Bridging the Gender Gap with Christina Wick #41

We have a conversation with Christina Wick, CTO @ Flowcode, on the current state of the gender gap in tech and what we can do as engineering leaders to actively bridge that gap. We cover stories of the historical impact of women in tech as well as what you can do to remove bias in interviews, performance reviews and feedback. Plus what you can do to intervene when you observe bias happening.

"The first time I heard someone talking about how "women should seek executive sponsorship" I got really annoyed... The term executive sponsor in project management usually means the C-level executive that sponsors or is responsible for the project. So like, why do women need an executive sponsor? I'm not some project! But then I thought about it... And men sponsor men all the time! We just don't label it that."
 

ABOUT CHRISTINA WICK

Christina was previously VP of Engineering at Harry’s, a successful next-generation CPG company. Before Harry’s, Christina’s roles have ranged from running Product, Design and Engineering at Venmo, to defining strategies and building services in the mobile and devices space at Amazon, to AOL where she started as a Software Engineer and rose to the level of Sr. Technical Director responsible for over 50 consumer-facing mobile apps and websites and where she received an Apple Design Award for the Best iPhone Entertainment Application, AOL Radio, in June 2008.

Christina has a Bachelors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Psychology, and a Masters in Computer Science and Applications from VA Tech, with her area of concentration being Human-Computer Interaction."

SHOWNOTES

• The historical impact of women in programming & tech (2:03)
• The current state of the gender gap in tech (7:04)
• Three things you can do to start actively bridging the gender gap in tech (12:12)
• Stop gender stereotypes & vague feedback (14:04)
• Remove bias in performance reviews and interviews (17:01)
• Intervene when observing bias (23:44)
• Executive sponsorship (29:40)
• Establish norms and make it okay to talk about bias (34:29)
• The Impact of “throwing starfish in the ocean” (37:36)
• Takeaways (38:39)

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