while DEI role-holders say that they are finding it increasingly difficult to get their work done.

A recent report published by the grant-making charity ROSA highlighted that only 1.8 per cent of the £4.1 billion worth of grants awarded in 2021 went to the women’s and girls’ sector. Not only that, a third of all grants made for women’s and girls’s activities went to organisations with no such focus.

So, it is perhaps unsurprising that we often face an uphill battle to secure enough funding to sustain our mission. On average, we need to replace over 50 per cent of our sponsors each year. Given our aim is to invest in long-term growth – in our website, staff, strategy, and events like Ada Lovelace Day 2024 – long-term financial commitments that will see us through inevitable financial ‘ups and downs’ are needed more than ever.

That is why Ada Lovelace Day is now offering its sponsors a range of discounts, with up 20 per cent off for commitment of five years or more.

What’s in it for sponsors?

There are multiple potential benefits of long-term funding commitments for sponsors, both existing and new:

1. You will increase your visibility and recognition: Sustained partnerships allow for greater visibility and recognition within our community and the wider women and girls’ sector.

2. We will establish a more meaningful collaboration: Long-term relationships enable you to forge a more meaningful connection with us, and allow us to get to know you and your community better and to work more closely towards our shared goals.

3. You will demonstrate your commitment to diversity and inclusion: Supporting Ada Lovelace Day on a long-term basis will demonstrate an unwavering commitment to advancing equality and empowering women in science and technology.

4. Your investment will be more predictable: Knowing your support is secured for an extended period (at a reduced rate) allows you to more easily plan your CSR or marketing spend.

5. You’ll save time and money: No more telephone tag or email ping-pong, and no more long discussions with your team to decide whether or not to go ahead with sponsorship this year. Instead, you can proceed knowing that our relationship is secure.

How do long-term commitments benefit Ada Lovelace Day?

Long-term financial support is revolutionary for small organisations like Ada Lovelace Day, not unlike the women we support.

1. We can more easily plan for the long-term: By creating income predictability, long-term funding paves the way for strategic financial planning and business growth, enabling us to amplify our impact year-on-year.

2. We can build strong relationships with subcontractors: Like many small organisations, we primarily work with freelancers and other small businesses, who also have unpredictable incomes. It is far easier to develop meaningful relationships with these individuals when the budget it set for the coming years and we can commit to working together in the long term.

3. We can invest in strengthening our foundations: Income predictability allows us to commit to long-term projects, such as reworking our rather tired website, or developing new community building initiatives.

4. We can save time and money, and can focus on what really matters: Sponsor acquisition is very time-consuming, so the more time we save looking for funders, the more time we can spend on what’s really important: supporting women in STEM.

If you’re interested in becoming a long-term sponsor of Ada Lovelace Day please download our prospectus via the form on our website or email me!

Rosie Curran Crawley at Ada Lovelace Day Live 2024. Photo: Paul Clarke.

Someone’s suggested that your company should sponsor Ada Lovelace Day, perhaps as part of your CSR or marketing work, and you’d like a quick and easy primer on what we do and who we help. Congratulations! You’re in the right place!

What is Ada Lovelace Day?

Held on the second Tuesday of October every year, Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). On the day, we focus on two activities:

Ada Lovelace Day Live

Our flagship event showcases the work, research and talent of a variety of women from across the STEM landscape. Our specially selected speakers talk for about ten minutes about their specialty, sometimes with a comedic or musical contribution from a performer who straddles STEM and the arts.

Past speakers have included such luminaries as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnel, Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Maggie Philbin, Chi Onwurah MP, Prof Sophie Scott and Dr Hannah Fry.

The Ada Lovelace Day Online Blog Marathon

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have published one blog post per hour in our 50-hour long online celebration. We’ve posted short biographies of modern and historic women which outline their achievements, as well as drawing attention to books and podcasts by, for or about women in STEM. You can read through our archives for 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 on our blog.

Who else celebrates?

Since 2011, people from around the world have organised their own grassroots events to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. We have had over 1,000 events held in 239 towns and cities, across 41 different countries.

Events are organised by all sorts of organisations, from businesses to universities, museums, schools, learned societies, professional organisations and women’s groups. And we’ve had lots of different types of events, from Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons to cream teas in the village hall, from fun hands-on educational events for children to panel discussions and talks for adults, and everything in between.

What are Ada Lovelace Day’s goals?

Ada Lovelace Day’s goals are:

• To raise the profile of women in STEM
• To inspire girls and young women to study and pursue a career in STEM
• To encourage women, especially in the middle of their career, to stay in STEM
• To provide women in STEM with a platform to share their knowledge and expertise
• To position women as figures of authority in STEM, not just for girls and other women, but also for boys and men

We do this through our events, our content, and our conversations on social media.

What else has Ada Lovelace Day done?

Over the years, we’ve done lots of things to support women and girls in STEM, including publishing a podcast, two books, an education pack and free downloadable posters for schools. We ran a very successful mentoring program for three years, ran two online conferences through the pandemic, and published three free crochet patterns.

We’ve organised events for International Women’s Day, and our founder, Suw Charman-Anderson, has spoken at countless events and been interviewed on TV and radio.

We’re never short of ideas for how we can entertain and inspire girls and women to consider a STEM career!

What impact has Ada Lovelace Day had?

Since it launched in 2009, Ada Lovelace Day has achieved a huge amount on a tiny budget. We’ve been featured on the BBC including TV, radio and the website, as well as The Guardian, New Scientist, The New York Times and many more, with an estimated combined audience of more than 350 million viewers, listeners and readers. Our website has had 1.8 million visits and our YouTube channel over 2 million impressions.

But the most important impact has been on the women we’ve brought onto our stage and the girls and young women that our work has inspired. We have had speakers whose participation in Ada Lovelace Day Live has resulted in book deals, invitations to prestigious conferences, and higher public profiles.

We also know that some of the girls and young women in our audience have been encouraged to study STEM and have found new role models to inspire them.

How can I get involved?

Ada Lovelace Day is predominantly funded by corporate sponsorships so the most important thing you can do is download our prospectus (just fill in the form below) and discuss our opportunities with your colleagues. If you’re not sure whether sponsorship is right for you, take a look at our checklist!

If you’d like to engage your staff or community with Ada Lovelace Day, why not organise a livestream watch party for our flagship event on the evening of Tuesday 8 October 2024? We will be providing a generous discount for bulk ticket purchases, and it’s a great way to get involved!

Prof Jennifer Rohn at Ada Lovelace Day Live 2024. Photo: Paul Clarke.

I came up with the idea for Ada Lovelace Day because I was frustrated at how few women were invited to take the stage at tech conferences. On one memorable occasion, not only was I the only woman on stage, I was the only woman in a room of about 100 people. Several of us raised this paucity of women as an issue with organisers, but all we got were excuses about how there ‘weren’t enough women in tech’ or ‘they all said no’.

So I thought that if I could persuade enough people to write blog posts about the work of women in tech, conference organisers wouldn’t be able to say that they couldn’t find any women to speak at their events. We’d be able to point at an archive of blog posts highlighting the work of some of the most amazing women in the industry and organisers could take their pick.

Ada Lovelace Day immediately expanded to cover women in science, engineering and maths, with that first day on 24 March 2009 seeing blog posts sharing the achievements of a wide array of historic and modern women. And a wider movement to encourage organisers to ensure gender balance at their events has improved the stats somewhat.

But one large problem still exists: Pay.

We still have a large gender pay gap in the UK, with the ONS reporting that the “median hourly pay for full-time employees was 7.7% less for women than for men in April 2023”. Women also do the majority of unpaid domestic and caring work. And in many larger companies where there are diversity programs and ‘employee resource groups’ (ERGs), women are often tasked with championing their own equality on top of their day jobs for no additional pay. Furthermore, most gender equality groups are run by women, either on a volunteer basis in addition to their jobs or on low pay.

When it comes to events, it’s widespread practice not to pay speakers at all. That’s not so much of a problem if it’s a part of your speaker’s job to prepare and give talks, and if their time and expenses are covered by their employer. But for many women in STEM, who perhaps work part-time or whose jobs don’t explicitly cover the time and expense of preparing a talk or speaking at an event, agreeing to speak at Ada Lovelace Day creates an additional burden.

‘Exposure’ doesn’t put food on the table. And it’s my belief that you can’t be an advocate for gender equality if you ask women to work for free. So I don’t.

Even though Ada Lovelace Day has a tiny budget as events go, we still offer our speakers and helpers an honorarium and to cover expenses, and have done ever since we first raised enough sponsorship to do so in around 2012. Despite running Ada Lovelace Day on a shoestring, I have always made sure that I set aside enough budget to cover speaker costs.

Not all of our speakers and helpers will accept – for some, it would create a conflict of interest, others prefer to leave the money with us as a form of donation. But we offer it to everyone and we make sure we pay in a timely fashion.

At the moment, our honorarium is £100, which is a nice token of appreciation, but it’s not the market rate for a professional talk – it doesn’t reflect the time and effort that goes into writing, rehearsing and giving a talk. A lot of our speakers are self-employed, so time that they spend working on a talk for us is time they aren’t spending on other work, something that I understand only too well as a self-employed person.

In order to increase our honorarium, though, we need more sponsors. Can you help us to pay market rate, so that we can ensure that women are properly paid for their time, effort and expertise?

Ada Lovelace Day has built up a huge amount of goodwill around the world over the 15 years since I founded it, yet very few of our sponsors take the time to tap into that. And they’re missing out. Actively engaging your staff and community in Ada Lovelace Day is both easy and rewarding, and doing so helps you to demonstrate your commitment to gender equity. Telling people you care about them is never as powerful as showing through your actions.

So what can you do to make sure that you get the very best out of your time as an Ada Lovelace Day sponsor?

Engage your internal community

Talking about Ada Lovelace Day to your staff is a great way to foster engagement with both the day itself and your sponsorship of it. If you have a women’s network or employee resource group (ERG), then make sure that they know about us as an organisation and that they are kept up to date with our Ada Lovelace Day Live event at the Royal Institution on Tuesday 8 October.

Encourage your staff to follow us via social media and subscribe to our newsletter, and share our own news, such as new speaker announcements or new grassroots events being held around the world. People like to feel that they are part of a bigger movement and Ada Lovelace Day truly is a global movement with events held every year on all inhabited continents, so talking about what’s happening is a great way to help your staff feel connected.

Engage your external community

When you become an Ada Lovelace Day sponsor, you have a chance to share news about our event with your customers and communities. It’s not just an opportunity for you to demonstrate your commitment to gender equity, it also helps us to reach new audiences. It’s a genuine win-win.

Whether you’re using social media, your community newsletter or talking about Ada Lovelace Day with clients and customers, you can use Ada Lovelace Day as a jumping off point for a broader discussion about the need to support women in STEM and what  your company is doing to move further towards gender balance in the workplace. And you can do this throughout the run up, as well as after the day, not just on the day itself.

You can also encourage your community to attend Ada Lovelace Day themselves, or organise their own grassroots event or livestream watch party. Our aim is to get as many people as possible to take part in Ada Lovelace Day, and that’s a goal we hope our sponsors share.

It’s also important for you to talk to other business leaders in your network about the day and your sponsorship of it. This doesn’t just establish you as a flagbearer for gender equity, it also signals to other companies how they can get involved and what they can get out of taking part.

Use your perks

We also provide all our sponsors with perks such as free tickets to Ada Lovelace Day Live, in-person or online, as well as discount codes and opportunities for me to come and speak to your staff about Ada Lovelace, or a variety of other topics. A surprising number of sponsors don’t use these perks, so rather than see them go to waste, spend a little time planning how you’re going to use them:

• Free in-person tickets: You can give these to anyone, so you could hand them out to staff, or run a ticket giveaway for your community.
• Discount codes: All sponsors are given a discount code for in-person tickets to Ada Lovelace Day Live. You can share these internally with staff, or via any private mailing lists or fora you are a part of. Please don’t share them publicly.
• Free livestreaming tickets: You can use these for your own staff to watch the event remotely, or you can use them to organise an in-person watch-party for your staff or community.

This  year, I am offering all sponsors a one hour presentation that explores Ada Lovelace’s story and how she came to become a computing pioneer, as well as a look at the work we’ve done with Ada Lovelace Day over the years. I’m also offering to organise a webinar – either public or private to your own staff only – with a female leader from your organisation, talking about gender equality, women in STEM or any other relevant topic.

Ada Lovelace Day isn’t just a great event or a global celebration of women in STEM, it’s also a fantastic way for you to engage more fully with your staff and your community around the topic of gender equality. With a little thinking ahead, it can be incorporated into your comms and event planning for the year so that you can truly get the most from your sponsorship investment.

We have had some amazing sponsors over the years, but we’ve also learnt a lot about when a company is ready to become a sponsor. So here are a few of the things that you should have in place before you get in touch. If you can say yes to the majority of these points, then the process of committing to sponsorship will run more smoothly, and you’ll be able to tick ‘Sponsor Ada Lovelace Day’ off your To Do List that much more quickly.

1. You know how big your budget is

We have a number of different sponsorship packages designed to suit a variety of budgets, but it really helps if you know how much money you have to spend before you get in touch. That means that I can guide you to the right package with the right add-ons immediately, and we can then discuss the more important topic of how you can get the most out of your sponsorship.

2. Your budget is already signed off

We’ve made our sponsorship prospectus, including our pricing information, available for anyone to download. Just enter your email address below and you’ll get the download link by return. This means that you can discuss your options with your colleagues and get sign off – or as close as possible to it – before we have a call. Again, the benefits of this is that it makes the process much faster if you’ve already got budgetary approval.

3. Your decision maker is up-to-speed and engaged

We know that a lot of the people who come to us aren’t the final decision makers, so we understand that you might need to download our prospectus and then have some discussions internally before you can get in touch with me. We have a lot of information on our website and social media that you can show any decision makers so that they can see the kind of event they are supporting and the work that we do alongside Ada Lovelace Day Live.

Here are a selection of links you might like to share with them:

• Our YouTube channel has videos of all our previous Ada Lovelace Day Live events up to 2019 (2023 is coming soon!) and the events we ran online during the pandemic from 2020–2022.
• Our most recent newsletters and weekly emails are available to browse here.
• We have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Bluesky accounts you can look through.
• You can take a look at our Ada Lovelace Day content marathons from 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 on our website, along with a whole host of other information.
• And you can learn a little about me, Suw Charman-Anderson, and our Advisory Council, the people who help to steer Ada Lovelace Day and our activities, on our website as well.
• If you have any specific questions that aren’t answered on our website, please do not hesitate to email me.

4. You have all your own paperwork to hand

Some sponsors require us to sign agreements on how we can use their logo, name, URL or other assets, and/or to sign a contract. That’s absolutely fine. We understand that some companies need these agreements in place to protect their intellectual property and investment. Just send over the paperwork as soon as we’ve agreed your sponsorship package and I’ll get it sorted out.

You will also need to have a high quality version of your logo ready, along with a two paragraph description of your company and your preferred website and social media URLs, so that we can get you up on our sponsor page immediately. If you have an embargo on the announcement that you’re a sponsor, just tell us up front and we’ll make sure we don’t break it!

5. You have your invoicing process details ready

As a very small business, our invoicing terms are 30 days, and we appreciate sponsors who can stick to this. We also understand that you may need us to complete a new supplier form and to then raise a purchase order in order for us to begin the invoicing process. Please ensure that you know your company’s invoicing process and can give us the information we need to smooth the invoicing process. If your company pays on 60 or 90 days, please let us know and ask your finance team if they can expedite payment.

Finally, if you’re a start-up that’s still seeking funding, a small business without enough budget for one of our sponsorship packages, a large business without an engaged decision maker or you’re just not quite ready to sponsor us, then why not support Ada Lovelace Day by organising a watch-party for our event in October? Livestream tickets will be available to buy in bulk in due course, and giving all your employees a ticket is a marvellous way to take part!

You can also talk about Ada Lovelace Day to your staff, encourage them to sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media, and talk about our work and share our blog posts and other activities with your own community. In an age where it’s getting harder and harder for us to reach new audiences, sharing our work is more important than ever. So whatever your budget, please get involved!