Women in Tech communities and platforms of note

by Startacus Admin

Even in this age of supposed enlightenment, a little authority and power, however minute, meaningless, or even imagined, can then go to people’s malfunctioning heads. Particularly in a still sadly female-deficient industry like tech, when these people are men, the result can be a hostile environment in which the women affected often feel they cannot say or do anything about it. Intelligent and decent people continue to work towards true equality, but until that is realised, there is certainly still very much a place for female-oriented tech platforms, communities, and groups where women can find support and advice from other women.

Here are just a few of women in tech communities and platforms of note...

Ada’s List

Ada’s List, named after Ada Lovelace, is an email-based community of over 4000 women working, however loosely, in STEM - from scientists to sci-fi authors to journalists. Members can chat about STEM - or business-related topics, share details of events and conferences, find support, source people to work with, find people worth writing about, receive informal mentoring, and much more.

Womentum

We have written more about Womentum here. This is a non-profit crowdfunding platform for women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Womentum exists to counter the lack of support and even opposition that women in developing countries often find when trying to start a business.

Women of Wearables

Despite the name, Women of Wearables goes beyond only wearables, providing support, inspiration, and connections for women entrepreneurs in wearable tech, fashion tech, the Internet of Things, augmented reality, and virtual reality. As well as opening up a new network for women, WoW provides mentorship with events and wearable tech workshops (including workshops for girls aged 10-18). The global WoW community includes universities, incubators, and accelerators as well as female founders, executives, designers, developers, and over 6000 others. We’ve previously written about Women of Wearables.

Blooming Founders

Blooming Founders is a community that provides support, motivation, a safe environment to ask questions and share experiences, and opens up a whole network from which to make connections and find people to work with. They run events and programmes which promote female entrepreneurs as well as educating girls and women about entrepreneurship and inspiring the entrepreneur in them.

Women Who Tech

Since 2008, this non-profit has been dedicated to bringing together women across all of STEM, particularly tech. A large part of what they do is help address the massive imbalance in where funding goes. The Women Startup Challenge, run by Women Who Tech, is a platform for female-led startups to showcase and pitch, with over $1m in prizes and investment.

Global Invest Her

Global Invest Her is, as the name suggests, a global network of female entrepreneurs with a focus on funding. The platform gives members access to stories from women who have raised over $400m in funding. Advice specific to women entrepreneurs, tools, templates, and all sorts of information are all available to members to help with the funding journey.

Everywoman

Since 1999, Everywoman has been dedicated to advancing women in businesses within any industry. Everywoman has over 20,000 members and provides and promotes everything from events, leadership programmes, and awards programmes to personal development, support, and sponsorship opportunities.

Female Entrepreneur Association

The Female Entrepreneur Association is an online hub dedicated to inspiring and empowering women from all over the globe to build successful businesses. This is a community built for women entrepreneurs to support and inspire other women entrepreneurs. As well as weekly, 10-minute inspirational videos and hosting inspiring stories, the Female Entrepreneur Association publishes a free magazine, hosts live masterclasses across a wide range of subjects, and maintains a Facebook page of over half a million members.

Savor the Success (US based)

Savor the Success is an online support and wellness hub, business school, and community centre for female entrepreneurs. They offer events, a supportive community, classes, and meetups, as well as publishing a magazine.

There are of course many more groups and platforms out there for supporting female entrepreneurs than we can comprehensively list here, however if there are any that have been of particular help to you, please feel free to drop us a tweet or send an email to iam@startacus.net

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Published on: 20th August 2017