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Boss Lady Robyn is Hosting a Tech Festival to Support Women in Electronic Music

Robyn is the latest female pop star to fight for gender equality in tech.

It's pretty whack being a woman in the tech world. Men still overwhelmingly dominate STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and the women working in these industries are severely underrepresented in the media--thus perpetuating the culture of bias and inequality.

Now, Swedish pop star and all-around boss lady Robyn is doing her part to shift the balance, hosting a one-day festival called Tekla to encourage and support girls who are interested in tech. The festival will include workshops on electronic music, gaming, programming, robotics, 3D printing and more. It will be held in Stockholm on April 18, with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Google, and Spotify as partners.

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"Tekla is a festival for girls, in which they get to sample different areas of future technology in what I believe will be a fun and imaginative environment," Robyn says in a statement. "I thought of KTH's motto, 'science and art', and wanted to do something to inspire girls who are curious about technology, while at the same time highlighting that too few women are applying to KTH programs." Robyn will also perform at the festival, because nothing is complete until you bellow "Dancing On My Own" with your girls. (PS: She is also rumored to be working on an album for later this year.)

Read "Numbers Don't Lie: Sexism in Dance Music Culture in 2014"

Robyn is the latest prominent female pop star to fight for gender equality in tech recently. Earlier this month, Bjork addressed this issue in a now-legendary Pitchfork interview with reporter Jessica Hopper. "When people don't credit me for the stuff I've done… It's a lot of what people see," Bjork said, referring to misreports that Arca had produced her album Vulnicura (it was actually co-produced by both of them). "When I met M.I.A., she was moaning about this, and I told her, "Just photograph yourself in front of the mixing desk in the studio, and people will go, 'Oh, OK! A woman with a tool, like a man with a guitar.'" That statement resulted in this Female Pressure Tumblr that collects images of women working with technology to produce and perform electronic music.

TL;DR: Bjork and Robyn fucking rule.

Read "Why Does Everyone Hate the Björk Retrospective at MoMA?"

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