Author Archives: Suw

J.P. Morgan offers free Finding Ada Network subscriptions to UK women in tech

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JP MorganThe Finding Ada Network is delighted to announce that we have partnered with J.P. Morgan to offer free mentorship for 50 women in technology in the UK.

The scheme will pair mentees from across the UK with women in technical roles within J.P. Morgan, with mentors available from different levels across the company, from junior software developers to senior tech leaders.

This is an amazing opportunity for women with a tech or STEM background to find a mentor who can help them develop their careers over the next twelve months. Mentees will be given a year’s free access to the Finding Ada Network online mentorship and knowledge sharing network, including our world class online mentorship platform and exclusive content covering careers advice, personal and professional development, plus HR policy and advocacy advice.

We have decades of evidence that mentoring helps women succeed, that mentees improve their soft skills, confidence, and communications skills, and develop better ways to process feedback and solve problems. Crucially, mentee’s career prospects are improved too, as they are more likely to be promoted, enjoying on average a five times higher rate of promotion compared to non-mentees.

This project becomes even more essential now – as COVID-19 makes life more challenging, women especially need additional help and support. And because the Finding Ada Network allows mentors and mentees to manage their mentoring relationship entirely online, it is an ideal way to access that help and support.

To apply for this scheme, please complete the short form below.

Ada Lovelace Day Live! 2020 cancelled due to COVID-19

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I am sad to announce that I have, with the agreement of my Advisory Council, taken the difficult decision to cancel the Ada Lovelace Day Live! 2020 event at The IET on 13 October.

This was not an easy decision to take, but I believe that it is the most responsible one.

At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic it is impossible to plan ahead to October and say for sure that we will be able to travel freely – we may well find ourselves dipping in and out of lockdowns for months to come. Even if we aren’t in lockdown, it may be inadvisable for people to congregate in large groups until we have widespread vaccination. It is our duty to consider the safety and health not just of our audience but also our speakers and those who work at the venue, so we believe that cancellation is the right decision.

We will still find ways to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day online, and will be taking the next couple of months to look at what that celebration might look like. We will let you know what our plans are as soon as we have worked them out.

For now, our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected, and our gratitude goes to all the staff of the NHS and other frontline health workers around the world, and all the essential workers who are keeping society going whilst the rest of us stay at home. These are difficult times, but we will get through them by working together and supporting each other.

– Suw Charman-Anderson, Founder, Ada Lovelace Day

Support your female staff with our mentoring network

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Women are the powerhouse of the economy.

Companies with more women in senior roles are measurably more profitable and more innovative than male-dominated businesses. Women-led businesses outperform, by up to three times, those companies led by men. They are more productive, make better decisions, and have more engaged, happier employees who stay in their jobs for longer.

Women are not just the powerhouse of the STEM economy, they create healthier, fairer and more successful companies.

Leaving in droves

Despite their superior performance, women are leaving STEM in droves. Over half of women in science, engineering and technology careers will leave their industry in mid-career, despite loving their jobs. Why? Because they can’t see a future.

Companies that don’t hire and promote sufficient female talent are not just leaving money on the table, they’re spending unnecessarily: Replacing a single employee costs £30,000, mostly money lost on getting the new recruit up to speed.

The female advantage

Companies that take equality seriously, that nurture and promote female talent, will be most successful in the 2020s and beyond. They will have a gender-balanced workforce, better gender pay gap data, higher profits, better products, and lower staff churn and lower recruitment costs. They will also have a happier workforce that is more productive and innovative. And in a world where publicly traded companies last only ten years on average, you need every bit of advantage you can get.

The Finding Ada Network

The Finding Ada Network, a new mentoring and knowledge sharing network for women in STEM, provides a best-in-class mentoring platform and supports women with exclusive content and private member’s forum.

Members benefit from a structured mentoring plan, with regular check-ins to keep them on track. They will also enjoy a mobile app, profiles, automatic matching, meeting scheduling, goal setting, task lists and more.

And exclusive content covering careers advice, personal growth, and professional development ensures that women have access to the information they need to improve their leadership and soft skills.

Make mentorship work for your business

Decades of evidence shows that mentoring is effective at increasing staff promotion and retention rates, as well as increasing job satisfaction and productivity. Both mentors and mentees are more likely to be promoted and to stay in their jobs. Indeed, mentorship provides a 5x higher rate of promotion for mentees, a 6x higher rate of promotion for mentors, and a 30% improvement in staff retention.

And with the Finding Ada Network, we can rapidly onboard groups large or small, getting your staff invited and on board in a matter of minutes. This means that if you want to dip your toe into mentoring, we can spin up a pilot and get you going fast! If you’re already convinced that mentoring is the way to go, then our program gives you more than any other mentorship network.

So if your business is based in the United Kingdom or New Zealand, and you want to provide mentoring for the women on your staff, get in touch with me here on LinkedIn or by email at suw@findingada.com.

If you’re a woman in STEM, or a small business who’d like to bring up to five women on to the network, you can sign up right now.

Box of delights: Make the best of your .ac.uk email address

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People working in a libraryYour academic email address can get you access to all sorts of useful and entertaining services. Here’s how to access some of them.

The value of an ac.uk email address

Few people in academia know quite how handy their online credentials – having ac.uk at the end of their email address – can be. Most university and college libraries and computer services departments have subscribed to numerous useful services that you can benefit from, even if you’re not using them for your study or research. Most are easily accessible once you’ve logged in to your academic account through services like Shibboleth or Athens, where you enter the name of your institution as well as the same username and password you use to log-in to a campus PC, wifi and email, although procedures can vary. Ask at your library’s help desk if you need help with this.

Box of Broadcasts (BOB)

Box of Broadcasts is a massive streaming database containing every television and radio programme broadcast through Freeview since 2006 plus much more besides.  For some new students, that means everything since they were six years old, all the documentaries, drama, comedy, music and films. Here’s a selection of programmes about Ada Lovelace and here’s every episode of the BBC’s Horizon, with some episodes dating from the 1970s. To access BOB, visit Learning on Screen, click Sign In, and once you’ve gone through the institutional log-in procedure, you’ll be asked to register. Your account allows you to keep a watchlist and store playlists for anything you might find on BOB.

Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT)

BOB is a product of the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) and partially built on their Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT) project which collects scheduling information for TV and radio broadcasts since 1923. TRILT is useful if you’re searching for a film or programme which isn’t yet on BOB, but may have been recorded by the BUFVC in the pre-streaming days. If you need to see a program that’s not on BOB, you can ask for it to be uploaded from an actual video tape. There’s also an option to schedule alert emails, sent up to ten days in advance, about a programme you might like based on your search terms. TRILT is accessible using the same academic log-in procedure as BOB.

Kanopy

Kanopy is a streaming service much like the BBC iPlayer or Netflix which is open to users of some public libraries and, luckily for us, academic institutions. Depending on your university or college’s subscription, it offers access to hundreds of films including the Criterion Collection, theatrical documentaries and thousands of documentaries and lectures. You can also use Kanopy to access The Great Courses, US-based lifelong learning content provider. Unlike BOB, Kanopy is also available as an app across numerous devices including Amazon Fire, Roku, Android and iOS. Access is initially through an institutional log-in, then you can create your own account with your own email address.

Scopus, SciVal and Web of Science

Every subject has a key database of academic journals and periodicals and for STEM, this means Scopus and SciVal from Elsevier and Web of Science from Clarivate, although there are plenty of others. The principle for all these websites is the same – access to the latest and historic academic papers on surgically searchable subjects, plus runs of a particular journal if you prefer the methodological approach. Although if you are already aware of the article you’re looking for, perhaps if its mentioned on a reading list, it might be quicker to search in Google Scholar, click through, then log-in directly through the journal’s own website.

Press Reader

If you’re searching for some lighter reading, Press Reader provides digital access to thousands of current newspapers and magazines from a hundred or so countries on every topic imaginable – the science and history section currently has three hundred and two titles. Visiting Press Reader is slightly trickier than some other sites.  Unless you’re on campus (where special ‘hotspot’ access is often available), you may have to find Press Reader in the catalogue or database sections of your institution’s website and click through from there.

Free software

Most universities have free software available to download through the computing/IT services area of their website, some of which is for use only on campus computers, but in plenty of cases you can also use it on your own laptop or home PC. Quite a few universities have licensing deals with Microsoft, so you might be able to access include Windows 10 and/or Office 365 with nothing more than your usual academic email credentials. Such marvels are usually to be found under the ‘software’ menu option on a computing/ IT services website, or you can contact your IT help desk to see what they may have available for you.

 

Access to these services varies from institution to institution, so if you can’t log-in, contact your library’s enquiry team and let them know that you’re interested in access. Equally, your library may have subscribed to other services we’ve not listed hear, so it’s well worth spending a few hours exploring your library and computing/IT services websites to see what else is available. New avenues of research and learning will all be there waiting to be discovered.

By Stuart Ian Burns

Stuart Ian Burns is a writer and qualified librarian who works in academia.

How did your ALD indie event go?

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Did you organise an independent Ada Lovelace Day event this year? We’d like to know how it went, and we’d like to share that info with our supporters and sponsors in our next End of Year Report. So we’d be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes completing the form below. If you ran multiple events, we’d be grateful if you could submit the form once for each event.

If you have any photos or videos that you can send us, or any online write-ups or blog posts that you can share, please them email Suw Charman-Anderson. You can also contact Suw with any questions you might have.

And finally, thank you so much for being a part of what makes Ada Lovelace Day such a powerful global movement!