Plus events in Auckland and Nottingham, Hinckley’s Lovelace statue nears completion, Lovelace tram in Nottingham, and progress on the Fieldwork audio comedy.

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

Subscribe to our newsletter to be kept up-to-date!

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

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Ten years ago today I and hundreds of other people around the world celebrated the very first Ada Lovelace Day. We wrote blog posts about women that we knew or admired, the work they did and why they inspired us. I went to the Science Museum and recorded an interview with ‘Ada Lovelace’, an actress who explained Lovelace’s work and how the model Analytical Engine works.

Back in 2009, blogging was still popular, and it seemed like a really easy way for people to get involved. The idea was simple: Create a day of blogging when everyone would write about women in tech (or, in reality, STEM). We’d create a database of posts, and it would be a great resource for people wanting to find conference speakers, or expert voices, or just some good old fashioned inspiration.

I will admit that I originally thought it would be just me and a few friends, but 1,978 people signed up on Pledgebank, and about another 1,600 people signed up on Facebook. Somehow, I had captured the zeitgeist – Ada Lovelace Day was covered across the UK media and I found myself appearing live on the BBC News Channel to talk about it.

Of the 3,600 people who pledged to write a blog post, 1,237 added a URL to our map, and whilst that map is no longer available on the internet, you can still browse the list of blog posts on Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Although some of them are lost to the mists of time, there are still some great blog posts to peruse.

Amongst the participants in that first festival of blogging were The New Scientist, ITPro, The Guardian, The Guardian Digital Content blog, The Guardian opinion page,  Electronics Weekly, Computer Weekly, Computer Weekly again, BCS, the BBC, the BBC Internet blog, BBC News blog, O’Reilly Media, including a post from Tim O’Reilly himself, Nature, Vox, The Telegraph, Gartner, Discover magazine, Anita Borg, Mental Floss, Fast Company and Wellcome Library.

American electronics retailer AdaFruit adopted Ada Lovelace Day and have celebrated it every year since. And other notable supporters included Sydney Padua whose webcomic for the day evolved into a hugely successful graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage; Lynn Featherstone, who was at the time an MP but is now Baroness Featherstone and serves in the House of Lords; award-winning author Naomi Alderman; science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini.

In total, 843 women were named in our database, and you can see who was most popular in the word cloud on the right there. Unsurprisingly, Ada Lovelace herself and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper were very popular, but was what really lovely was the huge variety of women who were featured. Many posts featured “my mum”, “my daughter”, or “my colleagues”, and there undoubtedly many more women mentioned in the blog posts whose names were never entered into our database.

Right from the beginning, Ada Lovelace Day was international, and we had posts in 18 different languages: Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Marathi, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh. Because we lost the map, we sadly can’t get an accurate count of how many countries were represented, but it’s a fair bet to say that we would have seen pins in at least 16.

I am grateful to everyone who took part in the first Ada Lovelace Day, but particularly to Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth who both helped me immensely with promotion and support.

Once the day was over, I did wonder what would become of it. It wasn’t immediately clear that it had legs beyond that one day, but a year later, I indeed found myself organising the second Ada Lovelace Day. Now, ten years on, Ada Lovelace Day is well established in the annual calendar, and is celebrated all around the world.

We work year-round to support women in STEM, and our growth shows no sign of slowing down. As well as organising Ada Lovelace Day, and our annual ‘STEM cabaret’ event, Ada Lovelace Day Live, we have also published two anthologies of biographies of women in STEM, a line of free women in STEM crochet patterns, and a podcast highlighting the work of women in STEM. We have run an Online Recruitment Fair for Women in STEM, and created a number of careers posters as part of a free education pack for teachers. Our Twitter campaigns have included a Christmas STEM advent calendar and the Twelve Days of STEMmas.

We have so many exciting projects planned for 2019, including a new peer mentorship and knowledge sharing network for women in STEM and their advocates. We’re hoping to launch that later this year, and you can help us out by answering a few questions!

Over the years, Ada Lovelace Day has been celebrated by millions of people around the world, and we want to reach millions more. So here’s to another ten years of Ada Lovelace Day!

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day’s 10th year, we would like to look back on all the groups and individuals that have honoured Ada Lovelace over the years. With that in mind, we’ve created a timeline of books, academic research, events, projects, films, documentaries and many other activities, to try and capture all the contributions that have helped make Ada and her achievements more recognised.

1950 – Computing Machinery and Intelligence, AM Turing, Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, 1 October 1950, Pages 433–460.
– This is Alan Turing’s seminal piece on artificial intelligence, in which he discusses Lady Lovelace’s Objection. 

1980 – The ADA programming language
– A computing language designed by Jean Ichbiah at CII Honeywell Bull, for the US Department of Defense.

1985 – Ada: A Life and a Legacy
– A biographical book on Ada Lovelace, by Dorothy Stein, reviewed by Garry J. Tee.

1990 – The Difference Engine
– An alternative history fiction book, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling that includes Ada Lovelace as a character, giving a lecture in France.

1994 – The Ada Project
– An online project for information and resources about women in computing (found here).

1997 – Conceiving Ada
– A film about a computer scientist who becomes obsessed with communicating with Ada Lovelace, starring Tilda Swinton as Ada.

1997 – Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
– A book by Sadie Plant exploring technology and women, featuring Ada Lovelace, reviewed by Nina Wakeford for New Scientist.

1998 – The Lovelace Medal
– An award established by the British Computing Society (BCS) for outstanding contributions to computer science.

1999 – The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter
– A biography by Benjamin Woolley, reviewed by John Zukowski.

2001 – Ada Lovelace: The Computing Wizard of Victorian England
 – This is a children’s book by Lucy Lethbridge.

2004 – Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 ‘notes’, J. Fuegi and J. Francis, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 16-26, Oct.-Dec. 2003.
– An academic research paper expanding on Babbage and Lovelace’s work.

2005 – Adafruit
– Online store for electronics products and maker kits, founded by Limor “Ladyada” Fried.

2008 – The Lovelace Colloquium
– An annual one day conference for women computer science students, held by The British Computing Society women group (BCSWomen).

2009 – Ada Lovelace Day
– The annual celebration of women and girls in STEM, held on the second Tuesday in October, and founded by Suw Charman-Anderson.

2010 – Ada’s Technical Books
– A bookstore in Seattle named after Ada, that sells technical and geeky books.

2011 – The Ada Initiative
– A project to increase the participation of women in the open source and open culture communities, run in the US until 2015.

2012 – Google Doodle
– On Ada’s 197th birthday, a Google Doodle was drawn in her honour.

2013 – The Ada Developers Academy
– Academy to increase diversity in tech by training people to be software developers.

2013 – Ada’s Algorithm: How Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s Daughter, Launched the Digital Age Through the Poetry of Numbers
 – James Essinger’s biography of Ada, reviewed by Kirkus.

2013 – A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Lord Byron’s Daughter Started The Computer Age
 – This is the US edition of Ada’s Algorithm, by James Essinger, with 5,000 additional words, reviewed by Colin Barker for ZDNet.

2013 – Ada’s List
– An email community for women in technology, launched on Ada Lovelace Day.

2013 – Ada Lovelace: An Interdisciplinary Conference Celebrating her Achievements and Legacy
– Academic conference organised by the Stevens Institute of Technology.

2013 – Great Lives
– BBC Radio 4 show on Ada Lovelace, with Konnie Huq and Suw Charman-Anderson.

2014 – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
 – The history of computer science, including Ada Lovelace as one of the innovators, by Walter Isaacson (wiki entry here).

2015 – The Ada Lovelace Initiative
– Community initiative in Ireland, connecting women in tech with secondary schools in order to provide female role models and increase uptake amongst girls.

2015 – Ada Lovelace Awards
– An award founded by LookFar, to recognise and showcase the achievements of women in the tech industry.

2015 – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer
– Graphic novel by Sydney Padua, of an alternative reality where Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage create the Difference Engine (wiki entry here).

2015 – Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine
 – A children’s book by Laurie Wallmark, reviewed by Maria Russo for the New York Times.

2015 – Lady Byron and her Daughters
 – A book about the life of Lady Byron by Julia Markus, reviewed by Anne Boyd Rioux for the LA Review of Books.

2015 – Ada Lovelace: Victorian Computing Visionary, by Suw Charman-Anderson, Ada User Journal: V 36, No 1, March 2015, pp 35
– Bicentennial edition featuring several articles about Ada Lovelace.

2015 – Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing
– Documentary that aired on BBC Four, presented by Dr Hannah Fry.

2015 – The Letters of Ada Lovelace
 – BBC Radio 4 Dramatisation, presented by Georgina Ferry.

2015 – Ada. Ada. Ada.
– Stage show of the story of Ada Lovelace, written and directed by Zoe Philpott.

2015 – UK passports
– Update to the passports that included Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage on pages 46 and 47.

2015 – A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention
 – Collection of stories about women in science, including Ada Lovelace, edited by Suw Charman-Anderson.

2016 – Ada, the National College for Digital Skills
– A college founded to help fill the digital skills gap and encourage inclusion in the tech industry.

2016 – PRACE Ada Lovelace Award
– An award founded by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) to honour an outstanding woman scientist working in high performance computing.

2016 – Programming Pioneer Ada Lovelace
 – A children’s book and part of the STEM Trailblazer Biography series, by Valerie Bodden.

2016 – Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer
– Children’s book by Fiona Robinson, reviewed by Emma Coonan.

2016 – Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People
 – Book by Stephen Wolfram, includes a chapter on Ada Lovelace.

2016 – Ada’s Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age
 – Book by Robin Hammerman and Andrew L. Russell, that developed after the Ada academic conference.

2016 – The multifaceted impact of Ada Lovelace in the digital age, Aiello, L. C, Artificial Intelligence, V 235, pp. 58-62
– An academic review of Ada’s Legacy.

2017 – Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace
– An historical fiction novel by Jennifer Chiaverini, reviewed by Amanda Skenandore.

2017 – The Early Mathematical Education of Ada Lovelace, Hollings, C., Martin, U, and Rice, A. BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, pp. 221-234.
– Academic research investigating the early education of Ada.

2017 – The Lovelace–De Morgan mathematical correspondence: A critical re-appraisal, Hollings, C., Martin, U, and Rice, A. Historia Mathematica, vol 34, no 3, pp. 202-231.
– Academic research paper presenting a detailed contextual analysis of some of Ada’s correspondence.

2017 – Ada and the Engine
– A stage play of Ada’s life by Lauren Gunderson.

2017 – Ada Lovelace Gin
– Part of the Great Women Spirits collection created by The Family Coppola, and released on Ada Lovelace Day.

2017 – Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician
– A boardgame by Robin David, where Ada Lovelace has to solve the crime of a missing artifact.

2018 – ÑuSat 4 “Ada”
– Satellogic’s microsatellite ÑuSat 4, named in honour of Ada Lovelace, was launched aboard a Long March 2D rocket on 2 February.

2018 – Ada Lovelace CofE High School
– “Part of the Twyford CofE Academies Trust, the school started life on the William Perkin CofE High School site. Students moved into their fantastic new premises in Ealing, London in September 2020. The school currently has 650 students on roll and will reach full capacity of approximately 1350 students in the academic year 2024/25.The identity of the school has been formed using Ada Lovelace’s legacy as ‘the first computer programmer’. This legacy is at the heart of our Digital Specialism. Every year the school celebrates its namesake by holding Ada Lovelace day, which aims to inspire students to ‘make the Lovelace Leap’ and think creatively and be brilliant agile thinkers and problem solvers for the 21st Century.”

2018 – The Ada Lovelace Institute
– Independent organisation formed to offer research and commentary on artificial intelligence, data and related technologies.

2018 – Ada Lovelace Excellence Scholarship
– A scholarship fund offered by University of Southampton, for female undergraduates studying Electronics & Computer Science.

2018 – Ada Lovelace
– Children’s book by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, part of the Little People, BIG DREAMS series, and reviewed by Allison at The Three Rs Book Blog.

2018 – In Byron’s Wake
– A biography by Miranda Seymour, reviewed by Lucy Lethbridge for the Literary Review.

2018 – Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist
– A biography by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice, reviewed by Suw Charman-Anderson.

2018 – Victoria
– Ada featured as a character in the ITV drama,  portrayed by Emerald Fennell.

2018 – Ada Lovelace Fellowship
– Funding for doctoral students from underrepresented groups, offered by Microsoft.

2018 – Top Quarkz
– Ada was turned into a superhero for the card game, Top Quarkz.

2019 – Doctor Who: The Enchantress of Numbers
– Ada featured as a character in this episode of the audio book Doctor Who: The Fourth Adventures, voiced by Finty Williams.

We would love to keep building on this document, so please do leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for us to add, or tweet to us @FindingAda.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Madrid, to speak to the Ciencia en Redes 2016 conference for science communicators about how Ada Lovelace Day started, and how we use social media to help have an impact far larger than our modest size should suggest.

It was a great opportunity for me to take a look at how much Ada Lovelace Day has grown since I started it, well, actually in late 2008 if we go by the first @findingada tweet! And it prompted me to look forward, and see what kind of work we still need to do, particularly in terms of reaching out to new audiences.

You can watch the whole day on YouTube, or just my talk (also below).

You might also want to take a look at the talk before mine, by Jenni Fuchs of @Museum140, who gave a fantastic talk about some of the Twitter hashtag campaigns she’s run around different museum-related themes. We’ll certainly be following her lead by developing such events ourselves!