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

Since the BBC wrote about the closure of Ada Lovelace Day, we have had over a dozen companies get in touch, asking how they can help us save the Day. I am currently having a wide variety of conversations about what companies value about ALD and how we could make it more financially sustainable.

More on that in the future, but in the meantime, one idea is to create a premium email newsletter.

Technically, that’s incredibly easy to do. But the devil is always in the details and the question is whether there would be enough people willing to pay £5 per month to create a solid income upon which I could build our future growth. Another key question is what would people want to receive in this new newsletter, and how often?  

Please take a moment to fill in our very short survey to help us understand whether there’s demand for a premium newsletter.  

Over the years we’ve written over 100 blog posts about women in STEM and their discoveries, inventions and achievements, as well as posting videos of dozens of talks and discussions by and with women in STEM on our YouTube channel. To save you searching, here is a handy compendium of our links:

On the blog

• 12 Days of STEMmas 2017
• Women in STEM Advent Calendar 2018
• Ada Lovelace Day Online Extravaganza 2020
• Ada Lovelace Day Online Extravaganza 2021

On YouTube

• Ada Lovelace Day 2013
• Ada Lovelace Day 2014
• Ada Lovelace Day 2015
• Ada Lovelace Day 2016
• Ada Lovelace Day 2017
• Ada Lovelace Day 2018
• Ada Lovelace Day 2019
• Ada Lovelace Day 2020
• Ada Lovelace Day 2021

Please note that, whilst most of our videos are suitable for all ages, there are a couple where swear words have crept through as Ada Lovelace Day Live was an event for adults. Please review videos in full before showing them to children.

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

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.