BY AMY YARNALL
Women in technology industries and academia across the nation convened at the sixth annual Grace Hopper Celebration of “Women in Computing” conference.
Event sponsorship has increased by 50 percent since it started in 1994 and includes Cisco Systems Inc., San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., Cupertino-based Symantec Corp., and San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc.
Held at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley from Oct. 4-7, the conference was hosted by two technology groups: The Association for Computing Machinery and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto that seeks to advance women into technology and leadership roles.
The conference exceeded its anticipated draw by a third, with more than 1,200 people attending. Two years ago, the conference counted 899 attending in Chicago.
Corporate participation is also up.
Companies continue to increase the number of participants they send to the conference by 20 percent annually, said Telle Whitney, president and chief financial officer of the Anita Borg Institute.
Among them, Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard Co. is sending more than 40 of its employees this year, Whitney said.
“Technology is a really important part of our economic future,” she said.
Whitney left the technology industry to take over the institute after Anita Borg, her close friend and institute founder, died of a brain tumor in 2003, at age 54. Borg and Whitney founded the conference together in 1994 and Whitney continues to host the event with the support of nine staff members.
“If you think about the worldwide picture, there simply aren’t enough people to do the technology jobs,” Whitney said.
The technology industry is a great, untapped resource for women and Whitney said she believes women need to start taking advantage of it.
“This conference is a wonderful place where women in various technologies can come together,” said Fran Berman, director of UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. “These women have conversations not around the issues of their companies but of the commonalities they share with other women.”
Berman ran the Technology Leaders Workshop at the local conference, where industrial leaders collaborated on what needs to happen in the workplace.
“What we saw was a strong need for companies to have mentoring programs, to connect the mentees of the company with the mentors,” Berman said.
Companies in the workshop included New York-based IBM Corp. and two San Jose-based companies, Cisco Systems and Cadence, a technology and engineering services company.
For some industry leaders in attendance, simply being there among women in their own field was an exhilarating experience.
“Being here is amazing,” said Revi Sterling, former Washington-based Microsoft Corp. researcher of 10 years. “I am here with women who I idolize and want to be , these women are my peeps.”
The technology industry may be competitive, but the competitiveness of those who attended the conference was left at the door.
“This is not a competitive space at all,” Sterling said. “This place is full of competitive women, but we get to take that hat off when we get here.”
Inspired To Excel
Sterling has attended the conference from its beginning and said it was actually the Women in Computing conference that led her to eventually leave Microsoft and go back to school to earn her doctorate. Now she attends the conference as a speaker.
“In 2000, I went back to Microsoft and said, ‘We have to get involved with this conference and start doing something to get women into the pipeline,’ and since then Microsoft has supported the event.”
Discussing and collaborating is what the conference provides for its attendees.
Speaking about what works best for them often leads attendees to go back to their company with a list of suggestions for business improvement.
“No one wants to reinvent the wheel,” Sterling said. “It’s too costly, ideas from one source need to be tailored to fit your own environment.”
