Diversity + Inclusion: Highlights from Women In Tech Summit West

This past weekend TechGirlz hosted the Women in Tech Summit West in our hometown of Denver, so we were excited to participate as attendees and as a sponsor. The event was all about promoting diversity and inclusion, from the keynote speaker to all the talks and workshops. Through anecdotes of each speaker’s personal journey’s, attendees gained inspiration and insights into how to persevere in the unbalanced tech industry.

Learning From Experience

Keynote speaker Shelley Peterson, Emerging Technologies Lead at Lockheed Martin, shared her journey of curiosity and exploration to get her to making augmented reality a tangible product, and the profound impact it’s had on how her teams work.

Likewise, Christine Weber, SVP of OTT Engineering at SlingTV, talked about what she learned from her experience of “breaking the internet”, and what it’s like to run an engineering team delivering live content. With her leadership, her teams built a new platform based on microservices architecture, became more CI/CD driven and improved communication.

In addition, all of the workshops and talks were each designed to make technology more accessible to the attendees with a varying assortment of topics ranging from Intro to Vue.js to machine learning with neural networks to a talk on learnings from breaking the internet.

Despite bleak statistics, the outlook is positive

Diversity & inclusion topics show up more and more a conferences — inside and out of tech (see our wrap of up the Linux Open Source Summit 2018).

Much smaller in scale, WITS really focused on gender diversity issues and supporting women in the industry. The proceeds from each of the WIT Summits go to TechGirlz, a nonprofit focused at exposing middle school aged girls to technology.

The founder of TechGirlz, Tracey Welson-Rossman, gave a wonderful talk on gender diversity issues with some eye-opening statistics:

• The technology field has one of the smallest pay gaps — yay!
• 25% of tech employees are women while that drops to only 18% of software engineers
• Half of women leave tech mid-career — no!

Welson-Rossman talked about how tackling the diversity challenge is like an onion — once you peel back one layer, there’s another one waiting. Everything from support networks and image portrayal, to work/life balance and lack of advancement opportunities keep gender diversity statistics seemingly flat.

While TechGirz and other nonprofits are really setting the groundwork for exposing kids with all kinds of backgrounds to technology, the responsibility turns to those in the industry to ensure that the working environment is not only one that embraces diversity, but supports all backgrounds in an exclusive industry that historically lacks of diversity.

This is definitely a work in progress, and the Q&A part of the discussion brought up some great ideas and ways to support each other and each other’s initiatives. Even though gender-diverse individuals still face hurdles, everyone still had a positive outlook for the future.