Our very own Nicole Faerber has made it to the short-list for “CTO of the Year” by the Women in IT Awards!

Congratulations are in order–we are so proud to say that Nicole Faerber just got nominated to the short-list of such a meaningful award. Nicole’s nomination means a lot to Purism, and we are here today to say just so.

She totally deserves this nomination (and, if we may say so ourselves, she’d also deserve to get the award…) for oh-so-many reasons:

for her amazingly innovative work on our upcoming Librem 5 smartphone

for her concerns about privacy and security and avoiding data and user exploitation

and of course her assertive presence in the free software community, where she contributes to making free software an industry standard… helping the rest of the world take its possibilities seriously.

So thank you, Nicole Faerber for all that you do!

“Women have been an important part in creating the very foundations of modern IT, naming Ada Lovelace as just one example (here and here are some more), and have ever since played an important role in IT and computer science.” – Nicole

Women in technology are clearly not represented enough: they amounted to somewhere between 2% and 5% of all programmers a decade ago, and about 10% now. At Purism, we pride ourselves on being gender diverse, in addition to being racially and geographically diverse. Our full team is comprised of 20+% women (with women accounting for 37+% of our board, and 33+% of Purism executives) and we continue to work to increase that percentage. Diversity is an asset, and creates safe workplace environments. If you want a safe workplace environment that respects diversity, we are hiring.