Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

My blogpost for #ald10 is dedicated to three women that I know well.

My colleague Joitske.
Joitske has a background in the developing world. She lived in Africa for several years with her family and used all kinds of methods and technology to connect to people and get her work done. These days she makes a living by guiding others online, doing projects from her home in The Netherlands.

She uses technology to achieve her goals.

My friend Lilia.
Lilia practically published all of her PhD online, before she knew what she would write in her thesis. It took her readers seven years to see her complete work. Lilia wrote her thesis into existence and now that she’s known as dr. Lilia she does the same for the life that will be.

She uses technology to fulfill her needs.

My mother Fenneke.
Fenneke has been taken photo’s as long as I can remember. We even had a dark room in the attic. I would often stand by her side waiting for the chemicals to reveal the image on paper. A time consuming hobby and for quite some time she hardly developed pictures herself. Then digital photography became affordable and she jumped on it straight away. Ever since her first digital camera she grew her kit and developed advanced skills in photo-editing. Aged sixty-two she started to give digital photography workshops to help others gain more from their digital camera.

She uses technology to capture her imagination.

Trine-Maria linked to a rant by Clay Shirky on male versus female behaviour. He rants about reasons why men are ahead of women in their carreers. He concludes that women are not self-promotional enough, whereas men more easily overstate their capabilities and thus bluff their way into a carreer. Women could do better when they learn from male self-esteem.

A snippet:

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

I suggest you head to Shirky’s blog to read the whole (long) article, and make up your own mind on his point.

(about the number in the title)