Here's an idea that we've implemented where I work: when coming up with working names for projects or whatever, go out of your way to name them after notable wo

Here's an idea that we've implemented where I work: when coming up with working names for projects or whatever, go out of your way to name them after notable women in STEM. Bonus, purposely retire the example women that everybody knows -- that means no "Project Lovelace" or "Ada", no "Grace Hopper" network optimization effort, none of that. Make it a rewarded challenge for people to spend time finding out, bringing forward, and celebrating the contributions of amazing women. Feel free to be expansive in what you consider technology and STEM. For example, women who've written music on music synths: Wendy Carlos, Imogen Heap, etc. Or videogame designers: Carol Shaw, Dona Bailey, Joyce Weisbecker,...actually here's a list [1] Cryptography: Dorothy Denning, Margaret Rock, and so on. [2] Make it a point to explain the history of the person you named the project after as part of your project charter and when you onboard new people onto your project, explain the history of the name to them and why you are making it a practice to name projects in order to celebrate the contributions of women in technology. It doesn't have to be a long, drawn out affair. But I can tell you that (from first hand experience) this type of celebration can have amazing effects on mixed gendered teams. I've never seen so many talented women staff suddenly get so supercharged. It's honestly amazing and incredibly humbling and it will absolutely become a continued practice wherever I go. The number of times I've also heard from women staff "if I had only known about so many of these women growing up, I might have made different choices in life"....you can feel the unfed hunger for recognition. You can do variants on this approach for many underserved and underrepresented groups of people. It actually becomes kind of fun for people to spend time learning about what people other than Turing, or Babbage, or some mythological God figure (or Star Wars/Trek character) and how they contributed to where we are as a species today. Get cheeky with it. Instead of "Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave" turn it into "Project Brown Square Cave" and have a designer make a cool logo design, or "Pamela Hardt-English" into "The Angled Heart Project" and make an 8-bit pixel art version of a heart or something. Make memes out of Margaret Hamilton's smiling face and send it around as a local meme when somebody does something really cool. Keep all references to women associated with positive/cool/etc. things. Never use them as a degrading joke, or to make fun or somebody or something. Pick women who are currently in STEM, e.g. Katie Bouman is a great name for an effort to add better visibility into the workings of a tech stack. Meet these women. Many of them are still alive. I know that the ANTIC podcast [3] has many dozens of amazing interviews as does Matt Chat [4]. Even though these are mostly about games and computing, many of the women featured went on to some pretty great careers. (ha! The most recent interview as of this comment on Matt Chat is Annie VanderMeer, a game designer) Make this an official policy. There's enough recognition for men already -- we're good. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_game_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_gam... 2 - https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women-in-cryptology.html https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women... 3 - https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ 4 - https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8 https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8 5 - and some more if you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing