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Chair’s corner: Highlights from the 2024 ACM-W Global Executive Committee Meeting in Madrid

The ACM-W Global Executive Committee held this year’s annual meeting from June 26-28, 2024, in Madrid, Spain. The committee members representing our diverse regions discussed current progress and ways to increase the visibility of women in computing and improve the support for women in the field. We discussed boosting regional activities, enhancing communication, advancing ongoing committees and special projects, and promoting collaboration between the different regions. Additionally, we explored new strategies for increasing the number of professional chapters in each region, improving membership visibility on the ACM registration page, organizing more local celebrations and grad cohorts, running summer schools, and awarding ACM-W volunteer scholarships to recognize their contributions. We would especially like to encourage more women to start Professional Chapters and take on leadership roles in their regions.

Rutvi Shah, ACM-W India Chair, joined us from India to share information about their current initiatives and future plans. ACM-W India has seen great success with the Grad Cohort, achieving 280 registrations this year. They are actively working on the Buddy Project, ACM-W Regional Celebrations, ACM-W Summer School, and ACM-W Winter School.

Lindsay Jamieson, ACM-W North America Chair, joined us from the USA to discuss their activities. ACM-W North America hosted 10 Celebrations this year, including one in Chile and one in the Philippines, with more Celebrations already planned for next year. Lindsay mentioned that they have 100 student chapters across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, which is a significant achievement! We eagerly await their upcoming events.

As the ACM-W Europe Chair at that time, I reported on our work on activating chapters. ACM-W Europe recently held a Chapter Workshop to unite chapter chairs for collaboration and local celebrations. The Europe committee is also launching two new working groups: the Wikipedia Working Group and the Online Hackathon Working Group, which the new chair, Dorota Filipczuk, will further announce. 

Why did we meet in Madrid? ACM-W Europe held its 11th Celebration of Women in Computing, womENcourage™, in Madrid this year. The Executive Committee members were delighted to see how Europe organizes this event and, like the many women in attendance, left the event inspired.  The event also served as a celebratory closing for the productive Executive Committee meeting. We hope to see the impact of this meeting as we announce new initiatives and improve on the existing ones this year. Stay tuned!

Our Mission

ACM-W’s core mission is to celebrate, inform, and support women in computing.

Corporate Supporters

We are very grateful for the support and generosity of our corporate sponsors. At present, ACM-W has funding from Oracle (through Oracle Academy), Microsoft Research, and Google for our scholarships, from Two Sigma for the Athena Lecturer Award, and continuing support from Microsoft Research for the celebrations and for community college-related activities.