Billionaire philanthropists Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott have formed the ultimate dream team, awarding tens of millions to advance girls and women this week.
“The awardees are strong teams working on the front lines and from within communities to help women build power in their lives and careers,” MacKenzie Scott said. This is not the first time she has given directly to nonprofits.
Last year, her team took a data-driven approach to identifying organizations, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital. She gifted over $4 billion in four months to the 384 organizations listed in her blog post.
“We can break the patterns of history and advance gender equality, but we must commit to lifting up organizations, like the ones receiving awards today, that are ready to lift up women and girls.” – Melinda French Gates
Here are the four winning ideas, each awarded $10 million grant:
A cross-movement coalition of organizations transforming antiquated attitudes around caregiving as unpaid work to establish a publicly supported care infrastructure — National Domestic Workers Allianceorganizes domestic workers in the United States for respect, recognition and labor standards, and Caring Across Generations connects across generations to strengthen family and caregiving relationships.
Ada Academy offers a cost-free software developer academy for women and gender expansive folks. With the grant, the nonprofit will expand their immersive training and internship program creating pathways for thousands of women and gender expansive people into impactful software development careers.
The nonprofit Girls Inc proposes “Project Accelerate” — accelerating young women’s trajectories through college and career entry, leveraging partnerships with corporations and social impact organizations to ensure their preparation and access to positions of influence. Project Accelerate aims to lift 5,400 diverse women into corporate positions of power and influence, shifting the equity landscape for generations.
The Future is Indigenous Womxn is a project to support and scale impactful businesses owned by Native womxn. An established coalition between New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead will deliver a culturally relevant solution to the gender and racial wealth gap — scaling impactful businesses owned by Native womxn to create a waterway of investable companies. Their growth will increase power and influence within their families and unlock potential for wealth creation through community employment opportunities. In addition, the national investment landscape will be assessed through an Indigenous lens, engaging investors to remove systemic blocks Indigenous people face.
It’s time to give gender equality the attention and investment it deserves. That’s why I’m proud to announce the @EqltyCantWait Challenge $10 million awardees:
— Melinda French Gates (@melindagates) July 29, 2021
The “Equality Can’t Wait” challenge will award additional funding to two finalists, and feature top ideas on the new Equality Can’t Wait Idea Lab website. We can’t wait!
We have ADOPTED a public Oakland school starting in the pandemic 2021-2022 school year, serving students grades 6-12.
Our goal is to support students at Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, California serving grades 6-12 with a computer science pathway, by providing access to role models from the professional community for these students.
If your employer wants to Adopt an Oakland School for the upcoming school year, please email osv@oaklandfund.org.
Girl Geek X CCPA Volunteering School Year in Review 2021-2022:
Thank you to our volunteers for August 2021 BACK-TO-SCHOOL support of CCPA teachers in East Oakland. Here’s a group pic we remembered to snag before we spent the afternoon helping teachers prepare their classrooms and hallways for back-to-school reopening! (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers for November 2021 CAREER PANEL for CCPA students! Volunteers shared invaluable career advice with 11th and 12th graders about showing up, making connections, and more. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers for December 2021 support of CCPA senior capstone projects in Oakland. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers on April 26, 2022 who attended Day 1 of Senior Capstone Project Presentations. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers on April 27, 2022 who attended Day 2 of Senior Capstone Project Presentations. (Read more)
May 11, 2022 Teacher Appreciation Luncheon at Coliseum College Prep Academy in East Oakland with Anthony’s Cookies and Girl Geek X goodie bags. (More pictures)
This partnership is facilitated by Oakland Public Education Fund, a non-profit connecting groups with schools to make a positive impact on school culture and student achievement through relevant and meaningful volunteer projects.
November 12, 2021 (10am-12pm):CAREER PANEL – Girl Geek X volunteers from Amazon, Microsoft, Planet, and Afresh spoke about careers in tech during 11th and 12th grade seminar.
Tuesday or Wednesday, April 26-27, 2022 (4pm-6pm): SENIOR PROJECT PRESENTATION – The school would like to invite as many volunteers that are interested in attending and providing feedback. The students voiced that they enjoyed having professional feedback and this is the perfect opportunity! Give crucial feedback on students’ Senior Capstones (apps that address a need in the community).
Wednesday, May 11, 2022:TEACHER APPRECIATION – Girl Geek X isbuying lunch for educators to say thank you for all that they do. We also assembled goodie bags for the educators, with supplies for the classroom and self care.
In the “More About You” section, it says “Choose the Option that Best Describes You”. Volunteers should select “Adopt an Oakland School Partner“.
Once you click that, another question pops up asking “Where do you work / where are you affiliated?”. Volunteers should write “Girl Geek X“
Look out for an e-signature email (subject line “Verify: Signed Response for Form “One-Time Volunteer Registration”) and you have to sign that form as Covid-19 liability waiver.
“We wanted to host a fun office event, and also give our employees an opportunity to do some public speaking in a really safe, supportive environment. They had so much fun. It was such a great event!” said CTO Heather Rivers, who leads engineering, product, design, and security at Mode. Hiring and recruiting talent is one of her priorities as an engineering leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she attributes Girl Geek Dinner as influential to multiple engineering hires!
Company: Mode (Industry: B2B software, Employees: 100-500)
Funding Stage: $46.4M total raised – Series C (2019)
Event Capacity: 130 (Tickets Sold: 271)
Successful Hiring: 2 (1 sourced, 1 influenced within 4 months post-event; expecting more long-term)
Mode CTO Heather Rivers sponsored the Mode Girl Geek Dinner with objectives in mind: “Get our name out there, get brand exposure, do a really fun event, have the community here in our office, etc. It was a great opportunity to showcase our culture! We expect it to pay off longer term. A couple years later, these attendees will remember being in our office for this great event and they’ll come back to work with us, or they’ll go out and tell friends about us.”
How Girl Geek X partnership fit into the bigger recruiting & inclusion strategy
“It was great for engineering — and not just engineering, but employer brand awareness. Hiring in technology is competitive here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we always have to be doing more — and we’re always trying new stuff to get our name out there and get candidates engaged,” said CTO Heather Rivers about how Girl Geek X contributed to Mode’s successful engineering recruiting plan.
Advice for folks PLANNING a Girl Geek Dinner
“Invest in the talks and the event experience! If we had thrown it together last minute, we may not have gotten nearly as much out of it, and folks may not have been as interested in following up to learn about the roles we’re hiring for. We created a lot of community goodwill with attendees who recognized the effort we put into making it a great experience,” said Mode CTO Heather Rivers.
The Mode Girl Geek Dinner was rewarded with high attendee rating, and earned rave reviews for excellent content.
Advice for women ATTENDING a Girl Geek Dinner
“Get to know the people there. Make a point to talk to speakers and employees. Make connections! We invited attendees in our hiring pipeline (women who were considering joining the team, or even who we were just hoping to influence to apply). One signed after the dinner, and it’s not clear she would have signed if she hadn’t experienced the event. Another candidate who heard about us from the Girl Geek Dinner was hired as well. She is now an engineer at Mode!” said CTO Heather Rivers after the Mode Girl Geek Dinner yielded two successful engineering hires.
Girl Geek XMode = increased employee morale!
“An important side benefit or happy accident: our Girl Geek Dinner was a fun internal event!It was great for morale-building and reinforces with the team that we’re part of the community here at Mode, not isolated. It was great for retention. People were thrilled with it. Overall, it was a great experience! I’m already recommending it to everyone I know. You should host one!” encouraged Mode CTO Heather Rivers.
The key to resilience with a career in tech is your network, especially for women and introverts. Here are strategies from the Girl Geek X community for maintaining trajectory of jobs, careers, passion projects, and more.
#1 — Leverage the buddy system
For the past decade, Sukrutha Bhadouria and Angie Chang have carpooled together to Girl Geek Dinners, from San Francisco to San Jose, when schedules align. This makes sitting in traffic almost enjoyable as we happily catch up about family and friends, work, and more. At Girl Geek Dinners, we stay abreast on current technology trends and the latest career advice for women in tech.
Meeting interesting new people at inclusive women’s events is easier to do than you think. Some confess they are dreaming of working elsewhere but are afraid of making the leap. Some inspire us to do more with our time and abilities. Some remind us how we can do better. Onstage, executives and engineers take turns on the microphone sharing best practices, giving lightning tech talks, and hosting panel discussions. You can listen and learn intently, or sit back (because talks are recorded for Girl Geek X’s YouTube channel) while your brain processes a work problem with a welcome change of scenery. Also, be sure to check out the company’s snack, beverage and women’s toiletries collections before leaving with some company swag.
Girl Geek Dinners are a force multiplier — a safe, inclusive “third place” apart from work and home, to recharge and recoup. Staying in touch with people you meet shouldn’t be a chore to sweat over — just add new friends on your preferred social networks because you just never know when you may want to drop them a note.
#2 — Do the work & communicate it
A common feeling in tech workplaces is that men are promoted at higher rates than their female counterparts. Doing excellent work will not be rewarded by more pay and a better job title.
Women succeed by rigorously communicating progress and learnings — from writing and sharing lists of accomplishments, and asking regularly about getting that promotion:
“Never in my professional career had a situation, I mean NEVER, had a situation where a manager has said, ‘Great, Arquay, you’re doing awesome. Time to promote you to the next level.’ Every single promotion that I’ve ever gotten has been me saying — ‘I am operating at this level. I’ve done all of these things, and I think I’m ready for the next level and here is why’ and you hand this [accomplishments list] to your manager and have a conversation with your manager to demonstrate these things.” — Arquay Harris, VP of Engineering at Webflow
Transparency is key for companies: provide regular audits and share promotion rates across gender and race for every promotion cycle and level. Industry leader Salesforce audits employees salaries annually then spends millions to reconcile any gender or racial discrepancies in employees pay, and shares annual Equality data and quarterly Equality updates.
People of color leave tech workplaces in droves citing unfairness. Such high rates of turnover ring up a $16 billion a year problem for the tech industry:
“Tech companies spend millions of dollars finding, recruiting and onboarding top-level talent, but the data show they must focus real attention on retaining the talent they’ve got. Unfair, non-inclusive and subtly-toxic cultures drive people out, and the trends are particularly pronounced for women, LGBTQ employees, and underrepresented people of color.” — Dr. Allison Scott, lead author of Kapor Center’s Tech Leavers Study
The Tech Leavers Study quotes female engineers who reported about the unfair promotions, and Black employees who bristled at being called “diversity hires” and being otherwise other-ed in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion trainings have always been in the toolkit for corporate HR to leverage, and while the Black Lives Matter movement rallied white people to utilize their privilege to dismantle systems that oppress other groups and increased awareness for equity globally, myriad organizers are still working on elements for long-term, systemic change in the world.
By attending Girl Geek Dinners, women can investigate alternate workplaces that may have better work cultures and different coworkers / managers, and meet more women in tech who will refer fellow girl geeks to their next job. Because Ally is a verb.
#3 — Move those goal posts
We’ve heard that what got you here won’t get you there, but how can you find role models for new goals, ambitions, and careers? If you don’t work at a company with tens of thousands of employees to provide dozens of women executives to look up to, Girl Geek Dinners hosted at various companies provides an endless parade of role models — speakers — with tables of girl geeks sharing their experiences, challenges, and connecting over dinner over shared experiences.
Learning to move her goal posts at work is a winning plan for Sukrutha Bhadouria, who has been managing high-performing teams at Salesforce for seven years. She was recently promoted to Director of Engineering, and welcomed the good news as she eased back into work from taking parental leave.
Sukrutha reflected on how her mindset has shifted over the years:
“I was so burned out after grad school, so I coasted for a few years. I started to see people zip past me, and I realized that I needed to find new goals to achieve, and once I achieve them, find more goals, rinse and repeat. My advice is to always look ahead at your goals, but when you get close, don’t underestimate the achievement. Take a moment to reflect on how far you’ve come. Then look ahead again and fight to the finish line!” — Sukrutha Bhadouria, Director of Engineering at Salesforce
If you’re facing a particularly tough challenge at work, you may benefit from enlisting some help. Some employers provide or subsidize the cost for professional development thru third-party coaches who work with underrepresented groups (minorities, women) to move up corporate ladders, reported NPR. This is important because all-white and all-male executive boards and executive teams are common, visible, and troublesome symbols of company cultures that are ripe for transformation.
Minji Wong coaches executives at Fortune 500 companies for decades, and focuses on coaching Asian women leaders. Through discovery, her clients find that 80% of challenges lie in misalignment of their strategic leadership vision- and how it’s embodied, expressed, and perceived by their teammates. For Asian-American women, making the most of your Asian assets at work means reconciling traits like humility and work ethic with what works in American workplaces. You can find yourself in a cycle of frustration and resentment you learn that assertiveness and informal relationships catalyze career growth, not simply doing excellent work.
“To bridge gaps between expectations and behaviors, Asian leaders benefit from understanding how they show up at work. Self awareness of gaps between your intended leadership brand and how it actually lands is critical for career ascension and success.” — Minji Wong, executive coach, At Her Best
She works with individuals to “identify the top behaviors or actions necessary in order to be seen, felt and heard by others. Common themes include taking up space and self authorization. Being aware of intersectionality in gender/race and taking action is critical for career success.”
Leading authentically lets others to see who you are, so they can more fully understand your point of view, bringing detractors to your side.
Asians in tech hold a unique “mix of privilege and exclusion that gives us just enough power to speak up but not enough to gain equitable access to opportunities and safety,” write Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou — “It’s no coincidence that those who initiated the first wave of lawsuits against tech monoliths (Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, and Twitter)” and that those who called out investors for harassment were almost all Asian women.
Research from Ascend foundation has found: “From a racial perspective, Executive Parity Index analysis shows Whites overall are overrepresented in the Executive level, while all minority races are underrepresented at the Executive level, with Asians and Blacks the least likely to be Executives. Asian women and Black women are the least likely of all cohorts to be Executives.”
For the time being, the onus is still on the individual to do the work and be recognized by management as a high-potential candidate for promotion. Companies may have a budget for leadership development, bringing in executive and career coaches to support their ambitious new leaders. You can also tap an executive coach to work outside the corporate structure and get that development work done for yourself.
And if you find yourself feeling burned out, depressed, or always irritated or angry, consider enlisting support from a licensed therapist for a short-term or long-term goal. Therapists work with people facing a wide variety of struggles, from depression, anxiety and trauma to trouble with relationships, multicultural issues and difficult life transitions.
“I like to focus on micro-progressions. People beat themselves up as they come in and want to make change, and they want to change faster than they are. The 25-year habit they want to change needs more time, self-compassion and self-realization of micro-progression. Let’s say, you are a big spender — celebrate that moment of hesitation when shopping online, and reflect back that, hey, you did think about making a different decision and didn’t, but that didn’t used to happen before, acknowledge that growing self-awareness.” — Nicole Chung, PsyD, licensed therapist
Many women have found EMDR therapy beneficial and proven in treating PTSD from work and other traumas, so they can rewire the brain and resume living full lives.
Support groups (facilitated in Facebook groups for people of a certain job title, recovery from addictions, or health afflictions) can be helpful in providing feedback and camaraderie. Whether you’re silently struggling with infertility or being a new mom, there are folks who understand where you’re coming from, and will empathize — and maybe share a tip on what has worked for them in their journey.
Girl Geek X Community: Have you overcome a personal/professional challenge, or want to share a story about a transformative experience?
Please email us at hello@girlgeek.io — we’d love to hear your story. If you haven’t solved a problem yet, and want to share your current challenge, email us too! While we may not be able to personally respond to every email, please know we will read every single one of them. Thank you in advance!
Our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference hosted over 4,000 around the world—the largest gathering yet of mid-to-senior women in tech celebrating International Women’s Day. By the numbers, Elevate hosted 26 speakers across 17 sessions,supported by 13 sponsors — check out their jobs, they are hiring!
Top 10 Highest-Rated Sessions from Elevate 2021 Conference
Here are the top-rated talks from Elevate 2021, as voted on by attendees! You can watch (or re-watch) them at the links below:
Building High-Performance Teams in a Pandemic – Elaine Zhou, CTO at Change.org, Rachana Kumar, VP of Engineering at Etsy, Tina Huang, CTO & Co-Founder at Transposit and Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder at Girl Geek X
Special Thank You To Elevate 2021 Sponsoring Companies
Thank you to the great folks at: Atlassian, Slack, OpenAI, U.S. Digital Service, Carta, Salesforce, Intel AI, Johnson & Johnson, MaestroQA and Amazon Web Services for supporting the 4th annual Elevate virtual conference for International Women’s Day!
#1 – Kellee Van Horne (Director of Client Success at Affirm) shares guidance on career moves: choose your boss and reporting chain carefully, prioritize roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise, and be clear on what skills or content you want to learn in your next role.
#2 – Anu Bharadwaj (VP of Product at Atlassian) encourages attendees to lead with your strengths to find resilience. She talks about self care and allies in her keynote.
#3 –Sukrutha Bhadouria (Director of Engineering at Salesforce), Elaine Zhou (CTO at Change.org), Tina Huang (CTO & Founder at Transposit), Rachana Kumar (VP of Engineering at Etsy) discuss building high-performance teams in a pandemic.
#4 – Ashley Dudgeon (VP of Engineering at Salesforce) shares stories climbing the ladder at Salesforce, and navigating two maternity leaves. Hear advice on decision-making in the face of career challenges, and negotiating for impactful projects to secure career growth.
#5 – Nicole Salzman Page (Product Manager at Zumba) shares her new communications strategy for staying aligned with Engineering, Executives and Business Stakeholders to release products faster while working from home.
#6 – Kat Chiluiza (UX Researcher at Google) shares tips to empower folks on how to advocate for more inclusivity at their job. With real world examples, she will discuss dos/don’ts for research surveys or interviews.
#7 – Dessa discusses her viral hit “Who’s Yellen Now” — a 90-second Hamilton-inspired send-up to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — one part biography, one part brag rap. She talks about her creative writing process and what she’s up to now.
#8 – Vrushali Paunikar (VP of Product at Carta) speaks candidly about her own career journey and why a problem-oriented mindset has been such an important tenet. She shares her problem-solving flywheel framework.
#9 – Amy Quispe, Julie Meloni, Elizabeth Schweinsberg, and Gina Maini (Engineers at U.S. Digital Service) discuss solving gnarly problems in government tech, and how they are using their skills to improve government services and benefits for all Americans.
#10 – Tracy Stampfli (Senior Staff Engineer at Slack) talks about modernizing and refactoring code, with lessons drawn from an overhaul of the mobile codebases at Slack.
Our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference hosted over 4,000 around the world—the largest gathering yet of mid-to-senior women in tech celebrating International Women’s Day.
We hosted 26 speakers across 17 sessions – scroll down to watch (or re-watch) their talks:
Anu Bharadwaj, VP of Product at Atlassian, in her morning keynote shares tips like leading with your strengths and how to find resilience.
Faylene Bell, Director of Digital Marketing at Nvidia, talks about extending opportunities in digital marketing to drive growth for technology leaders.
Kat Chiluiza, UX Researcher at Google, shares tips to empower folks on how to advocate for more inclusivity at their job. With real world examples, she will discuss dos/don’ts for research surveys or interviews.
Amy Quispe, Julie Meloni, Elizabeth Schweinsberg, and Gina Maini, Four Engineers at U.S. Digital Service, discuss solving gnarly problems in government tech, and how they are using their skills to improve government services and benefits for all Americans.
Ashley Pilipiszyn, Technical Director at OpenAI, discusses how prompt design and engineering works to build a variety of GPT-3-powered applications. Check out her final slide in her talk for her contact info to request access to the GPT-3 API to build your own!
Dimah Zaidalkilani, Director of Product at GitHub, shares her journey from Palestine to Microsoft Product Management: accessing resources to learn how to interview, to overcoming imposter syndrome, with the support of allies. She chats with Iliana Montauk, CEO & Co-Founder at Manara, on elevating engineers in emerging markets.
Ashley Dudgeon, VP of Engineering at Salesforce, shares stories climbing the ladder at Salesforce, and navigating two maternity leaves. Hear advice on decision-making in the face of career challenges, and negotiating for impactful projects to secure career growth.
Amrisha Sinha, Infrastructure Engineering Team Lead at MaestroQA, covers 5 DevOps insights that are essential for engineering managers to know to unlock their true potential.
Sukrutha Bhadouria, Director of Engineering at Salesforce, Elaine Zhou, CTO at Change.org, Tina Huang, CTO & Founder at Transposit, Rachana Kumar, VP of Engineering at Etsy discuss building high-performance teams in a pandemic.
Swati Raju, Head of Confluence Experience Engineering at Atlassian, shares her learnings on Confluence Cloud of building a reliability habit in the team, treating reliability front and center in team processes, tools, and decisions.
Tracy Stampfli, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack, talks about modernizing and refactoring code, with lessons drawn from an overhaul of the mobile codebases at Slack.
Nicole Salzman Page, Product Manager at Zumba, shares her new communications strategy for staying aligned with Engineering, Executives and Business Stakeholders to release products faster while working from home.
Kellee Van Horne, Director of Client Success at Affirm, shares guidance on career moves, from choosing your boss and reporting chain carefully, to prioritizing roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise.
Vrushali Paunikar, VP of Product at Carta, talks candidly about her own career journey and why a problem-oriented mindset has been such an important tenet. She shares her problem-solving flywheel framework.
Hema Chamraj, Director of Technology Advocacy at Intel AI, talks about responsible considerations to address limitations presented by AI in healthcare and drive better patient outcomes for all.
Suzanna Khatchatrian, Senior Engineering Manager, Product Security at Slack, covers several best practices and explores how Slack’s Product Security team collaborates with other Engineering teams.
Dessa discusses her viral hit “Who’s Yellen Now” — a 90-second Hamilton-inspired send-up to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — one part biography, one part brag rap. She talks about her creative writing process and what she’s up to.
Special Thank You To Elevate 2021 Sponsoring Companies
Thank you to the great folks at Atlassian, Slack, OpenAI, U.S. Digital Service, Carta, Salesforce,Intel AI, Johnson & Johnson, MaestroQA and Amazon Web Services for supporting Girl Geek X: Elevate 2021 virtual conference!
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Girl Geek X hosted our fourth-annual Elevate virtual conference. The March 8 event featured luminary engineering and product leaders who came together to elevate the conversation around women – an important opportunity to empower the women globally in a pandemic with diverse set of talks from technical women leaders on the hard and soft skills needed to succeed.
Events such as these, along with our Girl Geek Dinners, are important ways to elevate women as experts in their profession, to provide a safe space to speak candidly about career development. The inspiring speakers shared nuggets of wisdom and encouraged each other to persevere.
Here are 5 key takeaways from Elevate 2021 Conference:
#1 – Lead with your strengths
“Resilience is the capacity to deal with setbacks, yet continue to grow. It is also the cornerstone of mental health. Good mental health doesn’t mean never being sad,” saidAnu Bharadwaj, VP Product at Atlassian in her morning keynote:
“When you start a movement, you have a chance to move the Overton window. As a leader, you should shift the frame of reference, that the unthinkable and radical can happen. As a leader, my personal style is to be the activist, the person who shifts the Overton window, doing so energizes me.”
She weighed in on prioritizing strengths over weaknesses – that while it is important to build skills in your career, Anu encouraged conference attendees to “really lean into your strengths” – because it is when you are happiest, and helps you to be resilient.
#2 – Make problem-solving a virtuous cycle of communicated learnings
“Share that you’ve solved a problem, or what you learned by trying. Women often shy away from this step. You won’t earn the right to solve bigger problems without sharing what you’re working on,” said Vrushali Paunikar, VP of Product at Carta.
It is totally OK to fail! In fact, “a failure will be full of learning and it will help you form your next hypothesis.” She is adamant that “your solution hypothesis matches the problem.” Her problem-solving flywheel framework is here:
“Tell your manager what you want to grow toward. Flag things early, and communicate specific idea(s) as to how you want your career to grow so they can keep it in mind as the org changes,” said Kellee Van Horne, Director of Client Success at Affirm.
She distilled guidance into 3 key principles: choose your boss carefully, prioritizing roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise, and being clear on what skills you want to learn in your next role – so you can look for growth opportunities.
Research suggests mid-career women are often held back from the C-suite due to lack of experience managing a P&L, for example. Here are some skills to consider:
“Executives aren’t thinking about your project all day. Don’t overload them. They may only need to know the goal and how you’re going to measure success. Make sure you’re giving the right information to the person receiving it,” said Nicole Salzman Page, Product Manager at Zumba.
She shares her framework to release products faster while working from home – check out her new communications strategy for staying aligned with engineering, executives and business stakeholders to launch products faster!
“It was my childhood as a refugee that taught me that resilience was the key to not only surviving, but thriving. At 18, I thought I might have ruined my future by not pursuing medicine. Studying computer science seemed easy compared to what my parents went thru,” said Ashley Dudgeon, VP Engineering at Salesforcein her afternoon keynote.
She talks about her experiences in childhood, growing up in east San Jose with encouraging teachers and coaches. Ashley made a big bet on herself in college, spending two years taking computer science classes to see if her GPA would be high enough to be accepted into the selective major at UC Berkeley:
“I remember seeing my name above the [computer science major] cut line and feeling the weight of the two years slipping off my shoulders. The bet that I made on myself paid off. It has nothing to do with the data structures, the compiler I built, the mathematics I applied. What I did gain was the sense of resilience and confidence in myself.”
Fast forward 15 years — Ashley successfully led a multi-release project at Salesforce that solved a problem that hadn’t been solved in 17 years, and navigated two maternity leaves at Salesforce (which has an amazing parental leave policy).
She shares a story about negotiation:
“I believe the transition back from maternity leave is one of the most vulnerable in a female’s career – and it typically happens in the mid career. So what did I do? I was far too stubborn, or, dare I say, resilient, to put my ambitions on the back burner. I sought support from my trusted circle, and reached out to every technical leader I knew and talked to each. After two months, my boss told me a new project was on the horizon – and that he believed I was the one that I could deliver it. That’s when I knew I had to negotiate. I told him that if I committed to the project and helped make it a success, he’d put me up for promotion in exchange. It took 1.5 years to build and release, and the reception from customers was phenomenal. My boss held up his end of the deal, and I was promoted to Vice President.”
GET THE WORD OUT. Tell your friends and co-workers about our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference livestreaming on March 8, 2021 in celebration of International Women’s Day!
Spread the word: In addition to emailing the colleagues you work with directly, consider creating a calendar invite, posting on Slack and to your internal bulletin boards, ERG groups, Chatter, LinkedIn, etc. We welcome all genders and allies – this event is relevant to everyone!
PUT IT ON THE BIG SCREEN. Connect your laptop to a projector or HD television. Try a VGA cable to connect to a projector, or an HDMI cable to connect to your HD television. Crank up the sound. Enjoy!
SHARE THE CONFERENCE LINK (ELEVATE.GIRLGEEK.IO) so everyone can tune in from their home or couch, and soak up the learnings!
Tips to make your Virtual Viewing Party an even bigger hit:
INVITE WOMEN ON YOUR COMPANY’S LEADERSHIP TEAM to kick off the viewing party.
HOST AN INTERNAL Q&A, FIRESIDE CHAT, OR LIGHTNING TECH TALK after Elevate ends onscreen.
TAKE NOTES DURING THE CONFERENCE. Start a discussion about topics relevant to your team and your company, and make a note of any that aren’t addressed during the webinar. You might decide to host an internal event to dive deeper into those topics at a later date.
SHARE A SELFIE! Show us your viewing party so we can share in the excitement. Take a picture and tweet at @GIRLGEEKX using hashtag #GIRLGEEKXELEVATE and we’ll retweet.
MAKE IT FUN! Encourage attendees to mingle online and discuss the sessions, and ask each other questions. Have fun and make sure everyone feels welcome.
Meeting people was easy until the pandemic in 2020, as events became synonymous with superspreading, and so we socially distanced while hearing from women at companies talk about work, life, industry, challenges, jobs and more on Zoom. In 2020, Girl Geek X hosted 10 events and handed the mic to 84 women speakers: we heard from women at companies like Planet, Confluent, Sentry, CodeSee, Inflection, Cadence and Gap Inc virtually – and at Bloomberg (San Francisco R&D office) and Microsoft (Sunnyvale office) in early 2020.
While sheltered in place, we’ve kept writing lists of inspiring women in STEM, sharing videos from past Girl Geek X events, resurfacing our 21 podcast episodes, and sharing articles on social media.
We found it inspiring to see that the most-shared articles in our circles have been about women finding success mid-life, the importance in raising feminist sons, decolonizing Silicon Valley, and sisterhood.
In 2021, we continue Girl Geek Dinners virtually – and are planning our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference tackling topics familiar mid-to-senior women, with the help of sponsors.
It’s cold outside! Stay in and check out Girl Geek X’s most popular articles, videos, and podcasts:
Champion the unapologetically ambitious! Girl Geek X supports women who support women. Nab some swag and tag us (@girlgeekx) on social – we love to see how you are styling this winter.
Here are some fresh face masks, hoodies, pillows, and even bumper stickers to cheer on women leaders in all arenas.
All proceeds thru January 5, 2021 will go to Fair Fight, Stacey Abram’s nonprofit fighting voter suppression. So buy one for you and one for a friend!
In a global pandemic, masks are a must! Run your errands politely and firmly stating that “a woman’s place is in the White House and Senate” celebrating all the women ascending in leadership. Champion the unapologetically ambitious, like Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, to name a few. Get your face mask for $10 here!
Stay warm this winter with a soft hoodie with kangaroo pockets! Champion the unapologetically ambitious with a hoodie reminding the world that “a woman’s place is in the White House and Senate.” Perfect for your next Zoom meeting! Get your cozy hoodie for $34.85 here!
Update your couch with this mood! Support the unapologetically ambitious: “a woman’s place is in the White House and Senate.” Perfect for having in the background at your next Zoom happy hour! Get your throw pillow for $21.65 here!
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said: “women belong in all places where decisions are made”. Girl Geek X supports women making decisions! Ethically sourced following the World Responsible Apparel Practices Standards. Get your hoodie for $39.90 here!
Entertain the cars sitting behind you in traffic with a bumper sticker stating “a woman’s place is in the White House and Senate” celebrating Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris, who famously said: “our unity is our strength and our diversity is our power.” Get your bumper sticker for $5.40 here!
We support and appreciate our community organizers and instigators who fight for fairness. This is why all proceeds thru January 5, 2021 will go to Fair Fight, Stacey Abram’s nonprofit fighting voter suppression. So buy one for you and one for a friend! The holidays are around the corner, or brighten another person’s day just because we’re all mired in this pandemic winter together.
Company: Mode (Industry: B2B software, Employees: 100-500)
Funding Stage: $46.4M total raised – Series C (2019)
Event Capacity: 130 (Tickets Sold: 271)
Successful Hiring: 2 (1 sourced, 1 influenced within 4 months post-event; expecting more long-term)
“It was great for engineering — and not just engineering, but employer brand awareness. Hiring in technology is competitive here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we always have to be doing more — and we’re always trying new stuff to get our name out there and get candidates engaged,” said CTO Heather Rivers about how Girl Geek X contributed to Mode’s successful engineering recruiting plan.
