2013 NCWIT Summit - Welcome | National Center for Women & Information Technology

2013 NCWIT Summit – Welcome

[upbeat music]

LUCY SANDERS: Okay, Hi! I’m Lucy Sanders and CEO– Yay clapping! Thank you. Thank you. I’m the CEO and co-founder of NCWIT the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And, I’m very pleased along with my co-founders, Telle Whitney from the Anita Borg Institute over here, [audience applause] and Bobby Schnabel. Where’s Bobby? Right here. The other two co-founders of NCWIT to officially open the 2013 NCWIT Summit. So, welcome everybody. I was trying to think of a way to officially welcome you to Arizona. So, I pulled out the handy-dandy scrapbook. [audience laughs] I know, you’re laughing it’s really kind-of funny. Really, from my first visit here in Arizona 40 years ago when I was in college. And, of course, like all old family photos these things illicit all kinds of comments from your friends and family so, for example, “Gosh! Young women in college are wearing “those kinds of shorts today.” [audience laughs] You know and it’s like remember when we used to buy jeans and we’d cut off a perfectly good pair of jeans and make them into shorts? Or those horrible skirts, you remember those? I mean really, okay? So, that was like the first comment. Second comment was, “I didn’t know you were wearing UGGs in those days.” [audience laughs] Okay, listen. Were there UGGs in those days? Maybe not in this country, no. There were no UGGs in those days. Those are Lowa hiking boots, from Germany. 1970 vintage hiking boots they each weighed about 50 pounds. [audience laughs] And you use them to trek around Arizona and other places. And apparently also to climb trees. I don’t know what happened there. So, anyway welcome to Arizona, I really loved– Oh! I didn’t tell you the other comment which [laughs] got my lovely husband in trouble. He said, “Were you really that skinny?” [audience laughs] So when you see him at the conference, please wish him your best. [laughs] Anyway, I think scrapbooks are a lot of fun. And I thought it was a great way to welcome you here to Arizona. And to our NCWIT Summit. NCWIT is a change-leader organization, of over 450 change-leader organizations. K-12 through career, working all year long to significantly increase girl’s and women’s participation in computing. And the NCWIT Summit is our community meeting. It’s not just, any conference. It’s where we come together as a group. Representatives from all 450 organizations. We strategize, we think about partnering, and networking we learn about new research. And we plot out what our next 12 months are going to be as a change-leader community. So it’s a very, very special time. We wouldn’t have this Summit without the funders who are mentioned here on the slides. So, if you like the NCWIT Summit please give them a round of applause. [audience applause] Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a really great program today with a wide variety of content. We have a speaker who is talking about his own personal journey as a change-leader, and open-source community. We’re learning about new research around breaking habits. Because we all know we’ve been learning the last couple of years about unintended bias and stereotype threat. We need to kind-of know how to break through that. Right? It’s one thing to know about it. But now we need to know what do the researchers say about breaking through that. We’re going to talk about educational disruptions but not maybe from the lens we’ve talked about them before. We’re going to talk about them from the lens of diversity and inclusion. And what some of these major breakthroughs in education mean to the thing that we care so very much about. We’re very pleased to have Turner broadcasting here, again live streaming this wonderful program content to remote viewers. [audience claps] Thank you. And please tell everybody about it, that you know. I think the hashtag is in the program, I believe. But please, get some other people involved. If we can grow our remote viewers to 5,000 or 10,000 all of this great content is going to be shared by more and more people. So, please do that as well. So, I guess one last thing I want to do is mention the green water bottles. [laughs] Arizona is kind-of hot and dry. We have lots of water around, and we gave you our NCWIT, green water bottles so that you stay hydrated and healthy. So please take advantage of those. Then, I want to ask Rose Schooler to come on stage. We have a local host for this summit, Intel. Rose is going to make a few brief opening remarks on behalf of intel. She’s VP of the Intel Architecture Group and also GM of Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group. It’s great to have two titles isn’t it, Rose? [laughs] Really wonderful?

ROSE SCHOOLER: I just got my very first business cards printed.

LUCY SANDERS: That’s awesome. [chuckles] Rose is also on the NCWIT Board of Directors maybe the title that we like the most. So thank you for that. She got her bachelors of science degree at Penn State University in ceramic science and engineering and she joined Intel as a graduate, rotating engineer, and has had jobs with increasing responsibility on both the technology and marketing sides. So with that, Rose. [audience applauds]

ROSE SCHOOLER: So, on behalf of Intel, your local host and sponsor, I welcome you to the 2013 NCWIT Summit. And what I think is some pretty amazing, beautiful grounds in Tucson, Arizona. What do you guys think? [audience claps] Very nicely done, Lucy. I have to tell you that a lot of times I go to conferences. And, you know, it requires a fair amount of travel. This one was really easy, I jumped in my car this morning at 6:30 and drove two hours south and arrived here at a place that I actually have never been before. I’ve been to Tucson, but these grounds are spectacular. So, I think we have a couple of days of not only some really exciting and good content. But also an opportunity to enjoy what, I hope you see, is the beautiful South West. So, at Intel. We absolutely believe that diversity is a key workforce attribute to the success of not only our company, but companies worldwide. And one key pillar of our diversity initiatives, is obviously increasing the pipeline, the hiring and the retention of technical women across the company. We very much believe that our involvement in NCWIT, the programs that they sponsor, the data-driven way that they approach those problem statements, and the programs that they put in place to support the pipeline, to support retention, to support hiring align very well with our internal objectives in terms of technical women within our community. We very much believe that that commitment cannot be limited to a financial contribution. I think all of us have been in situations where it’s the easy way to write a check to make a contribution to your favorite charity. But action really becomes important when we’re talking about making progress and some of these key initiatives. So, we take a tremendous amount of pride in some of the work that we’ve done with NCWIT. Whether it be support of the workforce alliances, participation in pay setters– We actually have an executive on loan right now, working with Lucy’s organization to drive forward some of the corporate positioning so we can get a better amount of corporate support for some of the work at NCWIT. And finally, I attended my very first board meeting today in person. And I saw some of the work and the aspirations in computing program out of NCWIT and I have to tell you, I was floored. The girls that presented today were passionate, were driven. They overcame such amazing obstacles. Whether it be– You know the one gal talked about how her school had like 70 people, and the most interaction she had were like with the bears and the elk in her community. I mean, it was really kind-of out in the backwoods. And how she overcame a lack of, whether it be programs or initiatives, to really accomplish what she felt was her passion around robotics. The girls speak for the success of this program. You can look at the data, you can look at the indicators, but nothing speaks for success like the girls that I met today. So, I would like to take a moment to have a few of the aspiration and computing gals stand up and give them a quick round of applause, very quickly. [audience applause] These ladies are your future. These ladies right here.

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