Women in Tech conference Dublin 2019

Thanks to the organisers, WITS was delighted to attend the Women in Tech Dublin conference on September 12-13.

One of the attendees, Fiona Claridge of Own The Room was in touch with WITS afterwards : "We were thrilled to have the opportunity to participate at the Women in Tech event. We are at an inflection point in terms of the various roles women play within organisations and it is important that we understand how to be successful in the conversations we are having in the workplace. Communication at its core is about inspiring, connecting and it’s about sharing stories and it was a pleasure to share our techniques on how to unlock this so we can be the best versions of our self."

Some great speakers - a brief selection of highlights follows:

Marie Sherlock, SIPTU – Discussing the gender pay gap with your employer

Clear pay structure is needed to solve ambiguity, bias and confusion. Collectively agreed and clarified. Female pay negotiations have fewer successful outcomes than male.

“We need to have a collective structured conversation about pay because Divided we beg, Together we negotiate.”

Ciara Garvan of Work Juggle on the meaning of diversity:

"It's not about little jobs for little women...it's about big jobs and all of us having a say in the kind of society we're building!"

Dr. Anita Sands – Women in Tech: Mankind Needs You

Her talk featured her 6As of Success: Ask for everything you need to succeed, Advertise your great work, Assert your presence, be Authentic, Abdicate – delegate and learn to say no, it’s ok to be Afraid – “even the most successful women have their version of imposter syndrome”

Brenda Romero, Romero Games

She kicked off Day 2 with an inspiring talk on the Lost History of Women in Computing – featuring many of the women who were key players in the early days of computer science.

She talked about how “women have been commented out of computing history”, and offered inspiration for getting to a day when the image of non-male people at computers is just people coding, not, ‘women coding’

Did you know the first computer programming text was written by a woman?

"my reproductive organs have never made a game or technical decision"

“Why are we asked what it's like to be a woman in IT... No one asks men what it's like to be a man in IT”

Standing ovation for her inspiring and witty talk!

Lisa D’Arcy, chair of CWIT – the Vital Role of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives will play in Ireland’s tech future

“Diversity is what makes us unique, Inclusion allows us to be our unique selves”

Niamh Graham of Workhuman - Decoding Company Culture

“When workers agree their work has meaning and purpose, they are 2x as likely to recommend a friend and 4x as likely to love their jobs.”

"Society has children, not women or people. It is a societal interest to support people to have children."

Niamh O’Connell, Looking into the future: Through a blockchain lens

Niamh discussed wealth as a function of technology. She talked about a future with blockchain and how it connects ownership and identity. Because all you need to access blockchain is an internet connection, the infrastructure is already there for people everywhere to access it. Many people have no identity documents but with a phone they have a digital passport. So for example a person can directly give a family money for food and see that the family used the money for food. The recipients need a phone and receive the money as a QR code. Platform based businesses can use blockchain to trade e.g. solar panel can donate extra energy left over to a school for example anywhere in the world.

Sarah McCrann, Starting up and Scaling up: Protecting your own inventions

Sarah gave some practical advice and examples of how products can seem different and be similar and vice versa. This talk gave good insight to anyone considering patents.

Bahar Pamuk, Diving into web page performance

Bahar discussed how to improve your web page performance. She discussed how the speed of your page can affect sales. At over 3% 53% of viewers will leave. She gave examples of how working with an image for example can speed time up e.g. compressing an image can increase speed by 32%.

Closing thoughts from Kendal Parmar of Untapped, who spoke about race, gaming addiction and self-affirmation

"I want you to roar and I want you to keep on roaring and I want you to roar some more... lionesses we all are."