My experience at Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) — 2020

“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.” — Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. This year, GHC was held virtually, and I was honored, thrilled, and excited to attend the conference for the first time ever in my technical career. It really proved to be the most inspiring and motivating tech event designed for women, where they could share their experiences and be recognized for the genius in them. Before going further down into depth of my experience with GHC this year, I would like you to know what is GHC and why we celebrate this event.

What is the Grace Hopper Celebration?

GHC honors Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, who was an American computer scientist, United States Navy Rear Admiral, and the inventor of the first computer language compiler, which led to the development of the popular COBOL language. Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of “Women in Computing” in 1994 with the initial idea of creating a conference for women technologists.

Every year the event has a tremendous central theme, and this year’s theme was “Together We Build.”

My experience and how I felt being at GHC
Being a woman in technology, GHC has significantly changed my perspective by helping and giving me the courage to accept myself and get out of a pervasive feeling of self-doubt, which was eating away my confidence and inevitably holding back my tech growth. I never imagined being part of a gathering of this huge scale of impactful and inspiring women who have vanquished the difficulties and obstacles that I also have faced.

GHC tracks
During these five days of celebrations, I met so many great minds, learned about so many different technologies, and how those technologies are being used by different companies to make a difference. Generally, the GHC experience was revolving around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and an all-day hack-a-thon open source day (OSD) in which participants of all levels contributed and learned about Open Source while working on projects designed to solve real world problems. Also, there were a bunch of networking opportunities with other women in tech, who may or may not have had the same career interests.

The conference was filled with many great keynotes by the women who had proved themselves in the tech ecosystem. I was lucky enough to attend multiple keynotes throughout the conference, like an opening keynote by Brenda Darden Wilkerson, who is the current CEO of the AnitaB organization, a keynote on Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing (HPC) by AMD President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and another exemplifying keynote by the one and only Serena Williams (I love this lady), where she talked about her remarkable Tennis achievements combined with her off-court success in fashion and philanthropy.

GHC also had a few sessions on imposter syndrome and how it is impacting the retention of women in tech roles. Many female technologists from various tech companies came out and shared their experiences and the hurdles they faced in the beginning of their careers. This served me the best, because before joining the Capital One, I had started my career with a tech company where I was the only female Software Developer and I had to work harder to prove my abilities and existence.

This year, there were dozens of sessions and technical tracks on Software Engineering, HCI, Hardware, Data Science, Security and Privacy, Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality, Amazon Web Services and Emerging Technology among others. Career-oriented topics addressed advancement challenges, entrepreneurship, inclusion, mentorship, leadership, effective networking, and work/life balance. The talks were designed in the following formats:

• Presentations conveying knowledge on a specific topic or technology.
• Workshops were interactive sessions aimed to train and demonstrate tools and technologies.
• AnitaB meetups and a wide range of networking opportunities with women working on different career levels.
• Sponsored DEI showcase, Technology showcase, and the poster sessions.
• Amazing keynotes, meditation, and metal yoga sessions to kick start your day with full of energy and zen.
• October 3rd was called a bonus day as it was only dedicated for sessions or if someone wants to catch up with another interesting session previously held and recorded.
• A whole day dedicated to Open Source in order to increase the awareness of OS among women as it’s been said that only 6% of women in tech contribute to Open Source.
• PitchHer competition opportunity to get awarded with seed funding for your business.
• And in the end a huge virtual dance party.

Women and representation in technology
Women currently remain highly underrepresented in software engineering and computer science-related jobs. The very few numbers of female speakers at tech conferences is just one of the indications of the industry’s gender gap. With support, awareness and inclusiveness the shortfalls can be alleviated. Here are the facts and statistics of representation of women in tech as of 2020 by the AnitaB organization (Top Companies for Women Technologists).

The representation of women in technology has notably increased since last year, with a growth rate of 4.96% for a total of 28.8% women working in the tech force. Top Companies for Women Technologists

Extending your network

GHC allows you to meet women with similar interests through presentations and virtual meetups. As the nature of the conference was virtual this year, many workshops were allowing attendees to share their LinkedIn profiles and interests on a shared excel sheet. At the end of the conference, I was able to connect and expand my network with more than 70 female technologists. I was truly convinced of this common saying: “Behind every successful woman is a tribe of other successful women who have her back! “

Takeaways from my GHC experience

Wow! What an amazing conference. GHC 2020 has left a long-lasting positive impact on me. I would like to end with an amazing proverb from Aicha Evans, CEO of ZOOX: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Thank you so much Capital One and vGHC 2020 for not only giving me this great opportunity to connect with so many talented women, but also enlightening me to how important it is to support, empower, and uplift other women in tech!