I mentioned that I’m giving a talk this week at Women in Advanced Computing 2013 titled “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”.  I started out with the idea that there is a hole in the middle of your career, that hole is where women are the most likely to drop out of a technical career, and that there are steps that we as individual technical women can take to make it less likely that we and others drop out of technical careers.  With that idea, I wrote up an abstract and submitted it to speak at WiAC.

I’ve had the idea in the back of my head for months.  Ever since that idea arrived, I’ve been jotting down notes that are related to it.  As I’ve read books and articles, and they’ve led me to think about the topic more, I’ve fleshed out more of what might be included in the talk.  When I got the notification that my proposal had been accepted, I began working on it in earnest.  I first started looking at my notes and creating pieces of the talk, figuring out what would work and what wouldn’t work.  In working on those pieces, I spent a lot of time talking to myself in an empty room, to see if those pieces sounded good and felt natural when I talked about them.  Some things didn’t survive this cut, others were changed dramatically from their starting point.

When I felt like I had enough pieces that sounded right, I had to figure out how they fit together.  I had more pieces than I had time, but that’s okay: some of those pieces didn’t work in the context of a larger talk.  Some got cut, some got condensed.  New pieces got added when I discovered that I needed a bridge from one topic to the next.  I went from pieces that were related to this idea to a something that I hoped was a single cohesive discussion.

When I thought that I had the whole thing done, I stood in an empty conference room and gave the whole talk from start to finish.  This helped me be more comfortable with the talk as a whole, as well as identify places where it didn’t flow well.  More cutting ensued, as well as some new additions.  I tried again, felt more comfortable with it, and then rounded up a couple of colleagues to give me feedback on it.  They gave me fantastic feedback, which resulted in more revisions and more practice.

The talk is Thursday morning, 11am.  I really want to get this one right.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Next week, I’m speaking at Women in Advanced Computing 2013, part of USENIX Federated Conference Week.  I’ll be talking about “The Mid-Career Donut Hole” on Thursday at 11am.  If you’re at WiAC, I hope to see you there!

I just got notification that my proposal for Women in Advanced Computing ’13 has been accepted.  My proposal was “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”, and here’s my original abstract (which I reserve the right to revise!):

As a woman in computing, you usually start off being comfortable with having few peers of your gender. When you start out in college, perhaps you had resources available to you like a campus group for women in computing. When you get your first job in the field, perhaps you work for a company that’s large enough to have an organized group for women, or perhaps you just band together with friends for wine and story-sharing.

As you get older, you begin to notice that you have fewer peers of your gender. We know from the research that women drop out of STEM fields in their late 20s and early 30s. There are many reasons for this, and they’re outside the scope of this talk. There are also plenty of women who switch from a technical track to a non-technical track in their career, such as trying out management.

I want to talk about what you can do if you’re in that spot: you’re in your 30s or 40s, and you somehow find yourself the only senior technical woman in the room. I want to address the following questions:

• How do you stay up-to-date technically?
• How do you effectively communicate with younger team members?
• How do you ensure that you maintain credibility?
• How do you find mentors?
• How do you continue to grow your career and decide what your next steps are?
• What can you do to help address that problem of women dropping out of STEM fields?
• How do you find your peers again?

Before I forget … I’m going to be speaking at a Women’s TechConnect webinar on Thursday, March 21, at 8am PT.  The topic is “how to map your plan for success and stay on it”.  The first half of the webinar will be with Stephanie Peacocke, a career coach who will discuss mistakes that people make in career planning and how to pick yourself up if you get off-track.  In the second half of the webinar, I’ll share my experiences in being a woman in a technical field, growing in my technical career, managing difficult career situations, and making decisions about where I want to go in my career.

It looks like they record the webinars as well, so I’ll share a link once I’ve got it.

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.