For decades, research on gender and technology has highlighted the under-representation of women in technology. Although sub-research on the field studying women contributing to free software and hackers cultures is very limited, it also points to women’s low participation rates. However, behind these figures and the discourses that accompany them, other, hidden situations may appear: on the one hand, the existence of some women who do participate and might have been invisible before, on the other hand the widespread assumption that women are not interested or have an innate inability to engage with technology on a deeper level.

Lelacoders is an activist and cyberfeminist research piloted by Donestech (CAT) questioning why women are underrepresented in computer sciences, studying which practices and initiatives have been successful in overcoming barriers, and also which analyzes the experiences and subjectivities of women programmers who have chosen to use free software for their techno-political practices. Besides, the HerStory animation aims to actively oppose the prejudice that there are no significant women behind the development of sciences and technologies. This is the result of a systematic negation and invisibility of women in those specific histories. This drives to a lack of role models which perpetuate the women off-the-loop relation with ICT. Finding and making visible those stories is an important element to re-appropriate historical and collective memory and enable the emergence of new imaginaries which we hoped to be very much radical and feminists!