Margaret Foundation

In 2018, JFD announces the creation of the Margaret Foundation, which aims to support and restore the place of women in digital technology, a sector in which they are still largely under-represented, through 5 concrete actions.

Paying homage to Margaret Hamilton, the foundation is the continuation of the Margaret Award which rewards each year digital women entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, from Europe and Africa, who are changing the world thanks to digital technology.

The Margaret Foundation's lines of action

EDUCATION – ROLE MODELS – FUNDING

In addition to these 3 pillars actions, the Margaret Foundation has the ambition to change mentalities and behaviours concretely

With fellowships: Our Fellowship Awards in EUROPE & AFRICA will open to girls who want to enroll and pursue in any digital, innovation and STEM related careers
Awareness campaigns for highschool students with 100 000 entrepreneurs to sensibilise girls and boys by talking about women and diverse role models and inspire them to pursue entrepreneurial paths

White Shirts

2018 we launched a line of white shirts with La Redoute to empower women to dare, innovate and to undertake everything they want to.

A portion of the revenue generated from the sale goes to the Margaret Foundation to support its actions.

Symbol of women empowerment, the “White Shirts” is first of all a movement, born in 2017, to reply to the outrageous Capital magazine 2 page French startup nation illustration : 11 men in white shirts and jeans.

JFS organizes the response by gathering 13 startup founders in white shirt and jeans to denounce the under representation of digital women by the media.

UNESCO

JFD

In March 2019, JFD joins forces with UNESCO to celebrate International Women’s Rights Day through an exceptional exhibition and the # Wiki4Women initiative.

The “Remarkable Women in Technology” exhibition, presented for a month in front of UNESCO and Maison de la Radio in Paris during the 2019 JFD Europe edition, paid tribute to outstanding women in the field of technology. Among them, the laureates 2017 and 2018 of les Margaret Award: Céline Bardet, founder of We Are Not Weapons of War, Josephine Goube, founder of Techfugees and Roxanne Varza, Director of Station F.

Céline Bardet - Fondatrice de We Are Not Weapons of War

Joséphine Goube - Fondatrice de Techfugees

Roxanne Varza - Directrice de la Station F

The #Wiki4women initiative in collaboration with Les sans pagEs and Wikimedia brought together some 250 contributors to UNESCO to create, enrich and translate Wikipedia pages of women involved in the field of new technologies and sciences. The movement aims to move towards more parity on the Wikipedia platform: less than 20% of biographies of the online collaborative encyclopedia are women.

JFD has joined the movement by organizing a # Wiki4Women workshop with UNESCO at the 7th European JFD edition in 2019, to promote the visibility of digital women on Wikipedia.

If the representation of women on the WIkipedia platform is as low as 20%, it is even more critical for black women, represented at 5%. This is why the 1st edition of the JFD Africa was committed to raise awareness and carry out actions with “Black up Wikipedia” (Noircir Wikipedia), a project founded by Ivonne Gonzalez, to fill the absence of women references, articles, information on culture, African personalities and the African and Afro-descendant diaspora in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

More than 550 profiles have been published thanks to the actions of the Margaret Foundation, including that of Lucie Basch, founder of Too Good to Go, laureate of les Margaret Awards 2018 and Ndèye Tické Ndiaye Diop, Minister of the Digital Economy and Telecommunications at Senegal.