At Grace Hopper, an annual conference that celebrates women in tech, BuzzFeed’s own tech team asked fellow attendees what they thought our next president can do for women in STEM. Here&8217;s what they said.
What should the next president do for women in STEM?
Fifteen thousand women descended on Houston, TX last week to attend the Grace Hopper conference. The event, which has been taking place for more than 20 years, both celebrates the careers of women working in technology, and serves as a space to discuss the unique challenges faced by woman engineers, developers, coders, hackers, designers, programmers, product managers, and more.
Those challenges are significant. This year, a study using data from Glassdoor found that male computer programmers earn 28.3% more than their female counterparts. According to a report published by the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women end up abandoning careers in tech, compared to only 17% of men.
Five of us: Jane Kelly, Director of Data Products, Phil Wilson, GM of Minneapolis office, Paola Mata, iOS Engineer, Jennifer Wolner, Sr. Project Manager, and Swati Vauthrin, Director of Engineering, went to Grace Hopper to represent BuzzFeed. We had a few goals in mind that included building our BuzzFeed Technology brand, meet individuals in industry to talk about their work, and also talk about the challenges that women in technology often encounter. While we were there, we chatted with women from Google, Microsoft, General Assembly and more about what they think the next president of the United States could do to make tech an easier and better career choice for women.
(The photos below were taken by Jennifer Wohlner, Jane Kelly, Paola Mata, and Swati Vauthrin.)
Increase funding
Katlyn Edwards, a software engineer at Google, loves cats, computers and coffee, and hopes the next U.S. president increases funding for women in STEM!
More transparency around diversity
From left to right, Stefanie Swift and Sophie Cooper are software engineers at CourseHero, Aracely Payan is a student at USC and Malvika Nagpal also works at CourseHero. They want to the next US president to push companies to publish more data around diversity in tech.
Equal pay for men and women
From bottom left, Paula Paul of AmWINS Group Inc., Joey Capolongo of Lending Tree, Hannah Lehman of General Assembly, Simone Battiste-Alleyne of the Tax Management Association, and Felicia Jacobs of Microsoft want the next president to help women to earn the same salary as men doing the same job.
Says Paul, “I'm a bad ass coding goddess&033;”
Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s What Some Women In Tech Would Tell The Next President“>BuzzFeed
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