In early 2018, at what I thought was the top of my tech career, I was on the verge of becoming a statistic. And that is the very sobering statistic that over half of women - 56% - leave tech after 10 to 20 years. It’s twice as many as men. The main reason women leave tech is not because they want to start a family it’s because they face implicit bias on a daily basis and eventually that wears you down. However, we are literally writing the future a line of code at a time. Without a diverse tech workforce, technology fails to fully account for the needs of women or other underrepresented minorities. But not only that, diverse teams lead to better products and have shown to lead to more profits. Diversity and inclusion efforts are most impacted by a company’s hiring managers —at the end of the day they decide what job postings go up, the interview questions and process, and set the tone of the culture of the team. Join me to learn how the best management and leadership practices clearly align with diversity, inclusion and belonging and why you should rethink your belief that diversity and inclusion is something extra to invest in to realizing it is an integral part of building an amazing team. You will leave with actionable items as well as a new mindset of engineering with empathy to empower you to create an amazing engineering culture for your team that also aligns with diversity and inclusion.
