TechLeaders, Women of Color, what an amazing experience

Wow, what a week. Because I believe in disconnecting while on vacation, I kept out of the loop, but that means that the first week back is a killer, especially three weeks before our big event the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, as well as our fall Board of Trustees meeting.

The highlight of this week was our Techleaders for Women of Color. BJ Wishinsky, our communities manager, wrote a great blog that talks about the event. What is particularly inspiring to me about this workshop, is that it was brainchild of our TechLeader program manager Kim McLeod. Kim has produced quite a number of our TechLeaders workshops, but this particular workshop was her vision from beginning to end, and she did a great job.

I was there on the first day to welcome the attendees to the workshop, and was able to stay for most of the day. We had about 40 people in the room, and I learned from all of the people I talked to. My dear friend Valerie Taylor, from Texas A&M, was the keynote. Valerie talked about how often oversubscribed she feels as she is asked to serve on an extraordinary number of committees. For University committees, as she puts it "they look at me and think , we could have a university administrator, a woman and an underrepresented minority, all in one person". She is often asked for a woman's perspective, or for an African American perspective, and she says "I can give you one black woman's perspective". In her talk, she presented the numbers for Computer Science faculty in top Research one universities, and since (for example) there are 2 for full professors , she could rattle off the names that goes with the small numbers. Although I've heard Valerie speak before, the statistics matched with her articulation of the names painted a picture for me of isolation that occurs.

What I was also struck by was the reasons that attendees gave as to why they were there. Almost all of them had to fight for support to attend, and almost always they had a manager or a mentor that was looking out for them. Of course that means that there were hundreds of women of color that fought a battle to attend, and lost, because they were not able to garner the support.

I left the workshop reminded yet again why I do this job, because of the impact on the people we serve. I also realized how important this particular workshop is for our future.