rhymesInspiring Fifty is a project that each year nominates 50 women in tech to increase visibility and celebrate lesser known role models. It's mostly a European initiative (it started in the Netherlands) and a few countries have their own national edition. Italy is one of them.
Everyone can nominate other people and a jury chooses the final 50.
This year's list highlights researchers, high school STEM teachers, software engineers, university professors, managers, founders, CTOs, tech leads, IT directors and others.
A sample of the winners (the links point to their Twitter or online presence):
Viviana Acquaviva: astrophysicist and data scientist. Professor at CUNY in NYC, researcher and machine learning expert
Valeria Cagnina: 17 year old robotics expert, entrepreneur and teacher. She learned coding at 11 in Milan's CoderDojo. She spoke at TedX, at Italy's Senate, she's been at MIT for a summer camp and she now teaches robotics workshops all over the country in schools and companies, to kids and adults alike
Lorella Carimali: she's super passionate about teaching STEM to her students and she was recognized one of the 10 best teachers of the country in 2017. She also wrote the book "The square root of life"
Simonetta Di Pippo: she's the UN director of outer space affairs. She's been working in space agencies for a lifetime. She's also an astrophysicist and has a freaking asteroid named after her :D
Daria Loi: principal engineer at Intel, UX researcher and AI expert
Mariarosaria Taddeo: philosopher, ethicist and researcher at Oxford University. Her field of expertise is ethics in tech and AI
Silvia Wang: former manager at Rocket Internet, she founded her company in 2015, ProntoPro, a service marketplace to help users find professionals. The company now has a million users and 100 employees (29 is the average age)
So many amazing examples :-)
You can find the whole list of 50 women here: https://italy.inspiringfifty.org/italy-2018
The only critique I could make to the list is the fact, if I'm not mistaken, that they are all white women except Silvia Wang (who was born in Italy from immigrant Chinese parents). In a way Italy is a country where minorities are not that visibile, except when we're talking about the rethoric of "bad immigrants" which unfortunately seems to be in fashion all over Europe and beyond right now. I could fill a book of examples of invisible minorities in Italy. I'm not trying to diminish anybody's worth (I wouldn't have posted the list if I tought ill of it), I just wanted to point that out.
Anyway, hopefully you'll be inspired by amazing women in STEM :)
