First, I very much appreciate having this Q&A session available and am grateful for the panel who brought insight and shared their experiences and for Justin Reock who did a good job hosting.
That being said, my takeaway from this was that "diversity in the workplace" and gender bias has not changed much since my career began 25 years ago. Although the message of "we must keep trying" was clear, the fact that no one was able to cite a specific example of how diversity programs have changed their workplace was somewhat discouraging. Possibly if the panel had been able to prepare answers it might have been more inspiring.
And perhaps I am more "experienced" than some with the history of sexism in technology, but I couldn't help but feel that this session was marginalized by being held in a separate room during lunch. I do understand that if women want improved standing then they have to make the time to work on it, but in order to do that we were asked to sacrifice valuable networking time at an already short conference. I apologize if this is happenstance, but I recall the panel happening in the main room with all of the conference goers last year, so the optics just didn't seem great to me.
Again, thank you so much to RogueWave and ChickTek for having this discussion - it is fantastic that you took the time to offer this talk at all and it is great to know that this is an issue that is finally making it to major tech venues. Please keep it up!
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First, I very much appreciate having this Q&A session available and am grateful for the panel who brought insight and shared their experiences and for Justin Reock who did a good job hosting.
That being said, my takeaway from this was that "diversity in the workplace" and gender bias has not changed much since my career began 25 years ago. Although the message of "we must keep trying" was clear, the fact that no one was able to cite a specific example of how diversity programs have changed their workplace was somewhat discouraging. Possibly if the panel had been able to prepare answers it might have been more inspiring.
And perhaps I am more "experienced" than some with the history of sexism in technology, but I couldn't help but feel that this session was marginalized by being held in a separate room during lunch. I do understand that if women want improved standing then they have to make the time to work on it, but in order to do that we were asked to sacrifice valuable networking time at an already short conference. I apologize if this is happenstance, but I recall the panel happening in the main room with all of the conference goers last year, so the optics just didn't seem great to me.
Again, thank you so much to RogueWave and ChickTek for having this discussion - it is fantastic that you took the time to offer this talk at all and it is great to know that this is an issue that is finally making it to major tech venues. Please keep it up!