#GHC18 gathers 20,000 to talk data and take action
Busting stereotypes, mainstreaming ethics, and making tech safe for women at the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration
Last week, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing returned to Houston, Texas, bringing together more than 20,000 women technologists, from students to CEOs. Several women from the Insight Fellows Program team were there to learn and contribute to the community; here’s a recap of our experiences:
A theme among many of the technical presentations and workshops was addressing fairness and mitigating bias in machine learning and AI. Given the growing number of applications that rely on voice and face recognition, the need for diversity — in both the engineers programming the applications, and the training data being used — is stronger than ever. In an interactive workshop on Confronting Algorithmic Bias in Artificial Intelligence, Romi Boimer and Vinay Hanumaiah from Amazon Web Services guided the audience through creating their own deep learning program that detects faces in real time. By breaking down barriers to implement deep learning, they hope to correct issues like those faced by Atima Lui, whose face wasn’t recognized by certain Snapchat filters.
Ethics in data science was another recurring topic. A panel on A New Tech Consciousness: Social Responsibility and Ethics (featuring Hallie Benjamin, Sarah Hubbard, Kathy Pham, Amanda Casari, and Niveditha Kalavakonda) emphasized the idea that ethical responsibilities extend from the code up. Computer scientists, product managers, data engineers, and data scientists all need to design and build products with ethics in mind. The panel provided an overview of how ethics are currently taught at universities — as a short course, not integrated into the curriculum — and the profound downstream impact this has when technologists are building products for real people.
The Celebration also offered more than 30 events dedicated to career development, with taking initiative to achieve your professional goals being a theme from the very beginning. In an opening keynote speech, Founder and CEO Jessica O. Matthews asked: “How did I get here?” Certainly, starting a company at 22 was not part of her plan, nor did she ever imagine she’d be in the business of patenting energy-harnessing toys and developing novel power ecosystems. Matthews spoke about the need to demystify careers in tech, especially the path of the entrepreneur; no one enters this field — or any other — fully realized and ready to navigate the intricacies of it.
This message was echoed in another keynote address by Padmasree Warrior, who advised the audience to “open doors and go through them” rather than waiting until a dream opportunity comes along. This sentiment — in order to be successful, you need to take risks — came up again and again, including in a session on Shattering the Mid-Management Barrier: Moving to an Executive Role. In this panel, career coach Alison Bloomfield Meyer advised that “if you don’t say yes [to an opportunity], you can’t be in the room. Once you’re in the room, you’ll figure it out.” As she emphasized, career change can be intimidating, but this doesn’t mean you should turn down an opportunity that could make a profound difference in your professional life.
Data Careers Decoded: Exploring the Many Paths to Quantitative Careers, moderated by Insight’s VP of Growth, Kathy Copic, joined in on demystifying role change, busting stereotypes of what’s required to enter the data field or who might be a good fit. The panel drew more than 300 attendees and featured women in data-driven roles at Airbnb (data science), Facebook (UX research), GOAT (data engineering), and Elevate (data product management), including Insight alums Waad Aljaradt and Kelsey Jiang.
Insight alumni also took the stage at several other events:
- Jonathan Whitmore and Chloe Mawer offered a tutorial on hands-on exploratory data analysis.
- Ruth Toner spoke about the ‘human-centric’ and data-centric approach to user safety at Twitch.
- Zuzanna Kłyszejko and Marianne Hoogeveen provided a brief introduction to survival analysis.
- Maureen Teyssier, who left academia for a career in industry, took part in a discussion on professional transitions.
Beyond making that initial transition, another recurring theme was what it takes for women to stay in the technology industry. Women technologists leave the field at a higher rate than women in any other profession, and several events were devoted to strategies for fostering environments that will help women feel welcomed and like they belong. One the of largest was The Past, Present, and Future of the #METOO Movements, featuring law professor Anita Hill, which focused on creating inclusive and safe workplaces for all women.
The Grace Hopper Celebration began in 1994 to provide support and encourage scholarship for women working in a field traditionally dominated by men. In her closing keynote on Friday, AnitaB.org President & CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson stated: “If we lose any of our community members due to lack of support or for feeling alone, or for feeling isolated, we are not doing our job.” Toward that end, she announced the launch of Time’s Up Tech. This initiative — which aims to to provide an organizing platform for those working to ensure the safety, equity, and dignity for women in the industry — will extend an annual celebration of women in tech into a year-round effort to transform the field.
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