Greater equality in science will take more than Ada Lovelace Day

In the beginning, the whole coding scene consisted of one woman. In the 1800s, the story goes, an aristocrat named Ada Lovelace was studying maths with inventor Charles Babbage, who had built a machine that could perform calculations – what we'd call a computer. Lovelace came up with a series of commands for the machine: the first computer program. Now, in celebration of this, the second Tuesday of every October is Ada Lovelace Day. It's not surprising that this has spiralled to become the most symbolic day for women working in science, maths and engineering, with Lovelace a figurehead for ongoing attempts to close a worrying gender gap in those fields.