Weekly Readings, 7/29–8/2
Welcome to Week 3 of Weekly Readings, where I share what I’ve been getting into this week. Last week I touched on negotiation for women in the workplace, and a couple of “for fun” readings — YA fantasy and a memoir.
This week, we’ve got a conference, data science, and an interview — let’s get started.
I’ve got a lot on my mind from a conference I just attended, Culture First.
This made up a good portion of my “reading” this week, and I’m excited to pull all my learnings and takeaways together. I followed the “Diversity and Inclusion” track for the breakout sessions, and learned so much from the speakers on topics including:
- Performative Diversity/Equity/Inclusion work — is your company’s DEI work giving a false sense of hope for applicants and new hires?
- Design thinking as applied to a specific company’s needs — how can you make sure that you’re actually creating an initiative that helps others, rather than an initiative that simply looks good from the outside?
I really appreciated the social justice activism aspect that a number of the speakers and breakout session leaders took, which has challenged me in new ways to think about how to approach my own work.
Stay tuned for more detail!
Tech Ladies is an online community of women and nonbinary individials who work in tech. The community leadership runs webinars and meetups on relevant topics, as well as facilitate an online community and provide a job board to members.
This interview with the founder dove into how Tech Ladies was founded, growing from a passion project to the 50K+ member group it is today. Allison shared her journey to where she is today, including being vulnerable about failure and the discovery that she wasn’t (and isn’t) alone in the types experiences she had in the workplace.
Maybe most refreshing of the interview? Allison states:
If I had to summarize both of my firing experiences, what ties them together is that I don’t have imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome has gotten a lot of attention lately in the media, and it’s certainly important to acknowledge as it makes work even more challenging for so many. With that being said, I love seeing women confident in their skills!
Finally, data science —
As an engineer and with my research experience, I’m big on data. This article highlights why I am so passionate about an inclusive environment in engineering — namely, that data is not the unbiased depiction of the world it’s often understood to be. Humans design the questions to be answered, create the systems that collect data, and interpret the data that results — and we’re biased. It’s not to say that we should give up on data, but to make sure that we draw conclusions carefully and be thoughtful about all the factors that might have influenced our results.
Did you like what you read? Have some thoughts you’d like to share? Find me on Twitter @engi_queer — I’d love to hear from you!