Friday Keynote

Friday afternoon's keynote wrappped up the week in full circle about the women in technology of the past, the present, and the future. We were honored to have Mark Benioff from Salesforce talk to us about the methods he did with his company to expose the unequal pay between men and women. He is the leader in equality for all, urging companies to take it upon themselves to "find the inequalities in the workplace, and solve them with equality." He also talked about teaching more equality among K-12 grade students- that getting the students to be aware of unconscious biased from early on will help us in our success.

We also heard from today's leaders, including the producer of an upcoming film called "Hidden Figures" , an astronaut, and a female electrical engineer at NASA. These women remind us that we can do amazing things.

The next speaker was Megan Smith, who is in her own right an extroadinary technical leader. After spending 10 years at Google, she was asked by the president of USA to be the CTO. She currently works at improving tech in the government. She talks about continuous opportunities to improve government- some of those being modern webpages, services, and security. I can't give her enough praise for being such an amazing technologist, speaker, and always finding ways to improve society, a true civic servant.

In summation, I found that GHC (Grace Hopper Celebration) is absolutely necessary, if we want to be an inclusive, truly diverse society. We need to remind ourselves and others, that yes, women and minorities can be technologists, leaders, engineers, scientists, and anything else they strive to be.