Yesterday, I was happy to see Tom Hunter, director of the Arthur C Clarke Award, announce that he and I are working together to bring our two organisations closer together. In 2013, the Clarke Award was criticised for having an all-male shortlist. Having an all-male shortlist once in a while (this was only the second in nearly 30 years) should surprise no one, given how few science fiction books by women are published and then submitted for awards. Its statistical inevitability doesn’t, however, mean that the question of how many women write in the genre should go unexamined. Indeed, Tom and I have had some very long, very interesting conversations about it, and it was these conversations that lead us to decide to find a way to bring our organisations together.

STEM and science fiction suffer from the same ‘pipeline’ problem — it’s hard to attract women, and harder to retain them. And both fields have a problem with prejudice, including conscious sexism and the more pernicious unconscious bias. These are complex cultural challenges that need a lot of unpicking, and for which there isn’t a silver bullet. I’ve always been a pluralist and believe that to effectively tackle this problem we need to take many different approaches, none of which will be able to solve the whole problem, but each of which can deal with a particular facet. Together, these many different approaches can effect significant change.

One of the reasons I’ve been wanting to work with the Clarke Award is that there is a delightful overlap between science fiction and STEM, one that I’m keen to explore. Science fiction has inspired many a youngster to go into STEM, and advances in STEM have in turn inspired more authors than we can count. I’m excited to think about how a collaboration between ALD and the Clarke Award can help women on both sides of that equation!

Another reason for this is more personal: I grew up reading my Dad’s science fiction collection. Indeed, I graduated straight from Nancy Drew to Arthur C Clarke, EE Doc Smith, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and whatever else my Dad had on his bookshelves. I read anything and everything, frequently when I should have been asleep.

The first science fiction author that I discovered for myself was Anne McCaffrey and she became one of my favourites. For the first time, I could read about women’s heroism, from a woman’s perspective. So much science fiction then was by men, about men, and for men, and whilst I would read it all and enjoy quite a bit of it, it didn’t speak to me. McCaffrey did.

Whether it was her Pern series, or The Crystal Singer, or Dinosaur Planet, or the Talents series, or any of her other books, McCaffrey’s women were opinionated, strong, talented, flawed and, above all, interesting. And they provided me with the the kinds of female role models that I didn’t see in everyday life, or even on TV. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my main role models as a teen were McCaffrey’s Lessa and Killashandra, followed the very real Maggie Philbin, presenter on Tomorrow’s World. And that, really was all there was.

Role models aren’t just living women, or historical women, they are fictitious women too. We make sense of the world using stories, and fiction helps us explore ideas of what life would be like in a different reality. Before we can do something, we have to imagine it. Seeing women as leading characters in my favourite books, reading about women doing science, exploring the universe, as experts and leaders, and yes, even flying dragons, helps us to imagine ourselves doing those things, (especially flying dragons). These stories told me that someone, somewhere, thought that women could be more than just a footnote, a nameless character in the background, or a gruesome death to motivate a man.

So working with Tom and the Clarke Award on the issues facing women in science fiction speaks directly to the core mission of Ada Lovelace Day: to create new role models for girls and women in STEM. And it adds a new one: to inspire science fiction authors, especially women, with the amazing, astounding and real stories of women in STEM.

Venue Partner: The IET

I’m delighted to announce that The IET, one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community, is supporting us this year by becoming our Venue Partner for Ada Lovelace Day Live!

The IET run the prestigious IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award, the Mary George Memorial Prize for Apprentices and, in conjunction with the Women’s Engineering Society, the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) Prize. Aimed at early career professional women, aged between 18 and 35, and working in the UK, nominations for this year’s awards are still open, with a deadline of 30 June 2016.

You can follow The IET on Twitter: @IETWomenNetwork

We are very excited to be holding Ada Lovelace Day Live! in the newly refurbished Kelvin Lecture Theatre, and strongly suggest that you save the evening of Tuesday, 11 October and be ready to snap up tickets when they go on sale!

Sponsor: Ada Diamonds

I’m also thrilled to introduce you to another new sponsor, Ada Diamonds, who use cutting-edge technology to produce bespoke, sustainable, and conflict-free diamond jewellery. Their diamonds are “grown by scientists in labs around the world and are chemically identical to mined diamonds, but socially and environmentally superior to Earth-extracted diamonds”.

Ada Diamonds does not just use conflict-free lab-grown diamonds, they also only use “ethically sourced metals of the highest purity”. Their Ada Collection features earrings, necklaces, bracelets and rings in a variety of modern and traditional designs.

Ada Diamonds are possibly our most glamorous sponsor so far, and we’re looking forward to perhaps one day seeing their diamonds in person!

One hundred years ago today, the Royal Astronomical Society elected women as fellows for the first time in their history. Despite awarding its Gold Medal to Caroline Herschel in 1828 and giving an honorary membership to Mary Somerville in 1835, it was not until 1916 that women were admitted to the RAS. Says the RAS in today’s press release:

Mary Adele Blagg, Ella K Church, A Grace Cook and Fiammetta Wilson became the first elected female Fellows of the RAS on 14 January 1916. Six more followed that year, including Annie Maunder, more than 24 years after her first attempt to join.

Dr Bailey [Astronomy Secretary] commented: “Early women astronomers fought hard to gain recognition for their work, to be allowed to join the RAS and to take part in scientific discussions. I am both grateful they did so and in awe of their determination to succeed. They paved the way for women today and many are tough acts for us to follow.”

As part of their year long celebration of this milestone, the RAS will be the Platinum Sponsor of this year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live!. We are looking forward to working with them over the coming months to highlight the crucial roles that women have played in astronomy over the centuries, and are honoured to be a part of such an important anniversary.

We are incredibly excited and honoured to announce that Ada Lovelace Day has been awarded Digital Science’s prestigious Catalyst Grant, alongside tech company Penelope. ALD and Penelope will share the $25,000 grant equally.

We will be using the Catalyst Grant to expand the resources section of our website to provide a global database of information that women can use to develop their STEM careers. Including data on organisations for women in STEM, grants, scholarships, fellowships, research and media coverage, it will help women at all stages of their career to find the support, funding and inspiration they need, and help businesses understand more clearly the challenges faced by women STEM.

The Catalyst Grant Program, an international initiative by Digital Science to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for scientific research, has awarded more than $100,000 in grants to date. Awards of up to $25,000 are intended to provide initial support to take ideas from concept to prototype and are considered twice per year, once in December and once in July.

Steve Scott, Director of Research Tools at Digital Science, said, “This year’s decision was our toughest yet, with a field of over 30 entries to consider. However, both Penelope and ALD stood out and in the end we arrived at a unanimous vote. We’re proud to have an opportunity to help grow both businesses.”

Work on the new resources database will begin soon, and we hope to launch the database in early 2016.

You can read more from Digital Science on their blog and in their press release.

We’re very happy to announce our newest sponsor, Slack, who are providing 75 Ada Lovelace Day Live scholarships for people who would not otherwise be able to attend. We will be opening applications for those tickets in a month or two, and will let you know when that process begins.

If you haven’t heard of Slack, I’ll let them explain their service:

Slack is a messaging app for teams. It brings together your work communications into one place, makes them instantly searchable, and available on any device. It integrates with dozens of popular services such as Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, JIRA, MailChimp, Stripe, Zendesk and others to help consolidate and make sense of the ever-growing flows of data that confront modern teams. Since launching in February 2014, Slack now has more than 500,000 daily active users across more than 60,000 teams. Based in San Francisco, with an office in Vancouver, Slack has raised $162 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Google Ventures, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and The Social + Capital Partnership.

You can follow Slack on Twitter, at @slackhq, or find out more about them from their website.