Board of Alumni

Ruthe Farmer

After a career in both agency and client-side adverstising and marketing, Ruthe Farmer turned her attention 100% to gender issues in 2001. She credits this interest to a sophmore year Rhetoric of Women class at Lewis & Clark. “I was astounded to learn about amazing women, who overcame enormous obstacles to accomplish what they did, but were literally absent from my K-12 educational experience. How are girls supposed to aspire, if we don’t even tell them about the amazing role models that exist?”

As the National Project Manager for Technology & Engineering Education for Girl Scouts of the USA, Ruthe designed and implemented national programs and partnerships to increase girls’ participation in science, technology, engineering and math including the Intel Design & Discovery engineering program and the Firestone On the Road education initiative, winner of the Association of Educational Publishers Award. She managed the research work of the K-12 Informal Education Hub of the National Center for Women & IT, producing a original research on the influence of informal education on women’s participation in technical careers.

Ruthe served on the Leadership Team of the National Center for Women & IT (NCWIT) and as the co-chair of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance through 2007. She served on the National Girls Collaborative Project Champions Board, and the FIRST Robotics Girls FIRST Advisory Board. She was formerly national Diversity Chair of Ad2, and Outreach Chair, President and Chair of Ad2 Portland, an organization for young professionals in advertising.

Ruthe recently completed the MBA in Social Entrepreneurship and Marketing at the University of Oxford and is interested in how existing networks can be leveraged to realize scalable social change. She is a founding board member of Springboard Innovation - a Portland based nonprofit that incubates local social initiatives and social entrepreneurs.

Ruthe is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the National Center for Women & Information Technology, a full pipeline computing community dedicated to achieving gender parity in computing and information technology and driving improved innovation through diversity.