Women in Tech at ITEXPO

On Wed., 2/8 at 3 pm, I will be moderating a panel on Women in Tech at ITEXPO in Ft Lauderdale. Why is a guy moderating this panel? Probably because I wanted to see this session at ITEXPO. When I took it to TMC, Dave and Erik told me to run with it.

This topic has been on my mind for some time. The fraternity of telecom seemed to boil over last summer. We just had a presidential election cycle where one candidate played the gender card as several right media outlets put it, while also being maligned because of her gender. That played out on a national level.

Having run startup and tech events in Tampa for years, it is still largely a male dominated space. Just 18% of Computer Science Degrees go to Women. How many Entrepreneurship degrees go to women? Probably less.

In the last year, there have been a number of articles like this one about Why Women Quit Tech. To address this and have a good discourse, a panel of distinguished women was chosen from volunteers:

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond, VP of Product at CoreDial;
Angela Leavitt, CEO of Mojo Marketing;
Karin Fields, CEO of master agency MicroCorp;
Grace Schroeder, CEO of software house SLINGR.

As one female CEO wrote me, “You know what is interesting is that a lot of this article is exactly what Sheryl Sandberg wrote in “Lean in.” For the most part women in Tech are in marketing and operations. They aren’t in the “driving” positions.” True enough, because as I look at the Board of Women in Channel, half are in marketing and half are in channel sales. (Also, not certain how many expo attendees have read or heard about Sandberg’s book.)

Come join the discussion in Ft Lauderdale!

Tags: itexpo, technology, women
Related tags: women, marketing, panel, because, itexpo