NEWS
11 May Can the NFL playbook help solve tech’s diversity problem?
Bonnie Crater believes she’s been lucky. As a woman in technology, she has enjoyed a 20-year career that began at Oracle and has led to her current position as CEO of Full Circle CRM, a startup that provides marketing performance applications to businesses and is backed by Salesforce Ventures. Crater was one of only five women vice presidents at Oracle back when the company had about 4,000 employees. Now she’s one of the few women leading a tech startup. “I’ve had wonderful managers encouraging me who appreciated my skill set,” she says. Not every woman is as fortunate, especially in the male dominated tech industry. So Crater has made an unusual public pledge: whenever her company has an opening for a senior leadership position, she or her colleagues will interview at least two women for the job. Crater is challenging other tech business leaders and venture capital firms to do the same.08 May Entrepreneurial Diversity To Be Showcased At TiEcon 2015
TiEcon 2015, the world's largest gathering of entrepreneurs, will be a showcase for the growing diversity among technology innovators and business leaders in Silicon Valley and worldwide. The two-day show, taking place on May 15-16 at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara Convention Center, will highlight women and minority leaders that are at the forefront of "disruptive entrepreneurship." This year's show will feature the largest-ever gathering of women and minority innovators, engineers and panelists. Featured speakers will include industry leaders like Blanca Trevino, President and CEO of Softtek, which has grown under her leadership to become the leading IT services company in Latin America. Trevino has been cited as a Rising Star on Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women and was the first woman to be inducted into the prestigious International Association of Outsourcing Providers Hall of Fame.
07 May Microsoft: Diverse approach needed to get women into technology
Diverse approaches are needed to find female coders and achieve more gender equality in the technology industry, according to Microsoft UK's diversity manager. Alexa Glick, diversity programme manager at Microsoft, said at Monster's Women in Code event attended by V3 that technology companies need to broaden the way they find and recruit people, especially women, with coding and computing skills. Glick explained that recruiters put too much emphasis on hiring people from computing backgrounds, rather than searching for technical skills developed outside academia and the industry.