This year, the Grace Hopper Celebration was virtual. Apart from interactive workshops, all sessions were pre-recorded and available to watch for many days after airing. There were keynotes with great advocates for women such as the soccer player Megan Rapinoe and great women in tech such as Lisa Su of AMD, networking sessions where they used Zoom to put you in random virtual breakout rooms for 10 minutes at a time–a feature that I think would be cool to have in Teams if it doesn’t exist already–and if you woke up early enough, yoga or a meditation in the morning each day.
What virtual GHC could improve on
I went to GHC in person last year, and it was my first GHC. The most powerful part of it was being surrounded by other women in tech, after working for 7 years and going to school before that in an environment where being a woman, and being feminine, was always the minority. The virtual experience didn’t have quite the same effect on me, though the real-time events they did like workshops and networking sessions had a similar feeling on a smaller scale. The other thing I felt the virtual experience lacked was a way to talk to people informally, either one-on-one or in a group chat format. The networking sessions were good and everyone was nice (apart from one of my breakout sessions being dominated by a guy from the sponsor company for the session, which wasn’t cool), but the breakouts were very limited in length, and as is typical in Zoom/Teams calls, there wasn’t a good way to have side conversations to get to make more personal connections with people sitting next to you. Microsoft did set up a team in Teams for attendees to chat, and that satisfied the part of me that wanted to connect with others attending the conference.
And finally, the deferral of the Career Fair to a later date felt very unfair to students and other people who attended just to look for a job and might have spent the $200 for a student ticket out of their own pockets. They attempted to make up for this by making sessions available to students, but I still wonder how many people this left disappointed.
What virtual GHC did well
When you go to GHC in person, a lot of your time is spent waiting in line, especially if you want to go to the most popular sessions. The upside of this is that you sometimes get to know the folks standing next to you. However, it was nice to not have to worry about signing up for each session or waiting in line before it filled up, and since the sessions are available after airing for a while, it was very nice to not even have to choose between two sessions that were going on at the same time. One of the more important things about GHC is the talks themselves, and the quality of those was just as good this year. I left feeling re-energized to build a career in tech, and to lift up other women and minorities with me along the way.
There were many talks that I enjoyed, and here are summaries of my favorite ones.
Seeing Beyond Yourself: Effective Allyship, Advocacy, and Activism for Women in Computing
Panelists:
- Alicia Nicki Washington, Professor of the Practice, Computer Science at Duke University
- Fay Cobb Payton, Professor and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University (NCSU)
- Frieda McAlear, Senior Research Associate at Kapor Center for Social Impact
- Gail Chapman, Director of Outreach at Exploring Computer Science
- Lien Diaz, Director, Ed Innovation and Leadership at Constellations Center for Equity in Computing, Georgia Tech
Misconceptions
Most of the discussion was about common misconceptions about allyship and advocacy. These ones stood out the most to me, paraphrased in my own words.
- It’s not the role of women of color to educate white women. It’s not the role of women to educate men. Alicia Nicki Washington expressed this in the context of the recent incidents of police brutality and related protests, saying, “My black is tired.” Everyone seems to want to ask her opinion about these events and it’s extremely taxing for her to always be the educator, especially when she’s still grieving what happened.
- It’s extremely important to remember the impact of intersectionality. Being a minority in gender, race, or class can make things more difficult, but being more than one of these compounds the difficulty. As an example, in the original feminist movement, black women still weren’t seen as equal. There are still power structures and oppressive conditions in which we operate. “In order to fix the problem, we first have to admit it’s there.” – Kimberlé Crenshaw, who developed the theory of intersectionality.
- “I don’t think it’s enough to have a seat at the table, because sometimes the agenda is already set by the time we’re invited to the table. Let’s be honest, sometimes being invited is tokenism. I think it’s important that when you’re in these spaces, that if you’re going to have a seat at the table, we also want to have respectability for the voices, for the talents.” – Fay Cobb Payton
- Just being in tech and having a good salary doesn’t mean someone’s made it and all the money’s going into their own pocket. In many cases people are feeding whole families, ancestors, or peoples. It’s important to keep in mind that you often don’t know what people are going through in their lives.
- Many people want simple answers to complex problems. Just opening up tech to women doesn’t mean all women are actually equally welcome and have an equal chance to succeed.
Allyship
There were also a few suggestions on how to approach allyship of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and women in tech.
- Allyship looks like actively joining movements. However, jumping on bandwagons when terrible things happen, such as the pandemic or George Floyd’s death, doesn’t itself make change. It needs to be sustained, and people need to truly believe in the movement.
- For native peoples, build an accountable relationship with the people whose lands you live and work. Help them achieve their goals.
- In sciences, being taught history isn’t usually part of the curriculum. There’s a lot to learn to be a true ally. Ask and understand what you can do to help. Go to where the folks are that you need to connect with–this might not be in tech.
Beyond the Code with Jen and Aparna
Speakers:
- Aparna Pappu, Vice President, G Suite
- Jen Fitzpatrick, Senior Vice President, Core & Corporate Engineering at Google
This talk was a very candid discussion between two senior executives at Google. I’ll touch on a few of the topics they covered that spoke the most to me.
Biggest failures
Jen started at Google as an intern working on Local Search, and continued working on this project as a full-timer. Once she started doing testing with real data, she realized the search feature she made worked great in Silicon Valley, but the content just wasn’t there once you got outside the valley. She ended up having to completely scrap her code and start over. She now sees it as one of her greatest successes because of how much she learned: don’t wait until super late in the game to do testing and contingency planning, and you have to set your sights high and be willing to fail in order to get those learning moments and get the perspective of what works and what doesn’t.
Aparna was studying networking at Georgia Tech, looking at streaming over multicast to take advantage of resources. It was done in software rather than hardware. She had a big bug in her code where she had no rate limiting, and it brought down the entire campus’ network for Georgia Tech and also some neighboring schools. It made her realize code isn’t what you write — it runs in an ecosystem, an environment. It taught her a lot about networking, and it was embarrassing but she got through it with a helpful peer group.
These stories spoke to me because you don’t often hear about failures like this from successful people. It’s important to remember that the only way to succeed is to be open to failure and learn from your failures.
Confidence in tech
Aparna found that working at a startup helped her confidence in tech. She got to try all parts of the stack: UI, application code, and kernel code. She recommends trying everything, especially earlier in your career when there are fewer downsides. She also spoke about initially being afraid of public speaking and talking to customers, but she pushed herself and volunteered to go on-site to talk to a customer to help debug something. It was scary at first but she ended up having fun, and talking to customers helped her understand the context of the issue better.
Jen has had peer groups that helped her through times when she was aware she was struggling. She learned through repeated exposure that you can dive into something new and unknown and get through it, eventually becoming more comfortable. She gave an example of this where, she was given an offer to lead a team in a completely different tech stack and product and she initially didn’t want to take it. Her manager strongly encouraged her to do it, and she went ahead with it. She learned that coming in with fresh eyes was very valuable to her new team, and she could use that to add value while building up her expertise.
“Leadership is not about being the smartest person in the room; it’s about thinking critically, asking questions, and bringing people together with a common sense of purpose.” – Jen Fitzpatrick
Advice to sustain through difficult times
Jen spoke about how resilience is a more important life skill than ever these days. Give yourself permission to not be operating at perfection at all times. Manage your own personal energy. Sometimes life’s curveballs mean it takes more energy than usual to do things. And sometimes you have to sprint, but you can’t do that all the time. Don’t try to be superhuman! Aparna agreed and said it took her a while to feel confident enough to say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed, I need to take the rest of the day off” to her team.
Aparna also mentioned that a colleague told her once, “You smile too much, people won’t take you seriously.” It really hurt her–she believed it was possible to be serious and smiling at the same time. She realized she doesn’t have to be like everyone else. There’s no one definition of “professional” at work. Leading and working in the way that works best for you means you’ll have more energy for everything else!
Parting advice for women
“Unequivocally – Stay. This is an amazing field, you will learn so much. Yes, things will happen. People will say things to you where you feel like they’re being a jerk, but don’t let that demotivate you. There’s so much more here and we need each and every one of you to stay here so that it’s not just a very small circle of women at the very top. Please, please hang in there and grow and have fun.” – Aparna Pappu
This made me tear up. It’s simultaneously the one thing I wish for the most for women in tech today, but I also know just how difficult it can be sometimes. I want to do whatever I can to help women and minorities who are struggling in tech and feeling like they don’t belong, or dealing with burnout, and I encourage everyone to do the same.
Abie Award Series: Why We Need to Make the Internet Less Racist and Sexist
Speaker: Dr. Jess Wade, Physicist and Wikipedia Activist at Imperial College London
Every year, AnitaB.org, the organization that runs GHC, recognizes the success of women technologists through the ABIE Awards. This year the winner of the Change Agent Abie Award, which “recognizes women who have created opportunities for girls and women in technology”, went to Dr. Jess Wade for her work with Wikipedia, and I thoroughly enjoyed the talk she gave. Her area of study is in material science, but she’s a huge advocate for women and minorities in STEM.
Underrepresentation of women in STEM
She shared some statistics from the UK of how underrepresented women are in STEM:
- 23% of AP physics students are women
- 10% A-level CS students are women (A-levels in the UK are similar to AP tests where they can get you out of entry-level college classes)
- Girls outperform boys in computing, advanced math, and physics
- Men scoring at or below 1st percentile in Physics, Engineering, and Computer Science (PECS) were equally as represented as women in the 80th percentile
- 35% of Computer Science and Physics teachers have a relevant degree
- Girls are 2.5x more likely to study physics at an all-girls school
- In the UK, there are around 19k professors. 18k of them are white, and only 35 are black women. Only 1 of those black women is a professor of Physics, and only 1 of them is a professor of Computer Science.
Young peoples’ decisions are influenced by their parents, their teachers, and by what they read online and in social media. And even if your child isn’t allowed on social media, they are likely still influenced by kids’ books. She shared these stats about kids’ books in the UK:
- 19% of main characters in kids’ books are girls
- <1% of main characters in kids’ books are people of color
- Among all bestselling children’s books in the UK last year (2019), only 1 main character had a disability
There are a lot of similar issues with textbooks. Two articles she shared about this:
- Not one woman’s name included in GCSE science national curriculum, study finds
- Black women scientists missing from textbooks, study finds
We know the influence that it can have if you read about someone you think you could be like, who completely inspires you, or you see a little bit of yourself in them. Hidden Figures and Black Panther showed a whole generation of young people that black early-career engineers and researchers and scientists completely can transform the world. Why aren’t we making more media like this?
The influence of Wikipedia
This brings us to Wikipedia, another huge source of influence. It is the 5th most frequented website in the world, with 30-70 million different visitors a day. During the pandemic it’s become an incredibly powerful and important source for non-partisan information. On March 29 2020, when the pandemic was peaking in everyone’s consciousness, Wikipedia got 650 million views. It influences education, media, journalists, the direction of science, medical information and care, money made from tourism, and is a major source of information for many home assistants like Alexa or Siri.
So we know what’s on Wikipedia matters. Is what matters on Wikipedia? 80-90% of Wikipedia editors are men, and the majority of them are white and in North America. 18.6% of biographies on English-speaking Wikipedia are about women. Since she learned this statistic, every day she’s written a biography of a woman or person of color on Wikipedia, and to date she’s written 1,120 biographies. One woman she wrote a biography for was Gladys West, a black woman born in the 1930s in the US. Gladys graduated with a degree in mathematics when not many women were studying mathematics, and in fact in the UK she wouldn’t have been able to go to university at all. She ultimately worked for the US government, working on the early computations in mathematics for GPS technology, which we all rely on and use so much now.
Since the article about Gladys was written, Gladys has been nominated twice for BBC’s top 100 women, which increased her page’s views from thousands a day to tens of thousands a day, and she was inducted into the US Air Force hall of fame, meaning there’s now photos that the government has given to wiki commons that we can look at and are on her Wikipedia page. So many people have been talking about her, singing about her, using her in their teaching resources, because she’s on Wikipedia.
The best things about Wikipedia: you can teach anyone to edit it, and it’s completely free.
Final thoughts
I’ll let my final thoughts be Dr. Jess Wade’s final thoughts:
- Listen. Why are people not choosing certain subjects or professions? Make a case for why they should feel included.
- Be an ally. Work with marginalized groups in areas where you’re privileged. We shouldn’t always leave the activism for the people in marginalized groups.
- Amplify. If you have any kind of platform at all, amplify others’ voices and affect change for other people.
- Celebrate and nominate. Women and people of color are incredibly underrepresented in the people who win significant science and technology awards and honors. Spend an afternoon or a weekend putting together a prize package to nominate someone for something phenomenal. You’ll not only transform their career, but you’ll tell all the other people watching those awards programs that this person is impressive.
- Lift others as you climb. As your career grows, lift up others along the way. Collectively we can make the world a better place, but only if we work together.
- Thou shalt not read the comments. Whenever you’re being this advocate for change, you’re going to get some frightful pushback. So always remember to not read the comments!