Today, 13 October 2026, is Ada Lovelace Day — the second Tuesday in October, as it has been every year since it was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson.
It is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, with the stated aim of increasing the profile of women in STEM and creating new role models — to encourage more girls into STEM careers and to support women already working in them.
The structure is the interesting part
Most awareness days have a centre: a main event, a hashtag campaign, an organisation putting on the thing you attend. Ada Lovelace Day largely does not.
Since 2010 it has consisted of dozens of grassroots events around the world, organised by independent groups who want to support women in STEM in their own communities. The forms vary enormously — conferences, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, pub quizzes — and they are pitched at every level, from schoolgirls to university students to women with well-established careers.
The practical consequence is that “taking part” and “organising” are the same action. The official encouragement is explicit: celebrate by organising your own event, at school, at work, in your community, at a library or a university. There is a guide for doing exactly that.
That is a genuinely different model from a conference with a CFP, and it is worth noticing because it removes the gatekeeping step. There is no committee deciding whether your event happens. If you run it, it is an Ada Lovelace Day event.
Why the edit-a-thon is the format to steal
Among the listed formats, the Wikipedia edit-a-thon is the one that produces durable output, and it is worth singling out for a readership that works in technical fields.
The mechanism is simple: a group gets together, for an afternoon, and writes or improves Wikipedia articles about women in science and technology. No speakers, no venue costs beyond a room and wifi, no programme to assemble.
What makes it effective is that the deficit it addresses is measurable and the work is cumulative. Wikipedia’s coverage of women in technical fields is thinner than its coverage of men, notability decisions have historically compounded that, and the gap is the kind of thing that quietly shapes who appears when anyone — including a search engine, including a model trained on the web — looks someone up. An afternoon of six people writing produces articles that are still there next year, and the year after.
For a field full of people who are comfortable with citations, sourcing and technical accuracy, it is also an unusually good fit.
How to find or list something
Events are collected centrally even though they are organised independently, so both directions work: find events near you, or organise your own and have it listed.
- Worldwide events: findingada.com/worldwide-events
- Organise your own: findingada.com — organise an event
- The mission: findingada.com/about/our-mission
Adafruit, which flagged the day, is spending it publishing profiles of women working in science, art, design, technology, engineering and maths — historical figures alongside what they call modern-day “Adas.” That is also a format anyone can copy: the barrier to writing up someone whose work you admire is approximately zero, and it is more useful than a post about the day itself.