The first International Women’s Day was observed on 19 March, 1911: 36,515 days ago. In honor of 101 such observances, and in the spirit of celebrating the achievements of women, here are a few of the past year’s highlights and milestones for women in geekdom.
Awards and Recognition
- Ada Lovelace Day
- Anita Borg Institute: Women of Vision
- Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
- Women in Technology (WiT)
Community
- The Hollaback project used Kickstarter funding to launch a website and mobile applications for iPhone and Android to combat street harassment
- Valerie Aurora announced a standardized anti-harassment policy aimed at open source software conferences, which has since been adopted by several major events
- Noirin Shirley became the first woman to serve on the Apache Software Foundation board of directors and as an executive officer
- Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner launched The Ada Initiative to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture
- MáirÃn Duffy released free course materials for teaching digital media skills using free software, having developed them to teach a local Girl Scout troop
Business
- A report published in 2010 showed that venture-backend startups led by women delivered better than average results
- Jane Silber became CEO of Canonical
Academia
- Physicist/Feminist marks IWD by posting statistics on the progress of women in science from 1958 to 2006, using statistics from the NSF
Please share your favorites in the comments!
Geek Feminism Blog 
Here’s good fodder for future linkspam: Carl Sagan appealing to fellow members of the Explorers Club to allow women to join (1981).
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/03/if-membership-is-restricted-to-men-loss.html
Great link spam!
I started a list of inspiring women, often forgotten, ignored, overlooked, on my blog: http://morethansides.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/100th-international-womens-day-recognising-women/
Not all of them are geeks, but a fair few would certainly count.
The campaign to digitise The Dawn, Louisa Lawson’s journal for 19C Australian women, reached its fundraising goal on International Women’s Day 2011. Yay! I think it is scheduled to appear at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ some time next year.
Two Harvard Business review bloggers decided to observe International Women’s Day by commenting on how A) focussing on women and girls is bad for women and B) the group we really need to be worried about is young males.
*sigh*
Jane Bolin, Yale Law School, Class of ’31. The first woman to graduate Yale Law and the first person of color. She was appointed to the Family Court of NYC by Mayor Laguardia. My Dad graduated the School of Art that year.