2016 Diversity Summit

From newbies to mid level coders, it's a difficult thing to be a female software engineer sometimes - whether it's in a large corporation or a startup.

Sometimes it's hard being female in a man's world, but we are incredibly competent and very talented at what we do.

Join our paneliist as they share experience and insight from their years in the technical field. Learn more about how to stand out, be you, and thrive in the workplace. 

New to tech? Fresh out of a bootcamp? Want that first sweet gig? Transitioning your career can be extremely challenging not to mention terrifying! Publishing your sites to GitHub pages gets your code seen and your name out there.Getting involved with git and open source projects can be intimidating and in this talk, we will go over how to publish code with GitHub Pages and practice maintaining a project before jumping into an open source project. We will discuss now to get all those homework problems up on your GH-pages profile and start building a clean, available portfolio to send potential employers. As a bootcamp grad and with successful career change, I understand the hesitation and fear in putting your code out here, this talk will help with both the technical aspects of setting up your GH-Pages portfolio AND some of the emotional barriers to making the jump into tech!

This talk will discuss the tenets of user experience design and how they relate to the theory of intersectional feminism. Feminist topics such as the gender wage gap, and sexual harassment, and diversity in tech will be discussed, addressing how user experience design can help generate solutions to these problems.

It's Not All About You  

  During our lifetime, many of us have felt like an imposter or believed we are not good enough.  How does that happen?  How do we beat the Imposter Syndrome and not join "The I'm Not Good Enough Club.”  Shifting our focus away from ourselves and onto what it is we want and finding people who will help us achieve our goals, helps us break away from these limiting thoughts to achieve our dreams. We are social animals.  We need community and we need to surround ourselves with people who will cheer us on, help us explore and open doors.  How do you find these people?  

This interactive session will address the importance of mentors in professional development for computing professionals from diverse backgrounds, focusing both on how mentors can provide support and encouragement, and on how mentees can make the most of the mentoring relationship. This will include a presentation on best practices for mentoring, a small-group discussion about mentoring success and challenges and a Q & A session.

Have you ever been so shocked by gender imbalance that you've counted the number of men and women in a classroom, meeting, or even social event? Fifteen men and three woman; twenty men and two women; twenty­-five men and me. In this session, I'll present tips and tricks for thriving in such an imbalanced workplace that I developed in graduate school (in my first year, 20 men and three women) and in my first job at a start­up (when I started, 30 men and two women). Bring your own struggles and experiences to share with the group so that we may all be successful in this all-too-common workplace environment.

Part of having a diverse and inclusive environment is keeping your workforce. This workshop is meant for people of color, women, LGBTQ and their allies to come and produce a 'manual' that discusses practices that are not conducive to maintaining the diversity tech needs. Join Mark to create a 'working document' (our 95 Theses) that lists how we believe companies/institutions can create an inclusive, welcoming, and supportive environment from the ground up.

The tech industry suffers from an imbalance: companies are having a difficult time recruiting and retaining talent of varied genders, races, academic backgrounds, and experiences to make the tech industry representative of the users it serves.  As members of the tech industry, we have the power to serve as change agents, regardless of the position we hold in our company, to create an inclusive environment in tech.

If you were put in a situation where a tech imbalance was impacting the functionality of your team or your company, how would you react?  Let's dive into real life scenarios in this interactive workshop and figure out what the problem presented is, what needs to change, and how we can change it - regardless of your seniority level at the company.

Participants will leave the workshop armed with solutions and tools to advocate for themselves, help build a balanced tech industry, and celebrate their uniqueness as they move forward in their career.

Industry leaders and recruiters bemoan the difficulty in recruiting diverse and competitive 'tech talent'. The tech sector still has yet to figure out how to approach diversity in recruiting while depressing statistics come out everyday about companies percentage of women and minorities in tech departments. This session will cover how companies can recruit diverse talent by partnering with tech bootcamps to explore alternative pipelines for talent. 

In this session we will address common barriers to success for women in technology and address issues that must be touched in order to enable cultural change (policy- pipeline- and advocacy).

Together with the group we will build a potential survey for employees the answers to which will provide a starting place for culture realignment planning. Attendees will be encouraged to answer their survey honestly and use it to work toward change in their corporate culture.

They will also identify personnel in their company who they think can help them to implement these changes. We will also talk about engagement- policy adjustments- and the importance of visibility.

Women are underrepresented in high tech and leave at a rate 30% higher than men. In response, companies are taking recruiting steps. However, to retain women we must know the aspects of daily life they need to thrive. In this session the facilitator will share a framework defining dimensions of work life based on qualitative and quantitative research. Karen will share her intervention ideas and engage participants in a discussion of their experience and their thoughts on how to address these issues.

The tech sector is overdue in increasing diversity in gender, race, age, economic background, and educational background. Building an inclusive workplace is not just the right thing to do; it is the economically smart thing to do. Expand your definition of diversity and learn how building community partnerships and pathways for underrepresented talent can transform the tech workforce.

In this session,  UMD faculty will highlight research conducted at the University of Maryland around Data Science and Artificial Intellence and its impact on bias. Come learn how UMD researchers are looking at:

Natural Language Processing that aims to break language barriers and enable access to information and communication in a wide range of languages.  Bias, fairness and representation in genomic data science

New to tech? Fresh out of a bootcamp? Want that first sweet gig? Transitioning your career can be extremely challenging not to mention terrifying! Publishing your sites to GitHub pages gets your code seen and your name out there.Getting involved with git and open source projects can be intimidating and in this talk, we will go over how to publish code with GitHub Pages and practice maintaining a project before jumping into an open source project. We will discuss now to get all those homework problems up on your GH-pages profile and start building a clean, available portfolio to send potential employers. As a bootcamp grad and with successful career change, I understand the hesitation and fear in putting your code out here, this talk will help with both the technical aspects of setting up your GH-Pages portfolio AND some of the emotional barriers to making the jump into tech!

This talk will discuss the tenets of user experience design and how they relate to the theory of intersectional feminism. Feminist topics such as the gender wage gap, and sexual harassment, and diversity in tech will be discussed, addressing how user experience design can help generate solutions to these problems.

Join the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland  as they address interactive computational tools for accessibility.

The over 56 million people with disabilities in the US are disproportionately affected by inaccessible transportation, built infrastructure, and technology. In some cases, these barriers are an inconvenient nuisance—in others, they have dramatic impacts on a person's ability to live independently. In this session, we talk about how interactive computational tools are paving the way for making the world accessible. We present our efforts in addressing several accessibility challenges in the domains of transportation, health and wellness, and Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). We hope that getting a taste of what we can do with technology will inspire many more efforts to make the world truly accessible.

Speakers:

Manaswi Saha - Project Sidewalk

Ladan Najafizadeh - Temporal tracking of accessibility features in urban areas

Meethu Malu - Health and fitness tracking for mobility impaired users

Lee Stearns - Haptic and auditory guidance to assist visually impaired users

Meena Sengottuvelu - Using HoloLens for assisting people with low vision

This session will discuss the BRAID Initiative and present preliminary findings from the UCLA BRAID Research Project. The BRAID initiative involves fifteen computer science departments across the U.S. (including UMD) that are committed to implementing changes to their introductory computer science courses, pathways into the major, departmental climate, and outreach efforts in hopes of increasing the recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minority (URM) students in the computer science major. To document the results of the BRAID initiative and identify best practices, the UCLA-based BRAID research team is conducting a mixed-methods, longitudinal study of the BRAID initiative. The BRAID research team is collecting data from students, faculty, staff, department chairs, and administrators in order to answer a variety of research questions related the departmental change process and best practices for attracting and retaining women and URM students to the CS major.

Join in the discussion of Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (APCSP) curriculum and framework, and the role of computer science in education equity

Industry leaders and recruiters bemoan the difficulty in recruiting diverse and competitive 'tech talent'. The tech sector still has yet to figure out how to approach diversity in recruiting while depressing statistics come out everyday about companies percentage of women and minorities in tech departments. This session will cover how companies can recruit diverse talent by partnering with tech bootcamps to explore alternative pipelines for talent. 

Women in the US are a minority when it comes to competing in STEM. They are seldom seen as leading technical developers and data scientists. The environment is changing: education systems, government, and non-profits have identified this gender gap.  In contrast, the support for building female data scientists are nearly neglected in developing countries. The mission is to create a foundation, a network of resources, and a community for women to build data science skills. Most recently, I was on a team which built a community of female coders in Accra, Ghana. Developing data science among women in difficult environments will equip them to thrive in these at-risk markets. In turn, the women will be able build internal programs to serve their local community needs. New skill sets and leadership qualities will create female leaders, leading to an improvement in their quality of life. Drawing from insights gained from training women in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Haiti - the results indicate an environment ripe for data science, but with little resources to foster the advancement of this skill set. The model developed and lessons learned can be applied to many countries.