Visibility Matters — Why we’re producing Girl Geek X: Elevate next week
For over a decade, Girl Geek X (formerly Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners) has been committed to creating opportunities for women to share their expertise, gain exposure, and network with their peers in the industry. With 160+ events hosted and a community of 15K subscribers, we know there is more to do: more formats (podcasts, webcasts), higher frequency (we host an event every week this year) and more specialized content — our very first online conference, Girl Geek X: Elevate on April 18th, is focused on mid-to-senior career level women in tech (free ticket here). Here’s why…
We hear a few things a lot:
“As I advance in my career, it feels like my peer group is shrinking.” With each stage of your career comes new challenges. As you move up the chain of command to manager and then manager of managers, peer groups tend to shrink (for a multitude of reasons) and it feels like there are fewer people, especially women, to turn to for advice and support.
“As an employer, it’s hard to fill senior-level technical roles.” Companies struggle to source and place women into senior leadership roles (again, for a multitude of reasons). Finding passive candidates is hard, sourcing gender and racially diverse candidates is even harder.
“It is so hard to find women, especially WOC, to speak at our event.” Don’t get me started, my heart rate increases just typing that… Suffice it to say that we think that’s a cop out and set out to prove it. With our agenda 95% locked down, our expert speaker lineup is 75% WOC with 40% black and Latinx (and 100% women, obvi). How did we do it? We set a goal and we asked. Pretty clever, eh? (We’ll share more on this in an upcoming post.)
Let’s dig into a few reasons for the issues above and how we’ve set out to address them:
“It’s hard for me to get to evening events.”
Problem: Your career isn’t the only life evolution that happens while adulting. And it seems like the longer you’re adulting, the more life obligations you have to juggle.
Our response: We’ll host sessions online. Tune in live from the office (hey, go crazy and have a viewing party!) or stream it from your couch when you get a peaceful moment to yourself in the evening.
“It’s hard to connect with women with my level of experience.”
Problem: Let’s be real here — unstructured networking begins to feel less valuable as we advance in our careers. Even though you’re all about supporting the next generation of women, sometimes you need some support too.
Our response: We created a Slack workspace for all attendees. Join the channels most relevant to you, or create a new channel, and start connecting with your peers before and after the event. (Over 40% of the attendees have 10+ years of experience — we’re hoping we’re on to something here).
“The content isn’t always relevant to this stage of my career.”
Problem: As we move into senior level roles, learning becomes less about skills and more about ourselves and other humans. Hiring, managing, motivating and figuring out your identity as a leader are topics unique and highly-relevant to mid-career women.
Our response: We feel you. You need some real-talk, no-fluff advice on how to deal with humans, especially that really difficult human — yourself. You also crave deep technical talks from experts in the field, not that high level mumbo jumbo. We’ve got you covered. (Check out the agenda here.)
“It’s sooooo hard to recruit women for our senior technical roles.”
Problem: I’m gonna set aside my diatribe on the multitude of reasons why this is a problem [ahem] and focus on one simple action we can take at Girl Geek X to help.
Our response: We’ll bring senior leaders from all over the globe to one fabulous virtual location — Girl Geek X: Elevate online conference on April 18th. We’ll promote the hardest-to-fill roles to the ambitious women who attend the event — and even help connect with them if they want to hear about new opportunities! (Sponsor info here.)
We’re really excited to see the results of our experiment and will definitely share what we’ve learned along the way. Be sure to register for you FREE ticket and join our mailing list (and consider sponsoring!) — and we’ll see you on the interwebs on April 18th!
