Chair’s Message

Welcome to the May, 2016, issue of ACM-W Connections.

This month we have updates from Chapters, Celebrations, ACM-W India, and ACM-W Europe.   The report from our first New York City Celebration gives an overview of the event – I was there and can attest that it was a great event with tremendous enthusiasm.  It was clear that the participants (faculty, students, practitioners) were all excited to participate in an event of that kind.  The next week I was at NYCWiC, the upstate New York Celebration and I expect we’ll have a report on that in the June Connections.

Where’s ACM-W This Month?
Many ACM-W volunteers will be at the NCWIT Summit (probably while you are reading this!).  It will be a chance to meet with various of our volunteers and also confer with our NCWIT partners with whom we continue to work on the project to increase the number of ACM-W Chapters.  Wendy Powley (Celebrations) and Gloria Townsend (Chapters) will be blogging for Blog@CACM so keep an eye out for their posts.

Also around the time you receive this, I will be at the United Nations at the UN Women conference “A Call to Action for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment”.  Folks at Google (thank you Chris Stephenson) asked me to participate on a panel they have organized on “New Skills, More Choices: Access Through Education”.

I’ll also be representing ACM-W at the ACM Council meeting in a few weeks, and will have the pleasure of attending the ACM Awards Banquet where Jennifer Rexford will receive the Athena Lecturer Award.

Thanks, as always, for your work on behalf of women in computing!

~Valerie Barr, ACM-W Chair

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