I’m here with a late-day addition to Woman Crush Wednesday: The Global Fund for Women organized a hackathon last year, which brought ladies from around the world together to build apps that try to solve, well — all kinds of problems that women deal with on a day-to-day basis.
“Like what?” you, a troll, might ask. “Like street harassment, sexual assault, and dumb and infuriating obstacles to accessing necessary reproductive healthcare,” I would respond — then I would shove you back under the bridge from whence you came.
Anyway, the women hackers came up with some genuinely great apps: One that logs and maps incidences of sexual harassment, one that turns reproductive healthcare into a video game, and one that lets girls in India — where sex ed isn’t just nonexistent, but taboo — ask all their sexual health-related questions to counselors. The winner, announced this week, was an app that featured Yelp-like reviews of business that rated how their staff and patrons treated women.
Why does this matter? Well, women are severely underrepresented in tech and science, and as a result, these kinds of very real life problems don’t get the attention they need. I don’t want an app that will give me randomly generated digital fortune cookies every three hours (yes I do) — I want an app that will tell me exactly what kind of problems I can run into while trying to get the type of birth control that’s best for me.
In short: This is really wonderful, and nothing makes me happier than girls who will put their smarts and ovaries toward making the world a better and safer place for women.
