Wednesday night, SFWoW hosted its first-ever recruiting party: CANWOW! The CANWOW (Career Advancement for Women on the Web) goal was to assist our skilled and talented women in the Bay Area move up into higher level jobs in the technology industry.
From my very biased opinion, it was a huge success! Recruiters and hiring managers mingled and chatted with SFWoW members and guests in the private room of the Bubble Lounge. Business cards were exchanged, champagne was drunk, and networking relationships were established.
For me personally, I was energized and inspired to be in a room with so many successful and supportive women. I think the Bay Area really is a unique and special place where all of us geeky, techie women can support and encourage each other as we advance through our careers.
A special thanks to Rebecca Kidder, SFWoW Vice President, and Anna Billstrom, SFWoW President, for their crazy energy and dedication to make this event a reality. And thank you to all of the volunteers who helped organize the event, and who volunteered that night.
And thank you again to our wonderful sponsors, WordPress and Tatu Digital! We are grateful for companies who support and value diversity in the technology industry!
Check out more pictures from the night, and if you were at the event, please add a comment about what you thought of the evening.
A former colleague at IBM sent me this article today about the first woman to win the Turing Award. Frances Allen pioneered compiler optimization at IBM, and has, over the years, been recognized as an IBM Fellow and inducted to the WITI Hall of Fame.
Reading this article made me think back to my experiences at IBM and the female role models I had there. In my very first job out of college, the first five managers in the chain of command, all the way to the vice president level, were women. Over my five years at IBM, I worked with some amazing female engineers. Like Frances Allen, many of them joined IBM back before there were computer science departments at universities. But IBM sought them out and trained because they were looking for smart and talented people where-ever they might be.
Today, IBM and most other companies have changed how they recruit. They generally don’t offer intensive computer programming training courses, and instead look for people already with the skills they need to dive into the work. As recently as 15 years ago, IBM was still sending new employees off to three-month training courses before they started work. Now, employees get a day of orientation.
Companies are employing who the universities are graduating out of their computer science and related departments. IBM doesn’t have to be as creative as they were when Frances was graduating from school, when the distributed pamphlets called “My Fair Ladies.” There are always CS grads pouring out of school.
But the grads coming out of those schools are generally boys, and I can see how companies like IBM have changed their strategies. They used to say, “Let’s go find smart women and educate them to be programmers.” Now they say, “Let try to convince girls that they want to be CS majors in college so we can hire them as programmers when they graduate.”
