Talk:Lola Odelola

Contested deletion
This article should not be speedily deleted for lack of asserted importance because Lola Odelola is one of the UK's outstanding women engineers, a figure that is poorly represented on Wiki already, but particularly lacks pages on Black women engineers. Her contributions to this field include the founding of blackgirl.tech, a non-profit organisation that promotes diversity within the tech industry by creating a safe space for Black girls, non-binary people and women to learn and explore technology. This is an organisation that has supported over 300 black women, girls & non-binary people in the tech industry. Throughout her career she has highlighted issues with the tech industry, including this story: 'Some years ago, a friend of Lola’s took some photographs of himself and friends, and loaded them to Google Photos. Unbelievably, Google’s new tagging facility spotted that there were faces in the pictures, and tagged them as apes. If black people had been in the room when this functionality was developed, this would never have happened. Finally, and also shockingly, Lola pointed out that taps operated by motion sensors, the kind often found in public bathrooms, often don’t recognise black people’s hands. To avoid problems of the kinds listed here, we need to have a more varied group of people round the tables where products are developed and decisions made. And no matter how diverse the group becomes, we still have to ask ourselves about the needs of users not in the room. Getting a wider range of people into the tech industry will allow empathy to flourish.' Her page on Wikipedia will represent the necessity of having voices like her included in the hsitory of tech in the UK. I am continuing to update this page regularly. --MarthaClewlow (talk) 14:57, 24 June 2020 (UTC)