Tech Superwomen: Mentors and Mentees, FTW
From the New York Times to Glamour Magazine, a universal question continues to percolate - why are women underrepresented in the tech industry? Explore the role mentorship plays in building a stronger and more inclusive community, while expanding opportunities for women to ascend to leadership roles. Panel discussion will examine the impact of women mentoring women, the positive results of enriching this community and the importance of empowering such partnerships. This panel will also look at the role men can and should play to open more doors for women in the industry. Engage, contribute and participate as a mentor or mentee! Help build a stronger, more inclusive tech community.
Presenters
A leader in interactive communications, marketing and brand management, Cathryn Posey is also a mentor, and the founder of Tech By Superwomen - a movement to organize and connect aspiring and established women in the tech industry for mentorships, partnerships and allies.
Ekaterina Walter is a marketer, thinker, speaker, and connector. As a Social Media Strategist for Intel, Ekaterina works at the intersection of high tech and integrated marketing—driving campaigns and helping colleagues to leverage new media in support of business goals. She believes that building relationships with customers should be at the core of any business and that social media provides a perfect opportunity to do so. At Intel Ekaterina is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. She sits on the Board of Directors for Internet Strategy Forum. You can find her on Twitter @ekaterina. She blogs on her blog "Building Social Bridges" as well as on Mashable, AdWeek, FastCompany, Social Media Examiner and others.
Leslie Bradshaw is the President, COO and Co-founder of JESS3, a creative interactive agency specializing in data visualization, UX, social strategy and visual storytelling. Named one of the top five female executives in the technology industry by Fast Company, Leslie has been described as the "operational energy" behind JESS3's explosive growth and international success. Beyond that,The Wall Street Journal has recognized Leslie not only as a Top Woman in Tech Under 30 but also the "brains" driving the company forward. Since joining in 2006, she has grown the company's revenues over 4,000% and built a transnational operations system to coordinate across five physical offices, 30 full time employees and hundreds of contractors worldwide.
Leveraging her background in economics, anthropology and gender as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago, Leslie is a trusted strategist and consultant for top brands including Intel, Nike, C-SPAN, Pfizer and Google. A native of Northern California and Oregon and farmer at heart, Leslie also writes for Forbes on the topic of female entrepreneurship.
Margot Bloomstein (@mbloomstein) is the principal of Appropriate, Inc., an independent brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. She crafts brand-appropriate user experiences to help retailers, universities, and other clients engage their target audiences and project key messages with consistency and clarity through both traditional and social media.
Presenting at SXSW for the third year in a row, Margot speaks regularly on the evolution of content strategy; recent engagements include CS Forum London, Confab, and Web 2.0. She is the author of "Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Engagement" http://amzn.to/CSatW coming in March from Morgan Kaufmann and helps organize the Content Strategy New England meetup.
Nilofer Merchant is a corporate director (NASDAQ: EPAX), an investor in ecommerce companies (Buyosphere, ModeWalk), a well-known speaker, and, of course, a Harvard Business Review columnist. Her first book was called The New How, on setting direction collaboratively. Read her work and you'll see she's also a bit of a rebel-rouser, wanting to inspire fearless cultures of innovation, everywhere.
Saturday, March 10
