Meet ALD’s Founder

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson founded Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 as a response to online discussions about the lack of women on stage at tech conferences. As a woman in tech, she realised that the issue wasn’t a lack of women, but their invisibility. Ada Lovelace Day is her effort to increase the profile of women in STEM and create new role models to support girls in their study choices and women in their careers.

In 2015, Charman-Anderson began working on Ada Lovelace Day full-time, thanks to the generous support of the day’s sponsors. Prior to that, she was a social technologist and, as one of the UK’s social media pioneers, had worked with clients around the world to use social tools for collaboration and communication internally, and to build customer relationships externally. As a freelance journalist, she has written about social media and technology for The Guardian, CIO Magazine, .Net Magazine, Computer Weekly and FirstPost.com, and wrote about publishing and crowdfunding for Forbes.com.

In 2005, she co-founded the Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaigning group. As its first Executive Director, she prepared the organisation’s response to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, and gave evidence on digital rights management to the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group.

Charman-Anderson is a keen writer, who has self-published novellas and short stories on her website. The first Argleton, was crowdfunded through Kickstarter. A keen bookbinder, Suw combines her love for fiction with her passion for the book as a physical artefact. She has also recently learnt to knit, and now can’t stop buying yarn. She has three cats, Grabbity, Sir Izacat Mewton, and Copurrnicus.

Her blog is chocolateandvodka.com and you can follow her on Twitter, @suw.