This year, I got to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the first time. I was excited at finally being able to go: I’d been aware of it for awhile, but it kept on conflicting with other things. Besides being able to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Systers mailing list, I was part of a panel presentation about influencing without authority.
I got my first undergrad, in CS, in 1998. There weren’t a lot of other women in my program. I have a second undergrad in math, and a MS in technical communication — which, as a program, had more women, but I was in the human-computer interaction track, which had fewer women. I also used to be an Emergency Medical Technician. All of this is to say that I’m used to being the only woman, or maybe one of two or three women, in the room. I’m used to having to hold my own with a bunch of guys, and I’ve long since come to terms with that.
Being at Grace Hopper was weird for me. It sold out this year, so there were ~3600 other technical women there. I’ve never been in a room with that many technical women before. In one meeting with my previous employer, I actually had a meeting where it was all technical woman, and we took a picture to commemorate it because none of us had had such a thing naturally happen before. Being surrounded by so many technical women was just fantastic, even if it did feel very odd to me at first.
Grace Hopper also skewed pretty young. Of those 3600 attendees, ~1500 were students. The content of the conference reflects this: there were plenty of sessions aimed at students (both graduate and undergraduate), as well as sessions for people who were just starting out in their career. I wish that I had known about this when I was an undergrad, because I would have loved to have had access to resources like this instead of looking around the handful (or less) of other women in my CS and math courses and wondering where the rest of the women were. There was also some great material for people who were senior leaders, which I appreciated because I’d very much like to be in a position to take advantage of that material someday. I kind of felt like I fell into a donut hole: there were a lot of women who were 25 or younger, and there were a good number of women 45 or older, but I didn’t feel like there were a lot of women in my particular tribe there: mid-career professionals who were looking to figure out how to continue growing their careers. There was some material there. Of the sessions that I felt were appropriate for me in my mid-career, my favorite session was “Women, Thought Leadership, Mentorship, and Sponsorship”.
One of the things about presenting at a conference, and also being there representing your company, you’re not really an attendee of the conference. I mean, I got to go to sessions and all of that, but people were always coming up to me to introduce themselves either because they were interested in something about my company (say, the awesome swag that we included in the bag, or a job there) or because they were interested in or had a follow-up question about my session.
Another thing about being a presenter, especially when it’s your first time, is that you’re nervous before the session, so you don’t get to immerse yourself in the conference. At least, I didn’t, maybe others are better able to do that. And then there was the session itself. My session was right after the keynote. My fellow panelists and I arrived early, skipping the morning’s keynote so that we could chat and make sure that we were all prepared. This meant that we didn’t know that the keynote ran over, so we went from an empty room with a handful of people there for our session at the time when we were supposed to start, and then suddenly the room was so full that our room monitor had to turn people away about 10 minutes after the start of the session. We had a good discussion, not to mention some awesome questions (and I’ve got a bunch of blog posts to write as a result of those questions).
Overall, Grace Hopper was an awesome event, and I’m really glad that I attended. I need to put some more thought into what I’m looking for as a mid-career technical woman, where to find it, and how I can help create that.