ArabWIC is a non-profit organization that aims to support, inspire, retain, encourage collaboration, increase visibility and status of Arab women in computing, enabling them to achieve their career aspirations.

ArabWIC aims to create links with international women in computing organizations and is proud to be officially affiliated with the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), the Systers communities, and the Academic Computing Machinery Women in Computing (ACM-W), IEEE-WIE, and Google’s WomenTechmakers (WTM). It also collaborates with Stanford’s WIDS on organizing Data Science events in the Arab World. ArabWIC has forged important collaboration and partnerships with leading organizations in the Middle East such as New University of Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), they sponsored the first 3 conferences, AUB CS department (American University in Beirut Department of Computer Science), Birzeit University, WAMDA, ArabNET, Zoomaal, LLWB (Lebanese League for Women in Business), and Stanford’s Wids and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).

ArabWIC was founded by Professor Sana Odeh in 2012 and has built a community of more than 6000 Arab technical women (academics, students, entrepreneurs, VC’s, and industry professionals) from all over the world and has successfully created chapters in 19 countries.

ArabWIC members have organized hundreds of events such as hackathons in many cities such as Beirut, Betlehem, Amman, Ramallah, Gaza, Dubai, Riyad, Qatar, and Tunis along with major organizations such as AngelHack, LLWB, Wamda, ArabNet and Zoomaal. ArabWIC members have held mentoring, technical and research talks and workshops, career events, 6 annual International ArabWIC conferences (three at NYUAD 2012-2015, one in Algeria 2016, one in Lebanon 2017, and one in Morocco 2019):

Meet the ArabWIC Leaders

Kaoutar El Maghraoui
ArabWIC Global Vice Chair

Principal Research Staff Member, IBM Research AI

Connect with Kaoutar El Maghraoui on LinkedIn
Sana Odeh
ArabWIC Founder and Chair

Clinical Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Liaison for Global Programs of Computer Science at NYU, New York.

Connect with Sana Odeh on LinkedIn
Susan Malaika
ArabWIC Global Program Chair

Senior Technical Staff at IBM - Open tech for AI & Data</p

Connect with Susan Malaikaon LinkedIn
Diane Jordan
ArabIWC Global Finance Chair

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Connect with Diane on LinkedIn
Manar Abu Talib
ArabWIC Global Chapters Chair

University Professor and Chairman of Research Outreach Department

Connect with Manar Abu Talib on LinkedIn

If you want to get involved with us, take the lead and join our chapters, please visit chapters here.

MISSION

ArabWIC’s mission is to support, inspire, retain, encourage collaboration among, increase visibility and help elevate the status of women in the Arab world and beyond from the various computing and technology sectors (academia, industry and entrepreneurship), and allow them to achieve their career goals. ArabWIC also thrives by creating linkages with international women-in-CS organizations

Projects

Here is a listing of projects that we are working on:

  • Research: Conduct research about Arab women in computing, support technical research, and form an open source research and projects collaborations.
  • International ArabWIC Conference:  Convening an annual conference on Arab Women in Computing. Next year, it will be held in Jordan during the summer in 2021.
  • Mentoring Program: Developing a strong mentoring program to support Arab Women Academics, Entrepreneurs, women in Industry.
  • Publish a newsletter and other research publications.
  • Fundraise for our ArabWIC conference, events, scholarships for graduate study and conferences, awards to promote and support Arab women in computing at all levels.
  • Develop a comprehensive database to support networking and visibility for ArabWIC.