The U.K. government agency Sport England has a new campaign called This Girl Can to encourage women to become active in sports and recreational activities.

It comes as research, carried out by us, reveals that at by every measure, fewer women than men play sport regularly – two million fewer 14-40 year olds in total. Despite this, 75 per cent say they want to be more active. In some other European countries, this disparity doesn’t exist.

Further research into what's stopping women turning their ambitions into reality found that a fear of judgement – on appearance, ability or how they chose to spend time on themselves – puts women of all ages off exercising.

The video I Jiggle, Therefore I Am shows women of all sizes, ages, ethnicities, fitness levels, and abilities having fun in a wide range of sports. Watching it makes me want to dance, although I will leave the boxing to others.  

(YouTube link)

Find out more about the campaign, and the women who appear in it, as well as a behind-the-scenes video, at the This Girl Can website.  -via Time

The name Margaret Hamilton may make you think of the actress who portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West, but this Margaret Hamilton is the software engineer who kept the Apollo 11 mission on track to the moon. The photo above was taken in 1969 and shows Hamilton with the mission software. In a recent interview, Hamilton tells us about her role at NASA, a little about women in programming, and how she coined the term “software engineer.”

Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering; and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science. I had always believed that both art and science were involved in its creation, but at that time most thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.

Since 1986, Hamilton has headed her own software company. Read the rest of the interview at Medium.

(Image credit: NASA)