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NORTH AMERICA>Technology
North America | United States | Adventure

The women of NASA are looking to the lunar horizon

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Growing up, Holly Ridings, Anne McClain and Nujoud Merancy dreamed of space. But they didn't let those dreams rest to become flights of childhood fancy. Now, all three women work at NASA. McClain is an astronaut who just returned from a six-month stint on the International Space Station. Merancy is the Exploration Mission Planning and Analysis lead for the Orion spacecraft that will be part of the Artemis mission in 2024. And Ridings is the first female chief flight director. And they're all working toward the goal of landing the first woman on the moon by 2024.
North America | United States | Society

Why women in tech are being Photoshopped in instead of hired

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An image of a tech event in which two women CEOs were poorly Photoshopped into a group of 15 men reignited a discussion last week about tech companies’ ongoing failures to meaningfully diversify their workforces. Companies like Google and Facebook have overturned industries, changed the way we live, and are shaping the future. Yet somehow they haven’t been able to hire a workforce that even remotely represents their customers. Across the tech industry, the share of black and Latinx people in tech and leadership roles is often well below 5 percent, while women typically make up about a f
North America | United States | Technology

Women in tech winner at Mac

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A McMaster engineering student has won an important award from the Anita Borg Institute, a women-in-tech organization in the United States. "I was in tears when I found out that I won the award," said Alyssia Jovellanos, who is in her second year in the engineering department's computer science program. Jovellanos is the first female president of McMaster's Computer Science Society and spends her summers and spare time teaching code to hundreds of grade school kids through a Comp Science outreach program.
North America | United States | Entrepreneurship

Black Female Engineer Creates Job Matching App Designed To Remove Bias From Tech Hiring

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At the young age of 13, Stephanie Lampkin learned to code. By the time she was 15, she was fluent in computer programming. Graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree and from MIT with an MBA, she remembers still being told her background wasn’t “technical enough” when applying for a position at a well-known tech firm in Silicon Valley. “The recruiter told me a sales or marketing job might open up,” she said. Luckily for Stephanie, she ended up landing a position at Microsoft, where she would spend five years working in a technical position. But Stephanie con
North America | United States | Technology

Female coders are rated more highly than men—except when people know they’re women

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A group of computer scientists, when studying the acceptance of contributions on the software repository GitHub, found open source code written by women is actually more often approved than code written by men. The catch—there’s always a catch—is that this only happens when the woman’s gender is hidden. GitHub, which is used by more than 12 million people, allows developers to write code for the projects of other software developers, who then choose whether to approve the submissions. Among the three million submissions (or “pull requests”) the researchers examined, female-written
North America | United States | Technology

A 97-year-old tech fan gets her wish to visit Google

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At 97, most of us would probably want to sit back and reflect on the past. But Olive Horrell only wants to look toward the future. The great grandmother grew up without electricity or radio, when the regular mode of transportation was a horse and buggy. From a young age, Horrell wanted to be an engineer but was discouraged by her father. Despite this, she has maintained a healthy sense of curiosity and regularly uses her laptop to email loved ones. She even once called tech support so she could fix the computer herself. Horrell wanted to visit Google to find out how all this technolog
North America | United States | Science

Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself

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Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math. But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change
North America | United States | Education

Stanford women set to reclaim their place in the field of computer science

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Computer science has finally come full circle — back to women. According to Stanford University’s latest survey of its upper-class students, the most popular major among women is now computer science, with 214 women planning to declare the field as their primary focus of study. This means that 30 percent of the projected Stanford CS majors will be women, a significant improvement over the national average of just 17 percent. And surprisingly, this actually means that we’re returning to the standards of several decades past, when women comprised between 30 and 50 percent of computer scie
North America | United States | Education

Cards Against Humanity Offers $500,000 In Scholarships To Women In Tech

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For a company geared toward “horrible” people, Cards Against Humanity sure does do some pretty meaningful things. Earlier this year, the popular party game announced it would be selling a science-centric 30-card expansion pack to raise money toward its Science Ambassador Scholarship fund, which will provide full-ride, four-year scholarships to women pursuing undergraduate degrees in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering or math. The pack, co-authored by "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" creator Zach Weinersmith andBad Astronomy author Phil Plait, has been a hit, drummi
North America | United States | Activism

Meet the 15-Year-Old Tech Whiz Whose Software Is Turning the Tide Against Internet Hate

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Most people in most situations could probably benefit from one tiny prompt: “Are you sure you want to do that?” Fifteen-year-old techie Trisha Prabhu says that question could be the difference between life and death. Prabhu is the inventor of ReThink, a software program that recognizes when users enter phrases often used to cyberbully into a computer—and displays a pop-up window asking the writer to reconsider. The Chicago high school student’s own studies find that a simple prompt (“Are you sure you want to send that message?”) is enough to discourage its teen users from
North America | United States | Leadership

Country’s Largest National Security Lab Gets First-Ever Woman Director

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Sandia National Laboratories, one of three of the national security labs run under the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, recently made a groundbreaking staff change. Earlier this summer, the lab announced that Jill M. Hruby would take over the role of president and director of the facility, effective July 17. She’s the first woman to hold the position in the lab’s 70-year history. She was previously vice president of the New Mexico-based organization. Hruby had words of encouragement for other women in science and engineering fields: “You’re next.”
North America | United States | Activism

Tesla’s female engineers say #ILookLikeAnEngineer

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Twenty-seven female engineers at Tesla are the latest to own the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer. The electric car maker tweeted a photo Wednesday morning of the women posing in front of the Tesla logo with the text "We build cars #ILookLikeAnEngineer." The stereotype-bashing hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer" has been buzzing around social media since it was coined by Isis Wenger, a 22-year-old engineer at the tech firm OneLogin.  
North America | United States | Advice

Tech Women Triumph: $30k Funding In A Day, Success Under Pressure, True Leaders Inspire

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The women who founded Jewelbots, a programmable friendship bracelet that teaches girls aged 9 to 14 how to code, scored $30,000 of funding in just 19 hours. Having well exceeded their goal, they are nearing an astonishing $140,000 at the time of writing. How can you do the same for your tech startup idea? Cofounders Sara Chipps and Brooke Moreland tell me: “We learn new lessons every day. For crowd funding, we really learned that you must prepare.” The founders thoroughly analyzed successful and unsuccessful campaigns, before carefully choosing words, design, video and rewards, and c
North America | United States | Science

15-Year-Old Develops Flashlight Powered by Body Heat, Wins Top Prize in Google Science Fair

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From a sleeping bag that charges your gadgets to entire buildings warmed by body heat, scientists are harvesting the heat emitted by humans as a source of renewable energy. But the latest development in thermoelectric energy generation doesn’t come from a high-tech lab at MIT; it comes from Ann Makosinski, a 15-year-old Canadian girl who developed a flashlight that is powered by the heat from a human hand. With the aim of reducing the number of single-use batteries that are thrown in landfills, Makosinski developed the innovative flashlight, which can be developed cheaply and deployed to p

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