SQLBits 2023

Championing women in Tech

Join us for an interactive workshop and discover what are the real challanges that women face in the tech arena as well as what you can do to support a more inclusive workplace. During the session we will analyse external and internal barriers that prevent women from starting and growing a career in tech and we will provide practical tools to help you champion women in tech.
Research shows that gender diversity is an essential factor for the growth of any
organisation and that the level of female representation is strongly correlated to business performance. Just as an example, companies with strong female leadership generated a 10.1% return on equity per year, compared to a 7.4 % return on equity per year for those without strong female leadership (Pipeline 2020). Also, companies in which at least 8 out of 20 managers are female generate about 33% of their revenue from innovative products and services (Forbes 2021).
And yet, real gender diversity is still elusive. In 2021, only 31% of managerial positions globally were held by women (less than 1/3) and only 41 Fortune 500 have a fale CEO.

This is particularly true in critical sector like technology, in which women are severely underrepresented: in fact, women are just 27% of the total STEM workers. (The Tokenist 2021).

Today, we can make a chang and we can champion a more inclusive technology arena.

To support this shift we need to understand what are the real challenges that women face, from external barriers (gender bias, gender pay gap, micro aggressions, unpaid work, just to cite a few) to internal barriers (self doubt, impostor syndrome, fear of failure, and more). Most importantly, we need to learn what we can all do to address these current challenges, and to attract and retain female talent in the technology arena.

This workshop will provide an overview of the challenges that women face in tech to offer practical recommendations for actions that can be implemented to champion female talent.
Importantly, this session is designed for people of any gender identity as only working together we can truly create a more inclusive future.