Redesigning a networking community for a post pandemic world and other confessions of a woman working for a technology company

Sweating palms. Pounding chest. Fiddling with my mobile or making a fake call. Setting a self-imposed ‘deadline’ of 15 minutes to find someone to chat to, then falter when introducing myself. Perched on the back row or end of an aisle to enable a swift exit. Things that I — and many others I know — have experienced at women in tech networking events. I’ve never been shy to take on a challenge, so here I share how I helped revitalise a traditional women in tech networking community.

So, why did I put myself through networking events at all? Partly, FOMO. But mostly because the amount of women employed in the digital workforce has been hovering around 17% for the past decade with little growth, so I find myself gravitating towards those that care about building diversity in the industry.

I’ve been both a slightly panicked attendee and an organiser of community events for people in technical professions for the past 10 years, and I still falter. I recall one of the very first women in tech meetup groups I ran in London back in 2014 — Bluemix Girls Nights at Shoreditch Village Hall. Still makes me feel uncomfortable thinking back. Intensions were good but was it patronising? Did people learn something? Since then, I’ve continued to observe the evolution of Women in Tech events and the organisations that orchestrate them. I find these recurring thoughts bothering me:

1. Women in Tech events I’ve attended curiously attract low attendance from women in technical roles.
2. Others focus on giving a platform to impossibly intimidating role models that have triumphed incredible personal challenges — serious illness, rowing a boat across a vast expanse of water; climbing a metaphor (aka mountain) — that I find it impossible to relate to or glean anything that would be useful in my day-job.
3. Being so used to having so many men around my daily work life there is something weirdly unsettling about a room full of women. Although not specifically excluded from such events, I wonder does an absence of men from the primary audience help or hurt the conversations on gender equality?

research highlights the fact that popular interventions meant to increase diversity, such as diversity training or women-only conferences, not only fail at improving the gender balance — they often make it worse (Dobbin and Kalev (2016)

As a community programme leader, these are questions that lay heavy on my mind every day. I’d like to think that women-oriented tech events create a safe space free from discrimination and with a particular focus on the challenges women face. So when I volunteered to be the IBM representative in the cross-industry community of Women in Tech (CWT), I had an opportunity to banish networking event terrors for my fellow sufferers.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s day is Choose to Challenge. So here I tell a story of how I (along with my fellow committee members) ‘chose to challenge’ this women’s network group. To create a community that reflected its member’s passions, strengths and needs during a time of great uncertainty, isolation and sadness.

This is a story of how Connecting Women in Technology was reborn and the life it gave back to those that made it happen

History of CWT

Connecting Women in Technology (CWT) was founded by Eileen Brown as a way of addressing the challenges, issues and fears that women encountered in the workplace which were exactly the same, no matter which company paid their salary. Elieen’s vision was to bring together companies — who may partner or compete in different aspects of their business — and to celebrate that women across the IT industry could collaborate and network effectively. The commitment from each member organisation was to host networking events on a rota basis. The first event was hosted by IBM in 2008, and other hosts have included Avaya, Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. I’ve attended a few of the more recent events and experienced solid women in tech networking event formats & content.

I stepped into the shoes of the IBM representative with my colleague Darcy Gleeson early in 2020, and just like any newly appointed committee members, we eagerly brought a host of new ideas and passions with us. Early stage plans were scrapped as it became clear that a large-scale networking event was impossible due to UK lockdown restrictions (and for me no longer desirable). However, as we listened to our fellow members, we heard loud and clear the general exhaustion of the committee. Our challenge — we which eagerly accepted — was to trigger a fundamental change to revitalise the community whilst retaining its founding aspirations

the challenge was to trigger a fundamental change to revitalise the community whilst retaining its founding aspiration

Design Thinking principles and tools to galvanise ideas

We introduced Mural to the committee to gather our thoughts in retrospective of CWT as an organisation and the events we’d experienced.

In the absence of being able to gather in a room and stick real sticky notes of our thoughts onto the wall, this tool helped us capture the essence of the committee’s experiences from the founder, long standing representatives and newbies such as myself.

We then split into working groups where our ideas could be crystallised into plans of action, myself taking the event programme working group and Darcy took the branding and website content group. Feedback on the process was brilliant! We started to welcome new members of the committee including Jen Thomson who kept the ball rolling for IBM when I needed to take a break from the group as my Father suddenly passed away in September 2020 (thanks Jen). It also really helped to have some senior level support from Execs in the member organisation including Mark Chegwidden. As a collective, we rewrote the vision, mission and values of our organisation;

We in the events programme team devised a schedule of virtual events which centred around the following themes:

• Women Talk Tech — educational lunch-time workshops on technologies to attract women in technical roles
• Mentoring and ‘Ask Me Anything’ events — to replace traditional ‘networking’ events and to connect early stage professionals and those in senior roles
• Time to Talk — life skills events to support parents, carers and careers
• Working Party — to work on collective outputs to effect change in the industry
• CWT Live — for the remainder of 2021 we have agreed to keep to our schedule of regular virtual events with a virtual mini-conference of 2–3 hours on content later this year.

The Committee now boasts many new hands from Avaya, Dell, Intel, HPE to help with building a CWT community for our post pandemic world with plans to open up to new members in 2021.

Our first Women Talk Tech event for data scientists stunned us all!

We kicked off with our first ‘Women Talk Tech’ virtual workshop on January 19th. Using the Crowdcast Channel I run for my day-job, we scheduled a private (by invitation only) 1 hour workshop with a ‘Behind the Camera’ interview with our speaker to kick off the session. What followed was a hands-on technical skills workshop for beginner data scientist. A career in data is a good blend of computer science, business skills and problem solving which can span many different job professions and departments as it requires an individual to have technical skills and an inquisitive mind. It seemed like a perfect topic for our first online workshop. The event was hosted by Helen Edwards from Intel and the workshop was run by Yamini Rao from IBM. You can see our speaker’s joy at seeing so many attendees waiting for them on Crowdcast.

The event attracted 230 attendees both in the UK and internationally (Australia, India, South America and the U.S). The other advantage of running a virtual event is that interaction levels can be easily analysed, and this event proved to be one of the most successful events CWT has run in recent years. You can see the replay here:

Women Talk Tech series: Data Science for beginners - Crowdcast

Action is contagious. It breeds energy, motivation and feelings of well-being

Coming up next

The initial high that came from getting something done and having such a great response, has helped to motivate us to do more and validates that we are on the right track. Planning for the future has triggered further work on our journey to revitalise our community:

Collaboration tools I built a way for us to collaborate ideas for future events using an agnostic platform — Airtable — where we now populate with the full 2021 event programme. The new programme hopes to announce a new virtual conference in Summer 2021:

Content and branding is moving forward with new representatives with skills that can help us launch a new website.

Preparation of a member pack to help galvanise current members’ commitment and help us recruit new member organisations.

Create a working party to effect change. Having had the unfortunate experiences of dealing with harassment complaints from women attendees to tech events, I’m particularly keen for us to put together a cross-industry code of conduct and process to implement which we can all use no matter what company for which we work.

What I learnt and other anecdotes for community organisers

1. Take the time to understand your audience and the communities’ history — using the Design Thinking process and facilitating an honest retrospective was key to building relationship with the committee and teasing out ideas for the future.
2. Agree the communities’ mission, strategy and values — there are likely many other community organisations similar to yours. By teasing out our collective uniqueness and what we could realistically contribute, we engaged our members with a reliable voice, encouraged an open space for conversation, learning, and sharing.
3. Be sure to offer something of value — we earned the audience for our first event by simply offering content that was valuable and easily consumed, then using our networks to tell people about it. Our job now is to put out an engagement pattern so that our community gets to see us more often and builds trust in us.
4. The more you put in the more you get out — this goes for most things worth doing both in life, on a professional level and for the community as a whole.

Choosing a challenge has bought some light to some of my darkest days

If you work for a technology company in the UK and are interested to join our community, connect with me on Linkedin:

I’d like to take a moment to shout out those on the committee for all their support in making the past year a challenge and a joy; in particular: Jen Thomson Mark Chegwidden Darcey Gleeson Helen Edwards Sarah Robinson Nikki Bogle Sarah Gordon. And of course to Eileen Brown for ‘choosing to challenge’ all those years ago and founding CWT. Her legacy lives on.