Why Aren’t There More Women At Tech Conferences?
Attending the AWS Summit in NYC today. The conference is free and open to anyone who registers online (more than 10,000 people have). There’s tons of swag, and even the food is free.
Though the event is a massive Amazon sales pitch, it’s also full of inspirational surprises that anyone remotely curious about the future of computing, artificial intelligence, or machine learning at scale, will find fascinating. Attendees are getting a look at what lies under the hood of the machines that are robo-investing money (Betterment), self-driving vacuum cleaners (iRobot), insta-choosing dates (Tinder), and auto-screening movies (Netflix).
So why aren’t there more women here?
ADDENDUM ADDED JULY 31st: Here are some thought-starters (if anyone at AWS is reading this):
- Allocate portion of ‘AWS Expert Lounge’ booth space to Bridge Foundry, WomenInTech, GirlsWhoCode
- Invite a female CTO AWS partner to present at the keynote (at the AWS Summit NYC all the partners were men)
- Broach the topic of ‘Ethics & ML’ (how it applies to AWS Sagemaker) and the importance of incorporating diverse perspectives–a trending topic that would make the conference more interesting.
