The Restart Project is at least half powered by women. And we are proud to go the extra mile to recruit women volunteers and role models, to attempt to remedy the gender imbalances that are programmed so early on.
But when we started listening to Suw Charman-Anderson’s “Ada Lovelace Day” podcast featuring women in technical fields, we viscerally understood the power of hearing a stream of women be technical. We binge-listened these voices for hours and hours, and it had this amazing effect on us. It’s healing, it’s inspirational, and it’s empowering. It helps us imagine the world as it could be, with greater balance in science, technology, engineering, and maths fields. It helps us discover that many women have unconventional and circuitous paths, and that this is something to celebrate.
Our own radio has featured women over the years not because we felt some duty to, but because they are an integral part of the story we need to tell. Live on our show, we’ve talked about iconic women from the first computer programmer Ada Lovelace to Elinor Ostrom, the only women to have won a Nobel prize for Economics.
We have interviewed and learnt from women geeks, fixers, innovators and leaders, with backgrounds ranging from design, academia, community repair or policy work.
So here it comes. To mark International Women’s Day, we’ve put together a list of our women’s radio shows. More than 10 hours of audio of kick-ass women who are helping to flip our throw-away economy on its head.
Women fixers, geeks, innovators and leaders
- Restart Podcast Ep. 39: Repair and autonomy in a networked world with Alison Powell
- Restart Podcast Ep. 38: Inspiring repair with Jane, inventor and founder of Sugru
- Restart Radio: Popular, planet-saving right to repair with Libby Peake
- Restart Podcast Ep. 35: Exploring the critical materials in our electronics with Jessika Luth Richter
- Restart Radio: Community repair events as sites of social research with Lara Houston
- Restart Radio: Right to repair and product standards beyond Brexit with Susanne Baker
- Restart Radio: Ada Lovelace Day and the stories of women in STEM with Suw Charman-Anderson
- Restart Podcast Ep 30: Afrotech Fest and Afrofuturism with Florence Okoye and Debs Durojaiye
- Restart Radio: Repairing in school and Apple’s “zero waste” with Estefania Suquilanda
- Restart Podcast Ep. 28: Disruptive design and unlocking wonderment with Leyla Acaroglu
- Restart Podcast Ep. 22: Greening the internet with Sophia Flucker
- Restart Podcast ep. 18: Gendered gadgets with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
- Restart Radio: Restarting in Leicester
- Restart Podcast Ep 14: Boosting reuse with Cat Fletcher
- Restart Radio: Eco-labelling of laptops with Maxine Perella
- Restart Radio: Women who build PCs with Monique Szpak and Halima Koundi
- Restart Podcast Ep 12: A natural history of our gadgets with Jennifer Gabrys
- Restart Radio: A community repair revival in Argentina with Marina Pla
- Restart Radio: Beyond petitions and boycotts – influencing companies with Fidi Hanisch
- Restart Radio: from changing plugs to changing the world with Alison Winfield-Chislett
- Restart Radio: where are the women fixers? with Restart Orsetta
This is wonderful, but I find it hard to believe that in the 21st Century we’re still using phrases like “greater balance” as if equality is something relative that needs to be negotiated rather than a fundamental and absolute truth.
It’s hard to believe a lot of things in the 21C. And appreciate your exasperation, but sometimes women just want to listen to women without having justify how or why.