The DiG Festival has announced that award-winning US “women in tech” advocate Ruthe Farmer will be presenting a keynote address and conducting a workshop at the 2015 Festival to be held in October.
Ruthe Farmer is well known and significantly acknowledged world-wide for her efforts on increasing girls’ participation in technology and engineering since 2001 and at DiG will discuss “Innovation through Inclusion.” She will share her experiences in building diversity in the workplace as well as a Workshop that is still in development stage.
Ruthe has received the inaugural Education UK Alumni Award for Social Impact in 2015, the Anita Borg Institute Award for Social Impact in 2014, was named a Champion of Change for Technology Inclusion by the White House and received the Ulla Popken Phenomenal Woman Award for her work to increase girls’ participation in technology and engineering in 2013. Ruthe also served as the 2012 Chair of Computer Science Education Week and has been featured in Forbes, Tech Republic and is a guest contributor for the Shriver Report and TechCrunch.
She leads strategy, development and partnerships at National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and directs the NCWIT K-12 Alliance. She is the driving force behind the hugely successful Aspirations in Computing talent development initiative, designed the NCWIT AspireIT outreach program to engage 10,000 girls in computing by 2018, which has the backing of the Clinton Foundation, and launched the NCWIT Latinas in Technology campaign and initiative in January 2015.
“Ruthe has a history of scaling up innovative projects and was responsible for establishing a national Lego Robotics program at Girl Scouts of the USA, scaling out the Intel Design & Discovery engineering program to 63 locations, and forming a national partnership between FIRST Robotics and Girl Scouts of the USA,” Stephanie Hinds, Co-Creator of the DiG Festival, said.
“She also created GirlFEST, a one-day resource expo celebrating everything cool about being a girl. The inaugural event drew 10,000 girls; the event has been replicated in 15 Girl Scout councils and has been adopted as the girl engagement model at the Triennial Girl Scout convention. “On the Road: the Savvy Girl’s Guide to Cars”, is another of her creations – a comprehensive program on automotive careers, safety, and maintenance sponsored by Firestone and the US Department of Labor.”
“We cannot wait for the Hunter Business community to listen to her and learn from her experiences. Ruthe really is a world-class operator and I would encourage those interested in digital transformation of their business to get along to DiG.”
Image | Ruthe Farmer
