DCFT Powerful Women Awards

Image of the 2016 award winners

The DCFemTech Awards will recognize Power Women Programmers & Designers based in the Washington, DC region. We'll congratulate women who are working in the trenches of tech & design to help their company or organization achieve success, sometimes entirely behind the scenes.

View 2015 awards here.

2016 Winners

Powerful Women Programmers Powerful Women Designers
Alexandra Ulsh, Mapbox Acacia Betancourt, GlobalGiving
Alison Rowland, Commerce Data Service Alesha Randolph, Vox Media
Aliya Rahman, Wellstone Action Alexis Dominick, CircleBack
Allison McMillan, General Assemb.ly Ashleigh Axios, The White House
Ally Palanzi, Vox Media Ashleigh Liggett, Siteworx
Amanda Hewitt, 540.co Behnaz Babazadeh, AddThis
Annie J Wang, Analyst Institute Brooke Jordan, Aquicore
Annyce Davis, Off Grid Electric Crystal C. Yan, FiscalNote
Ashley Holtz, CrowdStrike Daniela Montalvo Shuffler, WeddingWire
Carol Hansen, Mapbox Elisabeth Warren, Clearly Innovative
Clare Politano Hutchings, Social Tables Georgia Cowley, Vox Media
Gem Barrett, Open Technology Institute JoAnna Hunt, Blackboard
Jacqueline Kazil, Capital One Kara DeFrias, 18F
Jessica Bell, RepEquity Karelia Jo Moore, Huge
Jessica Dommes, WeddingWire Libby Bawcombe, NPR
Jessica Ng, AOL Maggie Gaudaen, iStrategyLabs
Kat Kuhl, CHIEF Mariesa Dale, Pivotal Labs
Katie Cunningham, SpeakAgent Melanie Charlton, Brllnt
Lindsay Young, 18F Mollie Bates, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Lisa Chung, The Motley Fool Mollie Ruskin, U.S. Digital Service
Lizzie Ellis, Democratic National Committee Ngan Hoang, Vox Media, Inc.
Pamela Vong, InfernoRed Technology Olivia Cheng, iStrategyLabs
Rakia Finley, Surge Assembly and FIN. Digital Radhika Bhatt, Department of Commerce
Tammy Perrin, Attunity Ramla Mahmood, Vox Media
Veni Kunche, Blasterra and USGS Geological Survey Sarah Brooks, Veterans Affairs
Vera Lyalko, JBS International, Inc. Sibyl Edwards, Freelancer

Sponsors

  • Capital One

    Capital One is a different kind of company – we’re a top 10 bank, but we operate more like a tech company than a financial institution. Diversity, equality, and inclusion are central to the Capital One workplace culture as well. Our Women in Tech initiative that is bringing women and men together to focus on improving the representation of women in the technology field and supporting the career development of women in our organization. We’re growing our teams and hiring engineers, data scientists, and designers and offering them an exciting opportunity to join an organization that is building its own software and changing the way people interact with their money.

  • Siteworx

    Siteworx, a leading digital experience agency with two DCFemTech winners on its team, is proud to support the 2016 awards. For more than a decade, Siteworx has applied a craftsman-level attention to designing services and experiences and engaged with deep technical expertise to solve the most complex digital challenges. Leaders such as Time Warner Cable, Citrix Online and Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group look to Siteworx to achieve tangible results across the full marketing value chain by creating experiences that serve the needs, wants and desires of their customers.

  • Wingate Hughes

    A relationship-driven interior architecture firm based in Washington, D.C., Wingate Hughes Architects is taking over the area with convention-defying, provocative designs for the District’s most compelling, innovative clients. Our workplace designs for D.C.’s leading entrepreneurial high-growth companies inspire bold ideas and creativity. Recent notable clients include EverFi, Social Radar, Optoro, 1776, nclud, Endgame, iStrategy Labs, Learning Objects, and the Society of the Plastics Industry.

  • GitHub

    GitHub is how people build software. Millions of individuals, organizations and government agencies around the world use GitHub to discover, share, and collaborate on software—from games and experiments to popular frameworks and leading applications. Together, we’re defining how software is built today.

  • Social Tables

    Social Tables is a Washington, D.C. based event planning software company. The award-winning platform has been used to source, plan and execute over nearly one million events since 2011. The company has 4,000 customers in 100 countries and has been recognized as one of the best places to work in the D.C. area by the Washington Post and SmartCEO.

Nomination Process

DCFemTech opened the call for nominations for outstanding women programmers/engineers and designers based in the DC region on February 24, 2016 and received 190 submissions. The awards were expanded to include a design category for 2016 as a result of the overwhelming response in 2015.

Nominations were down selected by a committee made up of twelve women programmers, engineers, designers and executives for each category.

This year’s programmer recipients were chosen based on: Impact on organization (helped company/non-profit grow & achieve goals); Complexity of issues addressed with code (building a webpage vs. a complex system); Impact on community (contributed to broader tech/women in tech community or open source contributions).

The design recipients were selected based on similar criteria: Impact on organization (helped company/non-profit grow & achieve goals); Complexity of issues addressed with design (designing a platform that provides a great user experience vs. one page website); and Impact on community (contributed to broader tech/women in tech community or open source contributions).