International Women’s Day is Monday, March 8!

DEV is once again commemorating this global celebration of women by highlighting stories from women who code.

While International Women's Day is intended to champion women and girls in all fields, the DEV community has a unique opportunity to shed light on the experiences and stories of women who build software. It's crucial that women are empowered to celebrate their accomplishments, share their experiences, and continue to demand change with help from allies. That's what “Nevertheless, She Coded” is all about.

Our “Nevertheless, She Coded” celebration began in 2017. Over the past several years, community members around the world have used #SheCoded, #TheyCoded, and #SheCodedAlly to share powerful stories about gender equality in software. While no two #SheCoded stories are alike, they share common threads of honesty, vulnerability, and strength — all while looking towards progress.

The theme of International Women's Day this year is “Choose to Challenge” — and it's fair to say that finding acceptance and inclusion in the field of technology has been a challenge for women throughout history, despite our many (many) contributions. The willingness to continually face this challenge and participate in the activity and career we love is so inspiring. We're looking forward to hearing about the challenges that you're facing head-on in 2021 with “Nevertheless, She Coded”

Allies

The challenge doesn't begin or end with women. The voices of allies are essential, too. That's why we're inviting allies in the DEV community to share their thoughts on how we can make software development a more level playing field for everyone using #SheCodedAlly.

Non-Binary Inclusion

We remain committed to including and elevating non-binary community members and encourage you to participate on your own terms. If you identify as non-binary and wish to participate, feel free to use #TheyCoded, #SheCoded, or #SheCodedAlly. You can also shoot us a message at [email protected] if you use another pronoun that is not represented here -- we’ll be happy to set up an official tag for you!

We also understand that International Women's Day can be a challenging time for members of the non-binary community, as our society is often too eager to assign gender. We are looking forward to celebrating International Non-Binary Day on July 14th in its own right. Whether you participate or not, know that DEV is your home on March 8th and every day of every year.

How to participate

We’ll be featuring your stories on DEV and the wider community in the coming days. Please join us in sharing your stories and amplifying International Women's Day with "Nevertheless, She Coded"!

- Visit dev.to/shecoded 💜
- Choose a template ✅
- Write your post ✍️
- Share it with the world 🚀
- Encourage everyone you know to share their story 🌐

You can also take a look at the #SheCoded, #SheCodedAlly, and #TheyCoded tags to find insightful, important, and at times, painful or funny SheCoded stories. We hope they inspire you to add your own post to our library. If you participated in last year's SheCoded celebration, we'd love it if you submitted again in 2021!

Thank you all for being part of the DEV Community and helping us make this space a home for all coders.