Greetings Humans! Amnesty Stellenbosch is proud to announce the start of our new blog. This space is intended to facilitate conversations surrounding important topics. Our first series, The New Dinner Conversation, will focus on issues that are becoming increasingly important.

Globally, men outnumber women as students, educators, researchers, and workers in STEM fields, yet women in STEM have an important role to play in South Africa’s development, including pushing the envelope on gender equality, one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goal. Therefore, there is no doubt that women in STEM are important and have the potential to contribute to South Africa's development and transformation.

Data, what is it, and why is keeping it private important? Data can be understood as the traces of our digital footprint that we leave behind whenever we do something online. It can be explicit, like your name, address, or banking information we enter whenever we purchase something online, or it can be inexplicit, like the collecting of metadata [informationlike to who you send messages, how long it takes them to reply, or who you frequently tag in photos or posts] through our actions on sites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram.