Grace Hopper Conference 2015 Wrap up

Very briefly, highlights from GHC 2015 ...

Susan Wojcicki's (CEO of Youtube) keynote speech. She talked about two reasons why there are so few women in tech: (1) not enough women in the pipeline, starts in elementary / middle school, and (2) retention of women in tech - a workplace culture that causes women to leave at twice the rate of men. Not enough support for maternity leave and working moms is a problem. Her career advice: "Keep asking to be invited." "Power and influence is passed down from those who have it."

Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social offers career advice: (1) embrace failure, (2) nurture relationships.

Manuela Veloso's (CMU) keynote on symbiotic autonomy for autonomous robots. Robots can navigate around buildings with the help of humans.

Dinner with Duy Loan Le, former TI fellow, and Vietnamese Women in Computing. Follow your own path; don't compare yourself to others. Fail fast. It was nice meeting other Vietnamese women in computing.

My birds-of-a-feather discussion on maternity leave. There were lots of good conversations about fitting maternity leave into a woman's career. Key take aways: (1) ask for what you need, (2) start building your network now.

Lunch time table topic: Asian American identity in computing. Intersectionality.

All the conversations I had with women from other companies and students. Catching up with former co-workers.

Anita Borg Institute: you belong (in this field).

Hour of Code: teaching computer science in public schools is the best way to increase diversity in CS.

Jo Miller career workshop: for leaders, "delivers results" is a must-have.

What worked: meet your friend's friends: I met so many women through my former co-worker. Lunch time table topics lead to interesting conversations. Speaking at the conference is a great way to be involved. I had good conversations with people sitting next to me at talks.

For next time (if there is a next time): talk with more students. Stay for the full conference: more time to network. Most technical talks are beginner level, so go to talks to learn something new, and not on topics you already know. After meeting someone, always get their name and / or business card. Stay in lodging as close to the conference as possible. Don't do work if possible.

Attending Grace Hopper Conference

I will be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing this October, in Houston, TX. I am looking forward to connecting with other women in data science and big data. I would love to compare notes on Spark, Scala, Databricks, and machine learning. I would also like to meet others doing agile and scrum, or leading data science projects. There will be talks on professional development, and I will be leading a discussion on the impact of maternity leave on a woman's career. Last, but not least, I will be happy to discuss jobs at Samsung SDSA with job seekers.

Are We There Yet? Grace Hopper Conference 2012

I recently attended the 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. What an amazing experience! GHC offers a breadth of technical talks, career development, networking, and role models for technical women. This year over 3500 attendees converged onto the Baltimore Convention Center: about half were undergraduate and graduate students in computer science; the rest were tech women from industry and academia.

Are We There Yet? The keynote speaker, Nora Denzel, a tech executive formerly of Intuit, HP, and IBM, delivered an entertaining speech on the conference theme, "Are we there yet?" Her definitive answer was "no": in fact, the fraction of tech jobs held by women has declined to 25%, down from 30% a decade ago. This is a concern because research has shown that more gender diverse teams make better decisions.

Not Your Normal Tech Conference. Unlike many tech conferences, GHC included talks and panels on a breadth of technical topics. Within a three-day period, I attended interesting discussions about data intensive computing, agile development, hackathons, and enterprise social networking. The goal was to share cutting-edge academic research and the latest best practices from industry.

Career Development. Another unique aspect were the panels on career development. Catalyst research firm led a session on "Sponsors or mentors: which will get you there?" The takeaway was that mentoring is essential, but sponsorship is needed for advancement. There were ample opportunities for informal networking; over lunch I learned about Codechix, a community of women developers in the Bay Area who get together for hacking sessions.

Making a Difference. Can one woman or organization make a difference on diversity? The resounding answer at GHC was "yes!" Take for example Harvey Mudd College, a small 750-student engineering college, which this year ranked #1 among schools in GHC attendance, with 58 attending. After intensive efforts in recruiting and retaining female CS majors, Harvey Mudd's fraction of female CS grads jumped from 10% in 2005, to 40% this year.

Don't Just Take my Word. Check out this Storify overview of GHC: sfy.co/mAvA (click on "Next Page" to load each day's summary.)