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There’s No Ambition Gap: Truth About Women in Tech

#sxsw #techwomen

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Here are the problems with how closing the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) is often approached:
We tell girls to simply be more ambitious. But from all of the girls and women I interact with, I don’t see an ambition gap.
We tell women that if they just act more like men, they’ll get more funding for their startups. But we ignore the fact that if they were a man pitching, they wouldn’t have to simultaneously navigate around being asked on a date in the middle of their pitch.
We ask women to speak at conferences and when we still have a roster of mostly men, we can at least say we tried. But we never work to truly understand why women are more likely to say “no” in the first place.
This session is about challenging our assumptions and putting a different truth on the table, based on my current experience leading NY Tech Meetup, the largest Meetup in the world, and my past experience leading a Girl Scout council supporting 15,000 girls.

Listen:

Presenters

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Jessica Lawrence Managing Dir NY Tech Meetup

Jessica Lawrence is the Managing Director of NY Tech Meetup (NYTM), the largest Meetup in the world and a 30,000-member non-profit organization supporting New York’s growing technology community.

Prior to her work with NY Tech Meetup, Jessica was the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Southern California, where she supported a community of 75 staff, 5,000 volunteers, and 15,000 girls.

Jessica writes and speaks frequently on organizational culture, management, technology startups, the non-profit sector, and women in technology. Her writing has been featured on Forbes.com, The Next Web, The Daily Muse and in a weekly column in The Press-Enterprise.

Jessica was one of only 15 women selected to participate in Seth Godin’s Female Entrepreneur MBA (FeMBA) in 2010. She has received numerous awards including the Girl Scouts of the USA Frances Hesselbein Award for Excellence in Management in 2007 and was selected as one of The Daily Muse’s 12 Women to Watch in 2012.