Where women belong GHC16

Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder) and Megan Smith, United States CTO gave the closing keynotes for GHC16.

In an interview with Julia Boorstin (from CNBC), Marc spoke about his company motto of 'equality' and how he strives to bring equality for all his employees. 'I am myself and I am also all my employees' - when we see ourselves in each other, that's when we can be truly equal. His call for action is for every one to do at least one thing to promote equality. His advice is to -

1. Identify what specific outcome you want - something you can say in 10 words
2. Identify what your values are - prioritize these in order
3. Once you figure these two out, you will find a way to achieve your goal.

Megan started off by showing us pictures of women who've been forgotten in modern history textbooks. Her call to action is to contribute to efforts to lift up missing figures from history. She also shared new initiatives that the Government is introducing to promote STEM in the country. It was really informative.

There was a panel discussion with Mimi Valdes (executive producer of upcoming movie 'Hidden Figures'), Janet X (astronaut in training) and Christina (electrical engineer at Johnson Institute) about the changing attitudes to African American women at the workplace and what women can achieve if they want to - even go to the Moon or Mars. 'Hidden Figures' is based on the true story of 3 African-American women whose mathematical contributions were critical in launching the man on the moon. The movie will be released to limited audiences during Christmas 2016 and released widely on Jan 6 2017. Do watch it - it promises to be really good.

The results of the ACM poster competition were announced at the event. Clarissa Tuxen from Emory university won the best poster award in the undergraduate category while the award in the graduate category went to Setareh Ariafar from Northeastern university.

All the components at the keynote brought home the message that women deserve a seat at any table they wish to be at and are contributing in various roles in cutting-edge technology. I left the conference proud of being a technical women and feeling connected to so many others like me.

Meet the GHC16 Scholars

Anita Borg Institute offers a scholarship for deserving students and faculty to attend GHC. Interested candidates fill in a formal application describing why they wish to attend the conference, submit resumes and provide letters of recommendations, if needed. Scholars are identified after their applications are reviewed by the scholarship committee. 

This year, 500 of these applicants were chosen to be GHC scholars. I volunteered as a GHC Scholarship reviewer earlier in the year and know first hand how lucky they are to be chosen from the large pool of applicants. When I saw an opportunity to serve as mentors for these amazing women, I signed up for it.

Hilton Lanier Grand Ballroom

The reception was held at Hilton's Lanier Grand Ballrooms this 

Janet Cinfio

evening. Janet Cinfio, SVP & CIO of Acxiom (the event sponsor), spoke a few words about why supporting these women is important. Then, the formal mentoring activity for the evening began. A brief talk on elevator pitch - what it is and what it should contain - opened the session. The scholars and mentors were provided different handouts. The scholars practiced their pitch according to their handout while we, mentors, provided feedback based on the criteria in our handout. The mentors moved to a different scholar every 3 minutes till it was time to wrap up. 

This is the first time, GHC organized a reception style networking event and despite being a bit noisy initially, I must say it was a success from a mentor perspective. I met passionate women with bright ideas and learnt a bit about what they want to achieve. I can't wait to see what they do in the future. I also got to connect with other women from the industry who were also acting as mentors. So, it was win-win on both sides.

The scholarship program is one of many ways ABI supports women in computer science. These programs are not possible without support from people like us. Please donate at http://anitaborg.org/donate/ and your contributions will be matched by their sponsors thru the end of 2016 (doesn't this remind you of NPR fundraisers) and if your employer matches your contribution, you have thrice the impact. So don't wait to become involved.

Can mentoring help your career? GHC16

From Imposter to Hero

Peggy Lee (creator of Made by girls), Sargun Kaur (software engineer at Google), Carmen Badea (staff software engineer at Intel), Dioslein Gonazalez (VR engineer at Unity) and Iris Cheung (software engineer at Apple) brought a diverse set of experiences to this panel on encouraging women to be mentors. With different cultural backgrounds and mentoring experience (group vs 1:1), they brought a unique perspective to the challenges and joys of mentorship. 

The panel members

My key take-aways from the panel -

1. People who mentor are happier and more likely to stay at their place of work. It brings meaning to their life.
2. It is all about a relationship based on trust and honesty both with respect to how you can help and how much time you can put in.
3. Understand the difference between a sponsor and a mentor and set appropriate expectations with the mentee.
4. It's easy to project yourself on the mentee and force your opinion but figure out what they need from you. Maybe they just need someone to listen to them and not advice necessarily.
5. When imposter-syndrome kicks in, use data and and your anger to use. Put your engineering mindset to use and use the data i.e. your achievements for a counter-argument. Instead of being upset and giving up, turn that anger into something else. It is 2016 after all - we can't still be doubting our capabilities as women.
6. Call out the naysayers. Feel sorry for them (not necessarily aloud) that they are losing on valuable opportunity to hear your views just because they are being narrow-minded.
7. At first, mentoring is a personal victory at overcoming the imposter syndrome. It does translate into recognition and growth at work.
8. The closer you are to being your authentic self at work, the happier you will be. Find a place that appreciates you for yourself. 

Carmen Badea

I spoke to Carmen Badea from Intel after the panel and she spoke about how her mentoring opportunities both internal and external all came through Intel. It was great speaking to this awesome engineer from Intel SSG and glad to be part of the supportive company Intel is.

Public speaking at GHC16

Book cover (pic from amazon)

Karen Catlin and Poornima Vijayashanker are two amazing women empowering technical women to improve their public speaking skills and help them take their rightful place at the table. Both of them started off as software engineers and later got into consulting in public speaking and other topics. They've co-authored a book on the topic - Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking. I got the amazing opportunity to attend a workshop where they shared some tips from their book.

Karen Catlin

The workshop was presented in a 'I show then You do' fashion where the presenters talked us through the steps to achieve, walked us through a real-life example and then made go through the exercise ourselves. 

Poornima Vijayshanker

They walked us through the steps of identifying what we can speak afer inventorying our achievements over the past year, whetting interest in the topic with others at the table and coming up with a suitable story to open our story with. Almost every attendee walked away with a topic they could potentially present on. That was the best part!

They shared some tips to overcome stage fright, prepare good slides, practicing etc.

Apart from the techniques to identify what you can speak on, my key takeaways were the following - 

1. Power Posing ala Amy Cuddy
2. Meet and greet your audience before the talk to overcome nervousness and gather data for Q&A
3. Story telling to draw the audience in
4. How to handle Q&A (crowd source if you do not know the answer, use the meet & greet data to create questions)

I'm looking forward to develop my speaking topic further and see where it takes me. For more details on the session, refer to the handy notes on the systers wiki.

Also, I've started reading their book to learn more. If I've intrigued you enough, you can get your copy from here.

GHC16 starts with a bang!

Ever seen almost 15000 women in a single place? You should have been at the Toyota Center this morning. The excitement was palpable in the huge auditorium while waiting for the opening keynote of the 16th annual Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) to begin. Popular music numbers by DJ Roonie DJ fed the frenzy in the audience.

The crowd at the keynote

Dr. Telle Whitney, the CEO and President of the Anita Borg

Dr Telle Whitney

Institute (ABI) opened the session welcoming the attendees and talking about the progress this event has made since its inception in 1994. They had about 500 attendees then and today it has grown to over 15000 attendees from across 83 countries (also includes 1000 men attendees) and the keynotes are being live streamed as well. Women, it seems, are ready to drive change on a global scale.

Dr Latanya Sweeney, Professor at Harvard, is an impressive

Dr Latanya Sweeney

lady. She is the pioneer in Data Privacy as we know it. With some concrete data-driven examples, she made it clear that we as computer science engineers need to 'algorithmically accountable'. We should not just be concerned with developing new technology and programs but also be mindful of the consequences of these technologies i.e. ethics/data privacy issues ideally in the design phase. She drove home the point that we shouldn't just think about data in my application but what information this data along with all available public datasets together can provide. Her call to action is that we should train/help the policy regulators help formulate the data policies in a rapidly changing technocracy we are living in.


Dr Anna Patterson, this year's technical leadership ABI award winner

Dr Anna Patterson

and VP at Google, is the most humble person I've seen in a while. She isn't afraid to say the hard things. Her leadership style is to be transparent and be over-trusting. It makes people go overboard to deliver their goals. She hoped that any struggles or difficulties women see at the 

Let your light shine

workplace will soon be as distant in memory as the fight for the right to vote. She was passionate about women exercising their hard-earned right to vote this election year. Thank you for reminding us of this responsibility to our nation.


The 2016 ABI award for the Top Companies for women technologists 

Dr Rebecca Parsons

went to Thoughtworks. Their CTO, Dr Rebecca Parsons, said that technology is at the epicenter of social growth and there has never been a better time for women technologists with attitude, aptitude and integrity.



Ginni Rometty, CEO and President of IBM, spoke next. So

Gnni Rometty

down-to-earth! Loved her 3 mantras for success - never let someone else define who you are, growth and comfort never go together and work on something bigger than you are. She reminded us that 'past is prologue' and this is the cognitive era. She also had a mini-panel where she pulled in 3 of IBM's best engineers and had them speak about their specialities - agile/user-centric design, Watson-based genomics and innovations.

The 2016 ABI Student of Vision award winner this year is an

Alyssia Jovellanos (pic courtesy ABI)

inspiring and cool 19-year old Alyssia Jovellanos. She talked about how a chat with a single software engineer changed her course of study. She said that letting new people into your life, finding a mentor and being a mentor can expand the world beyond your imagination. Someone to look out for in the coming years.

The keynote was so inspiring - listening to women working at the cutting edge of technology and being in a room with so many women was strangely empowering. Definitely an experience of a lifetime.

Preparing for GHC16

What's the most happening event in Houston in October? The Grace Hopper Conference for Women in Computing, of course! A conference with about 15000 attendees, most of them technical women similar to me - it is beyond my imagination. This is my first time attending and I must admit I am both excited and a bit apprehensive. I set out to get over my nervousness with a typical engineering mindset - prepare, plan, execute.

I read multiple blog posts on what I should expect and how to prepare it. I attended some sessions at work hosted by previous attendees on the same topic. I started consuming all social media relating to GHC16 and have been following some fascinating women on twitter. I studied the agenda and identified sessions I really want to attend. I had a sort of road map of what I was going to do and who I'd like to meet.

Then, about a week back I got an email that I got picked as a mentor for the Open Source Day (OSD) at GHC. How did that happen? I was reading up suggestions online about GHC and one of them was to volunteer. I signed up for what I thought was interesting and then conveniently forgot about it until I got the email congratulating me on being chosen. My pre-planned agenda for the conference was not going to work anymore. Normally, I would be upset about any interruptions to my plans but surprisingly I wasn't. In fact, I was more elated than before.

Over the last week I have been trying to figure out what brought about this change in me. Initially, I attributed it to my belief in open source and contributing to the community at large. That, of course is one of the reasons but I realized it was more fundamental than that. Less than an year ago, I started working in a team that does Agile software development in a big way - pair programming, daily stand-ups, 2 week sprints, etc. Customers would change requirements on us from one day to the next and colleagues treated it as the norm while it used to annoy me to no end. These days, however, I've come to accept it. Dare I hope that the agile mindset is creeping into my personality and that is why I am so open to changing my schedule without a twinge of annoyance? I would like to think so.

So, as I re-lay my plans for the conference, I look forward to new experiences that will challenge/change my mindset and perspective again. #GHC16 #GHCOSD16