Communications of the ACM
Women in Tech: Change the Conversation
"No kid is going to want to be doing this if all we talk about is the negatives," 1-Page CEO Joanna Weidenmiller says.
Credit: Tumblr
At the G20 Summit-sponsored Women in Leadership conference in Brisbane, Australia in November, leaders pledged to reduce the gender gap in workforce participation 25 percent by 2025.
Joanna Weidenmiller, CEO of 1-Page, wants to inspire more women to participate in the tech industry by highlighting their inherent skills and the field's ample opportunities. "This will be biggest job creation opportunity ever, and if you don't know tech in the next 10, 20 years you will be obsolete," Weidenmiller says. She also says that government and school systems should incentivize businesses to teach computer and science skills, citing Step It Up America, a nationwide program led by UST Global that seeks to educate 5,000 minority women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields by 2020.
Weidenmiller also believes women need more encouraging role models and parental support. "I think we should be talking more about how do you have a work life balance," she says. "People like [Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer got to where they are because, regardless, they performed." Weidenmiller also believes it is essential to focus more on positives in order to change the conversation about women in technology. "No kid is going to want to be doing this if all we talk about is the negatives" of being a woman in the technology industry, she says.
From EE Times
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found