Women Transforming Technology (WT2)

Schedule at a Glance

* These sessions are by invitation only.
** Attendees must have registered for this session in advance. Please see your email for scheduled appointment time.

Download a .pdf of the entire program here

Keynote speakers

10:00 - 11:00a Opening Keynote
Kara Swisher
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Kara Swisher is the executive editor of Re/code, host of the Re/code Decode podcast and co-executive producer of the Code Conference.

Re/code and Code are wholly owned by Vox Media, a company with an audience of 170 million worldwide. It has eight distinct media brands: The Verge (Technology and Culture), Vox.com (News), SB Nation (Sports), Polygon (Gaming), Eater (Food and Nightlife), Racked (Shopping, Beauty and Fashion), Curbed (Real Estate and Home), as well as Re/code (Tech Business).

Swisher co-founded former Re/code and Code owner Revere Digital and, before that, co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital,” with Mossberg. It was the major high-tech conference with interviewees such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many other leading players in the tech and media industries. The gathering was considered one of the leading conferences focused on the convergence of tech and media industries.

She and Mossberg were also the co-executive editors of a tech and media Web site, AllThingsD.com.

Swisher worked in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. For many years, she wrote the column, “BoomTown,” which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and also on The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. Previously, Swisher covered breaking news about the Web’s major players and Internet policy issues and also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. She has also written a weekly column for the Personal Journal on home issues called “Home Economics.”

Previously, Swisher worked as a reporter at the Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her graduate degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Swisher is also the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” published by Times Business Books in July 1998. The sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future,” was published in the fall of 2003 by Crown Business Books.

Note: Kara will also be participating in the VP+ Breakout which is by Invitation only from 1:00 - 2:00p

4:00 - 5:00p Closing Keynote
Gloria Steinem
Recording not available

Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. She now lives in New York City and has just finished a book detailing her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer.

In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine’s move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women’s magazines as well as for publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime.

Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and in India, As If Women Matter. Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History.

Ms. Steinem helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She also co-founded theWomen’s Media Center in 2004. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of URGE, a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. She is currently working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on documenting the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement, and on a Center for Organizers in tribute to Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. As links to other countries, she helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action and Direct Impact Africa.

As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the James Weldon Johnson Award for Journalism, Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women’s Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and most recently, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism. In 2015, Gloria received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for her lasting humanitarian contributions.

Ms. Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls’ self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. And in 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. Rutgers University is now creating the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.

In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories. With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, Better Off Dead, which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. Gloria has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO’s Gloria: In Her Own Words, and she is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary MAKERS, a continuing project to record the women who made America. She was the subject of The Education of a Woman, a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun.

Note: Gloria will also be participating in the VP+ Breakout which is by invitation only from 2:30 - 3:30p

Breaking Barriers Panel 11:00am-12:00pm

Lori Mackenzie

Kathy Chou

Erin Kitchen

Lynn Christensen

Susan Chen

Breaking Barriers Panel
Moderator: Lori Mackenzie, Executive Director, Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University
Panelists: Kathy Chou, VP, Research & Development Operations and Central Services, VMware; Susan Chen, VP, Business Development, Mozilla, Lynn Christensen, SVP, Applications Development, Workday & Erin Kitchen, Vice President,
Global Diversity & Inclusion, Dell

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This panel of senior female technology executives will share their own experiences breaking through barriers throughout their careers. The group will offer examples on how they have overcome obstacles, dealt with personal and professional challenges, constantly changing demands in technology and innovation, and how they have persisted in some of the most difficult situations an executive can face. The panelists will offer advice to attendees on how their experience can help each of us reach our own career goals given changes in the technology industry.

Breakout Sessions 1:00-2:00pm

Emerging Leadership Track
Leadership Lessons Learned from the Marine Corps
Rebecca Fitzhugh, Consulting Architect

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Being a good leader is about more than just getting the job done. Leaders must balance their team’s needs with their own goals, working in the best interest of the entire team. Leadership is not something everyone knows how to do instinctively. Leadership, whether in intense combat or in the tech industry, is a learned skill that belongs in everyone’s toolbox. There are many different leadership styles, but the best leaders demonstrate some common traits. The speaker will share her own personal experiences and lessons learned from time on active duty military and how they’re applicable in tech.

Rebecca is an independent consulting architect (VCDX #243), published author, blogger, and technical evangelist. In a past life, she served 5 years in the United States Marine Corps.

Technical Track
Building Cloud Native Applications
Reshmi Krishna, Cloud Application & Platform Architect, Pivotal

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Cloud Native Applications have a lot of benefits like individual scaling, individual deployments. However, when we are building them, we also need to think about challenges like configuration management in the cloud, load balancing, service registry, latency analysis. In this talk, we will talk about industry wide best practices for designing your applications for the cloud. We will also discuss the design patterns and tools available to us like 15 Factor App, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud. At the end, you should feel empowered to build scalable, resilient cloud native applications that can run on any cloud infrastructure.

Reshmi Krishna (@reshmi9k) is a Cloud Application & Platform Architect with Pivotal, where she works with Cloud Foundry and helps customers transform the way they build software. Previously, Reshmi was a software engineer with investment banks and startups on Wall Street. Reshmi has also presented in various conferences and meetups like Oreilly’s Velocity (New York), Spring One Platformc(Las Vegas), Spring User Group (NY), Cloud Native Meetup (NY). She also supports various conferences and causes for diversity, including Women in Tech and the Society of Women Engineers, and participates in the Grace Hopper Conference for Women.

Sue Bethanis

Lila Ibrahim

Risa Stack

Nicola Acutt

Executive Leadership Track
Tech for Good: Design Thinking for Influence and Impact
Moderator: Sue Bethanis, Founder and CEO, Mariposa Leadership, Inc.
Panelists: Risa Stack, Ph.D., General Manager, GE Ventures, New Business Creation; Lila Ibrahim, Chief Operations Officer, Coursera & Nicola Acutt, Ph.D, Vice President, Sustainability Strategy, VMware – Office of the CTO

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Curious about how you can leverage your knowledge and skillset in technology as a force for good? Ever wished you could design a greater sense of impact and purpose into your career? Drawing inspiration from a design thinking approach to leadership, this session will examine radical curiosity and big picture thinking in innovation cultures. Our panel of thought-leaders will share strategies and practical tips from their work at the confluence of technology and social impact in education, healthcare and the environment. The session will challenge our assumptions about influence skills by examining the importance of "influence-ability" in leading for impact (and creating a purposeful career in the process). Be prepared to open your mind to opportunities for greater influence and impact.

Kara Swisher

Betsy Sutter

VP+ BREAKOUT - BY INVITATION ONLY
Fireside Chat with Kara Swisher
Hosted by Betsy Sutter, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer

Recording not available

Melissa Abad

Alison Wynn

DIVERSITY COUNCIL – BY INVITATION ONLY
Breaking STEM Pipeline Barriers
Melissa Abad, Research Associate, Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership & Alison Wynn, Graduate Dissertation Fellow
2016-17, Sociology, Stanford University

Recording not available

Alison Wynn and Melissa Abad from Stanford will lead a conversation and share research on what successful strategies for breaking STEM pipeline barriers look like and how “culture fit” impacts the hiring of women.

Breakout Sessions 2:30-3:30pm

Emerging Leadership Track
How to Pursue a Successful Career in Leadership
Madhura Dudhgaonkar, Engineering Leader: Data and Machine Learning Products, Workday Inc

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Most leadership books focus on what it means to be a great leader. But there is no practical framework to help you decide if you have what it takes to pursue and succeed in the leadership track. In this session we will discuss the “Dos” of great leaders and the “Don'ts” of the struggling ones. In addition, you will receive some practical tools to help with your leadership decision:
1. A map of day-to-day work-life at early leadership levels
2. A practical framework to assess if you are ready for the leap
i. Make or break competencies
ii. Value system shift
iii. Are you ready for what’s to come?
You will walk away with a toolset to navigate key decision points in your career. When the right leadership opportunity arises, you will be able to make the decision with knowledge and confidence to succeed.

Madhura Dudhgaonkar is an engineering leader at Workday responsible for the company's data and machine learning products. The belief she lives and leads by - All of us can reach our highest potential, given an inspiring and nurturing environment. She started her career at SUN Microsystems in the Java team. After SUN, she joined Adobe to build a team to ship a version 1.0 Flash Design Tool. She spent last decade of her 18-year professional journey actively honing her leadership craft. She is fascinated by two areas 1) Tech and Innovation - specifically its role in moving us forward as a species, and 2) Neuroscience and Leadership - understanding what inspires people and applying it to build rock star organizations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunications and masters in math and computer Science.

Madhura is originally from a small town in India and came to the United States to pursue a career in technology. She currently calls San Francisco home, and in spite of 8 years here, can’t get enough of its hilly charm, hidden staircases, the diversity of people, culture, and experiences. When not obsessed with technology and neuroscience, she is an adrenaline and outdoors junkie and loves hiking, snowboarding, and mountaineering.

Technical Track
Velocity, Volume & Veracity: Leveraging DevOps Culture in Data Science
Jiaqi Liu, Data Scientist, Capital One

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Nowadays, it is not only necessary for us to be able to process big data, but we also must be able to do it quickly and accurately. MapReduce and Distributed computer are great tools in big data because they allow you to process huge data sets in a manageable way, but does not allow for incremental decision making. Internet companies and ad tech companies have successfully been leveraging real time streaming to process event data, but might not provide the same level of veracity that batch processing does. Thus, it is important for certain types of work to have a unified batch and real time architecture that includes a real time decision engine coupled with historical data and feedback loops for improving the algorithm.

In this talk, we will discuss how such an architecture would allow for data science work to find the right balance between the three Vs – Velocity, Volume and Veracity. In addition, we will discuss the value of leveraging devops in data science work and the challenges of training and maintaining a real-time decision making model.

Jiaqi Liu is a Data Scientist at Capital One working on consumer facing data products. Her work revolves around using big data tools and machine learning algorithms to gain insights from bank and credit card data. She works with largescale data platforms and enjoys seeing challenges in consolidating the science and the engineering part of data-driven work. Outside of work, she is active in the NYC Women Who Code network. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Executive Leadership Track
Extraordinary Teams, Extraordinary Results!™ For women who leads teams
Pattie Vargas, Speaker, Coach and Trainer, Vargas Group

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Of all the skills required of a leader, the one and only thing we truly have control over are team interactions. Too often we focus on the technical aspects of our work, thinking so-called soft-skills are just a “nice to have” and yet studies confirm that strong interpersonal skills are the new management core competency.
Participants will learn how to develop the five characteristics of an Extraordinary Team:
• Trust: Recognize the identifiers that indicate either high or low trust on your team and learn practical tips for increasing honesty and vulnerability.
• Managed Conflict: How we manage conflict indicates the level of trust on our teams.
• Outrageous accountability: Learn how to use positive peer pressure and honest conversations to increase accountability to personal and team goals.
• Self-management: Leading others takes a heightened awareness of self. Develop new insights on how to turn external negatives events into an internal catalyst for change.
• Commitment: Leverage your innate ability to inspire confidence, loyalty and commitment to a common goal.

Pattie Vargas is a recognized leader in performance and change management with a proven track record in behavioral, organizational and personal change. She focuses on leadership development and team effectiveness, especially during times of transition. Pattie coaches managers and individuals through the twists and turns of change, helping them gain personal perspective and self-management so they can, in turn, better equip their teams for what lies ahead.

Pattie is a frequent conference speaker on the topics of change management, personal resilience, team dynamics and issues facing women in the workplace, with a delivery that is humorous, practical and backed by years of personal experience, both painful and pleasant! She holds a Masters degree in Organizational Management and is certified in the use of DISC Behavioral assessments. She is also a certified speaker, coach and trainer with the John Maxwell Company. From her technical days she holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from Project Management Institute as well as a certification in Total Quality Management and Process Improvement. Pattie is also passionate about The American Business Women’s Association (ABWA) where she has held many leadership roles including serving on the American Business Women’s Foundation, a Board focused on Gender and Wage Equity.

Gloria Steinem

Carrie Varoquiers

VP+ BREAKOUT - BY INVITATION ONLY
Fireside Chat with Gloria Steinem
Hosted by Carrie Varoquiers, Vice President, Global Impact, Workday, Inc. and President, Workday Foundation

Recording not available

For Gloria Steinem's bio, please visit the keynote section.

Carrie Varoquiers is Vice President, Global Impact, Workday, Inc. and President, Workday Foundation.
In these roles, Carrie leads the company's philanthropic grantmaking, employee community engagement, environmental sustainability, belonging & diversity, employee wellbeing, and corporate citizenship reporting.
Most recently, Carrie was the President of the McKesson Foundation and Vice President of Corporate Citizenship at McKesson Corporation. Carrie developed the McKesson Foundation's "Mobilizing for Health" grant initiative, which encourages the use of mobile technologies in chronic care, and founded Giving Comfort, a not-for-profit program supporting low-income chemotherapy patients. Prior to joining McKesson, Ms. Varoquiers served as the Founder and President of Cause Partners, a cause marketing consulting firm based in San Francisco. Carrie received her BA from U.C. Berkeley, her MBA from Golden Gate University, and her MPH from Johns Hopkins University. She serves on the board of Family House in San Francisco.

Melissa Abad

Sharon Jank

DIVERSITY COUNCIL – BY INVITATION ONLY
What Blind Auditions Tell Us About Diversity in Tech
Sharon Jank, Stanford University & Melissa Abad, Research Associate, Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership

Recording not available

We will discuss different definitions of diversity — who do we imagine embodies diversity and why? To kick off this conversation, Sharon Jank from Stanford, will share research in progress on how blind hiring processes change recruiting outcomes — and for whom.

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