WASHINGTON, D.C. (CitizenWire) — On Wednesday, July 6, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will honor 37 women from the Middle East and North Africa and their American mentors who participated in TechWomen, an initiative that harnesses the power of technology and international exchanges as a means to empower women and girls worldwide.
The event will take place at approximately 12 p.m. in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the Department of State. The event will be streamed live on www.state.gov and open to credentialed members of the media. Press access times will be forthcoming in the public schedule.
TechWomen, which Secretary Clinton first announced during the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in the spring of 2010, brought 37 women from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the Palestinian Territories to the United States for a five-week mentorship with their American counterparts at 24 U.S.-based technology companies. Later this year, U.S. mentors will travel to the Middle East and North Africa region to conduct workshops for women in the technology sector and young girls who have expressed an interest in pursuing a tech-based career.
Twenty four technology companies in Silicon Valley and the Greater San Francisco Bay Area are serving as mentors. They include: Adobe Systems, Inc., AT&T, Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, Intel Corporation, Internet Systems Consortium, Juniper Networks, LikeList, mPay Connect, NetApp, Newcomb Anderson McCormic, Northgate Environment Management, Inc., Parallel Earth, SAP Labs, Symantec, ThoughtWorks, Yahoo!, and ZaReason.