Written Evidence Submitted by Ada Lovelace Day
(DIV0058)
Suw Charman-Anderson, CEO and Founder of FindingAda.com
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee will, no doubt, already be aware of the evidence showing that there is a significant lack of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), and I am sure that there will be many submissions exploring the impact this has and why it’s important that we, as a country, tackle this problem immediately.
I would like today to submit a personal testimony drawing from my experiences founding the annual Ada Lovelace Day celebration of women in STEM, as well as running a mentoring program, online conference and other activities designed to highlight the contributions of women in STEM and to provide practical support to women in STEM.
In 2009, I founded Ada Lovelace Day, an annual international celebration of women’s achievements in STEM which, in a normal year, features an annual London event and dozens of independent events around the world.
The main celebration is Ada Lovelace Day Live, a ‘STEM cabaret’ event in London, which features seven women from across the STEM world talking about their work or research for ten minutes each. The event has had over 3000 attendees since it first began. (I have run Ada Lovelace Day online since the beginning of the pandemic, hosting webinars and content on social media and our website.)
The day also sees a large number of grassroots, academic and corporate organisations who hold independent events around the world. Since the first grassroots events in 2011, there have been 871 registered events held in 240 towns/cities in 40 different countries across all six major inhabited continents. Many are held in countries where English is not their native language, proving that the idea behind Ada Lovelace Day transcends the British cultural context.
I am regularly contacted by independent organisers with photos and testimonials about the impact that such events are having on girls and women around the world, including that they are made aware of inspirational role models and routes to careers, they are able to share their work with others, learn new skills and make connections with other women in STEM.
I also run the Finding Ada Network, an online mentorship platform which supports women in STEM with a year-long one-to-one structured mentoring program. In 2020/21, I worked with JP Morgan, The Information Lab, and the University of York as our clients, the latter as part of a Natural Environment Research Council-funded research project examining the impact of mentoring on early career ecologists.
This year, I am working with women in STEM from the general public who have accessed the program thanks to the generosity of donors.
I am also (small) part of a $5 million grant proposal to the US National Science Foundation, in collaboration with a number of American universities. If the grant proposal is successful, my role will be to provide five years of mentoring for a global group of ecologists who are taking part in a project to foster international research and co-operation. I will also be responsible for carrying out qualitative research on the impact of mentoring through the medium of semi-structured interviews.
The Finding Ada Network has a 100% satisfaction rating, meaning that every participant who has completed a survey rated their experience as ‘satisfactory’ or ‘very satisfactory’. The program has an ‘Engagement Index Score’, which is a measure of how engaged participants are, of 21.83, compared to an average of 7.82 for corporate programs and 9.87 for professional association programs.
I have also twice run the Finding Ada Conference, an online event covering careers, equality, and widening participation which was launched in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conferences had a schedule designed to be accessible for people from AsiaPac, EMEA and the Americas, and had over 1,500 registrations from over 59 countries, and logged-in time of over 7 hours on average.
And I have produced careers and educational materials and posters over the years, as well as a podcast, and two anthologies about women in STEM, amongst other activities.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, an honour granted to people who “have made outstanding achievements to social progress and development”, which I was given because of my work on gender equality. And I am a Visiting Associate at the University of York, in the Department of Biology.
Finding Ada is based in the UK, but our activities have a global reach. For example, about 40% of our Twitter audience is in the UK, 27% in the US, and the rest are in 172 other countries around the world. We do not have local offices or chapters, so apart from Ada Lovelace Day Live and the Finding Ada Network, everything we do is done with a global audience in mind.
The success of a global movement can be difficult to measure accurately. I have three categories of metrics:
These metrics measure direct contacts that we have with our community, whether in person or online.
● Registrants/attendees physical and virtual events: 5,200
● Social media follows/engagement: 28,000
● Newsletter subscribers/engagement: 1,800
● Website visits: 1.5 million
● YouTube views: 55,000
● Finding Ada Network participants: 240
These metrics look at outreach done by groups that are independent of Ada Lovelace Day.
● Number of independent events: 870
● Geographical distribution: 239 towns/cities in 40 countries
● Reach: Impossible to quantify, but likely over 100,000 people.
These metrics look at the reach we have via mainstream journalism, blogs and other media outlets.
● Press articles: 280
● Blog posts: 370
● Articles in languages other than English: 70
● Total readership: Over 350 million. Both I and Ada Lovelace Day have been featured on TV, radio, and mainstream and specialist news outlets such as BBC, New York Times, The Hindu, and The Atlantic.
The single biggest problem that I have faced in the 13 years that I have been running Ada Lovelace Day is access to funding. I have done all of the above on a maximum turnover per annum of £55,000, which is less than the average salary of a London Underground train driver.
For the years 2009-2014, I received either no or very little money from sponsorship to cover costs, so most of the costs I bore myself. From 2015 until present, I have raised between £30,000 and £55,000 per annum. That budget has to cover every expense, including paying speakers, hiring in freelance help, overheads, etc. I thus do not earn a salary commensurate with my experience, skills or age.
The majority of my business’s income comes from corporate sponsorship, with some income from donations via websites like GoFundMe and Patreon, and a tiny amount from book and merchandise sales.
Most companies and organisations do not enter into long-term sponsorship agreements, which means that every year I have to re-approach existing sponsors and await their decision on what they can fund, and find new sponsors to fill in the gaps left by companies whose funding priorities or budgets have changed. Cost of sponsor acquisition is high and retention is difficult. And whilst the cycle repeats yearly, there is no predictability to my income, making long-term planning impossible.
The sponsorship landscape has changed a lot over the last four years, with Brexit and then the pandemic causing both uncertainty and budget contraction. With more and more campaigns and organisations working in the diversity area, and with sponsoring companies slashing their corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing budgets and delaying funding decisions, the slice of the funding pie is getting smaller and smaller, and harder to secure.
This is exacerbated as companies expand their diversity work to, very rightly, include LGBT and racial equity especially, but do not expand their overall budget. The result is that everyone is getting less.
I have also not been able to access much in the way of grant funding, due to the nature of my enterprise and the difficulty finding and accessing grants.
My corporate governance structure is that of a UK-registered limited company. This is the only governance structure open to me as a single-person business, but it does limit the sources of funding to which I can apply, as many non-corporate funders will only fund charities or non-profits.
Charities are complicated to set up, inflexible, and unsuited to a single person working on their own. They also restrict activities, so it’s not possible to carry out commercial activities or to campaign on political issues. A CIC has limitations regarding how much a director can draw from the business as salary, which again is problematic for a small business where the main overheads are my wages.
Applying for grants, awards and other non-corporate sources of funding is problematic for all small organisations, regardless of their governance structure.
It is difficult to identify appropriate grants for which one is actually eligible, particularly if you do not have existing expertise in grant funders and knowledge of the funding landscape. It is very time-consuming to locate and apply for grants, so even when I find a grant for which I am eligible, it’s a lot of time spent on an uncertain outcome when I am already under pressure to deliver on my existing commitments.
Another major problem is that many funders refuse to fund overheads. For small organisations, the majority of one’s costs are overheads, so dependency on grants can lead to funding cannibalism: the organisation cannibalises money from Grant A to cover both mission and overheads costs, then must successfully win Grant B to cover the outstanding mission costs that should have been paid for by Grant A. This can, obviously, spiral out of control.
Funders often also add onerous reporting requirements to grant conditions, which can be problematic for small organisations to fulfil. Small organisations often do not have the structures in place for the kind of reporting that’s required, or the resources to spend hours putting together post-projects reports.
The fundamental problem caused by inadequate funding is that small organisations never reach their potential, because they firstly spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking funding, rather than on the activities that fulfil their mission, and secondly because they cannot invest in long-term solutions or projects that would help them grow.
It is impossible to grow an organisation when conditions are so uncertain, when you have no slack in the system to devote to developing growth strategies, and no money to invest in activities such as marketing and PR.
Given the size of my company, it is nothing short of a miracle that I have created a global movement in support of women in STEM. Many large multinational businesses use Ada Lovelace Day as a core plank of their public-facing diversity work, and yet I have on many occasions been told they have no budget to come on board as a sponsor. One company with global revenue of US$20 billion in 2020 told me last year that they didn’t have the budget for a £10,000 sponsorship package.
Businesses, universities, learned societies, media companies, and indeed other campaigns and activists all benefit from my work. Ada Lovelace Day has become a permanent fixture in many people’s calendar. And yet I am stuck in an underfunded trap, unable to expand and possibly even unable to continue past the end of this year because of a lack of funding.
Underfunding is a common problem across the sector. My experience is by no means unique.
When I started Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 there were hardly any grassroots campaigns in support of women in STEM. Now there are dozens, each working with their own specific audience and in their own specific way.
The sheer scope of the problem of gender equality in STEM is enormous, particularly in areas like engineering, maths, and the physical sciences, where women make up a tiny, tiny proportion of graduates and workers. This means we need a wide variety of approaches to reach many different audiences in many different places.
There is no one size fits all solution.
And yet, when you look at where corporate money goes, there isn’t as much variety as there should be. There is a huge emphasis on graduate and early career support because companies are keen to develop their graduate recruitment programs.
It’s much harder to sell companies on mid-career interventions such as mentoring, even though the mid-career period is when we lose a huge number of women from STEM careers. The knock on effect of these losses is that there are fewer experienced mid-career women to promote into senior leadership roles, a problem which can be seen clearly in the patterns revealed by the gender pay gap data.
Equally, it’s almost impossible to fund interventions for pre-school girls. Evidence shows that children understand gender stereotypes from a very young age, and that as their sense of self develops, they come to self-select out of STEM interests.
In many cases, corporates prefer to keep their activism in-house, using days like Ada Lovelace Day as an opportunity to do a bit of gender-washing. They want to own the change, and to use it for PR rather than actually serving their community.
Frequently these campaigns achieve nothing and may even be actively harmful: EDF Energy’s 2016 Pretty Curious campaign focused on encouraging girls into STEM is a case in point, not only for its condescending name, tone and content, but also because they ultimately awarded their top prize to a boy. Worse, they entirely refused to engage with the activist community when issues were first raised, despite the fact that we could have helped them avoid the problematic outcome.
It is the people at the coalface, women like myself who have direct experience of the problem – my background is geology, science publishing and tech – and direct experience of how to solve that problem, who are both best placed to tackle it and yet least able to access the funding to do so.
We need not just Ada Lovelace Day and the Finding Ada Network, we need Trowelblazers, ScienceGrrl, Coding Black Females, Geek Girls and all the other small organisations who each speak to their own community and tackle the problem in their own way. We all need sufficient funding and room to grow. That funding is not coming from the market, so it must come from government.
The government can step in to fill the funding gap. I am aware that Innovate UK has run funding programs for women, but their programs are inaccessible to many, including me.
What we need are generous, long-term funding opportunities, which do not have onerous application processes, are designed to support small organisations regardless of their governance structure, and do not require complex reporting.
It would also be beneficial to provide options for practical support, to help organisations in areas where they lack expertise. Perhaps it’s a lack of marketing or PR expertise, or difficulty developing tech solutions, challenges managing finances and accounts, or the need for a knowledgeable mentor. That expertise exists, it’s just that we cannot easily tap into it.
In 2015, I organised The Funding Gap, an event at Conway Hall which brought together around twenty advocates for women in STEM to talk about the funding problem. It was clear from the conversations we held that everyone was struggling with raising money, and that it was difficult to develop cross-organisational links and collaborations because everyone was overworked. Resources are so scarce that it’s difficult to bring campaigners together to campaign for more resources.
My vision is for an independent non-governmental organisation to manage grant funding for and provide tangible support to organisations supporting women in STEM. This organisation would begin by working with the community of organisers and activists, both in the community and in academia and industry, to understand not just their needs but also how they could be gainfully connected.
It would then develop a simple, easy and low-cost grant application and decision making process. Evidence from academia shows that, when assessed on outcome, lengthy and complex application processes are no more successful than random allocation, so the focus would be on eligibility not on complex project plans which may not survive first contact with reality.
This organisation would also develop support services, whether that’s providing admin support for very small organisations, or dealing with more complex needs such as website design, social media strategy development, events planning, PR and marketing. The NGO would be well placed to hire in expertise and provide services and consulting to small organisations who would otherwise not only not be able to afford such services, but also not have the bandwidth to act on advice.
Reporting would be done in collaboration with this central NGO to ensure that is not onerous and does not put potential recipients off. This new NGO would also provide mentorship, networking opportunities and could also manage a central pool of volunteers.
I have the required experience to assist in the creation of such an organisation, with expertise in campaigning, collaboration, and consulting. I am well known within the UK women in STEM community, with campaigners, academics and business people. And I have extensive experience as a founder, having also co-founded the Open Rights Group. I would be delighted to assist with this project.
Having this new organisation in place would revolutionise gender equality in STEM in the UK. It would help us to accelerate progress and ensure that all audiences are served, not just those that are in fashion with CST executives or funders. It would create a strong community of organisers, campaigners, businesses leaders and academics, and would ensure that all the knowledge and expertise currently stuck in different sectoral silos is shared and expanded upon.
(January 2022)