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Women's voices needed in enterprise tech

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Boston, 08 May 2017
Julie White, Microsoft corporate VP.
Julie White, Microsoft corporate VP.

Speaking at the eighth annual women's leadership luncheon that takes place at the Red Hat Summit each year, corporate VP at Microsoft Julia White said a successful global company needs to reflect society.

The Red Hat open source software summit took place in Boston last week.

White focuses on Microsoft Cloud, with special attention on Azure, enterprise security, IT management and making sure the cloud is a place all organisations can trust to run their business.

She said Microsoft and her team realised a few years ago that different viewpoints and more diversity are needed to truly innovate.

A few steps have been implemented to ensure this.

Firstly, White said Microsoft assigned 'sponsors' to women.

Sponsors are slightly different to mentors: "A sponsor is someone who has the woman's back in the room, advocating for them, and a vested interest in helping her move forward."

Microsoft also assigns sponsors to people from other diversity groups.

Secondly, the company regularly holds informal talks with separate groups of people. White said there is no agenda; people are just asked to talk to each other about things that are top-of-mind.

She noted important insights are often gained from these talks, such as once a black man shared with the group that last year after one of the police shootings, all he could think about was how he had such a similar background to the person who was shot, he looked like him, and it easily could have been him in the situation.

"And when he got to work, all anyone spoke about was a sports game," said White, who added these life views are important and give her a better understanding of what people in her team are going through.

She is starting to see the business impact of these changes, but there is still a way to go, she commented.

Her advice to other women carving careers in tech is to stay resilient. "Your voices are so need in this industry; it is critical."

Women in open source recognised

At the summit, Red Hat also recognises women who have done exceptional work in the open source community. Avni Khatri, president of Kids on Computers, and Jigyasa Grover, a student at Delhi Technological University, were the 2017 Women in Open Source Award winners.

Khatri and Kids on Computers, a non-profit, set up computer labs installed with free and open source software in underserved communities in places like Mexico, India and Morocco.

"Open source has made it possible for us to provide technology and educational content to communities at scale so that we can improve the lives of kids who don't have access to technology," said Khatri.

Grover, who won the academic award, is pursuing a bachelor of technology in computer engineering, has been an open source contributor for three years and was one of the top contributors to Pharo 4.0.

Both are involved in a series of other projects and mentorship programmes.

The winners each receive a $2 500 stipend to support open source projects or efforts.

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