[vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]San Diego, CA, October 24, 2018, – San Diego’s tech women have just gained a new way to connect locally and globally in tech industry. The San Diego chapter of the global non-profit The Women in Technology Network, kicked it off with a technology demo and networking event. You can join The WIT Network for free until November 1^st.[/vc_column_text][grve_button align="center" button_text="Join The WIT Network San Diego" button_size="large" button_shape="round" button_link="url:http%3A%2F%2Fthewitnetwork.com%2Fmembership%2F||target:%20_blank|"][vc_column_text]The WIT (Women in Technology) Network is a community of professionals across the world that believe in making it easier for women to imagine, begin, and develop a career in IT. There are over 80 chapters in over 40 countries that provide a vast and varied network of events, contacts, and opportunities. The San Diego Chapter is co-chaired by Tina Rountree, Director of Sales at Managed Solution and Jennifer Benedict, Account Executive at Managed Solution.

Tina Rountree, Co-Chair of the San Diego WIT Network Chapter, stated, “I am beyond proud and happy of the knowledge, expertise and experience we had in the room today. In San Diego, we have a unique opportunity to establish an environment that will attract women in technology and bring them from imagining to developing a successful career in IT. We are open to suggestions and needs from our members and are looking forward to join forces with other female-led organizations in the region for a greater impact.”

At the kick off event, members experienced a demo of productivity tools and discussed current statistics about women in technology as well as as well as San Diego’s current state as it relates to women in the technology industry and how collaboration can be established in ways to promote welcoming tech environments for women. For example, women make up less than 20 percent of U.S. tech jobs, even though they make up more than half of the U.S. workforce (Evia).[/vc_column_text][grve_callout leader_text="yes" button_text="Join The WIT Network" button_shape="round" button_link="url:http%3A%2F%2Fthewitnetwork.com%2Fmembership%2F||target:%20_blank|"]Membership is free until November 1st, register now!
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Don't Tell This Robotics Team That STEM Is For Boys

By Sarah Hedgecock as written on forbes.com

At the Javits Center in Manhattan last Saturday, hundreds of teenagers milled about in sneakers and safety goggles, tinkering with the robots they had brought to the FIRST Robotics Competition New York City Regional. Requests for parts (dowel rods, PVC pipe) boomed out over the PA system. Parents lingered near each team’s staging area, sporting their children’s team colors.

Robotics competitions this large haven’t been a standard part of high school for very long. The ability of so many schools to support teams that build semi-autonomous machines–or find enough kids to even build a team–is a fairly new phenomenon. One thing about the competition will be familiar to anyone who participated in a particularly nerdy hobby in high school: It was very dude-heavy.

But the team FORBES had come to see was busting that trend: The Fe Maidens–pronounced “Iron Maidens”–is one of two robotics teams from the Bronx High School of Science, a magnet school in New York City. It’s made up of 42 girls. The only male members of the team are coaches and mentors. (The high school’s other team is coed, and it’s neck-and-neck with the Fe Maidens when it comes to competitive wins.)

“It wasn’t until I came here that I realized that STEM fields are more than just a career,” says team captain Violet Killy. “I thought you could just start them after college, or during college, and I’d have to wait to get my hands dirty. And then I saw kids driving robots at Bronx Science, and I was like, ‘I want to do that.’”

The team was founded in late 2006, expressly to encourage girls to get into STEM and break down the gender stereotypes that are, nearly a decade later, still rampant in technical fields. Even the students who make up the Fe Maidens regularly hear people saying they’re pretty good at this–for girls. “We’re trying to get girls to realize that this is something they can do, this is what’s out there, it’s available to them, it’s fun,” says Killy.

And the name? The team’s first captain was a fan of the band Iron Maiden. “We’re a group of girls, we’re tough as iron, we’re building what the guys are building,” explains the team’s PR chief, Luz Jimenez. “So we just went with it.”

At the competition, the team was tinkering with its robot for the first time in several weeks. Per competition rules, each team gets six weeks to build its robot (they start with a basic kit of parts provided by FIRST, the STEM education nonprofit that sponsors the competition, but can add parts as needed). The robot must then go into a bag until competition day.

At the competition itself, teams compete in two-and-a-half-minute rounds of a game that changes every year. This year the theme was castles. Students compete in two three-team “alliances,” each defending a castle at one end of the playing field. Among other things, robots were tasked with operating autonomously for the first 15 seconds of each round, clearing certain barriers on the playing field and scoring goals by sending balls through holes in the opposing alliance’s castle.

Famous Women of STEM: Shaping the Future of Women in Tech Careers

Women have made significant contributions to the development of new technologies, overcoming many barriers to study and work. In years past, women have been barred from colleges and universities, denied the opportunity to work in certain fields, and had their work obscured or stolen by male scientists. As a result, the history of technology is told as a story of great men. But these women, among many others, shaped the technology that we use daily along with the futures of those inspired to go into tech careers.

Hedy Lamarr

Film buffs know Hedy Lamarr as the sultry female lead of "Algiers" and "Samson and Delilah", but the world owes her a much greater debt. She is the co-inventor of frequency-hopping and spread spectrum, techniques that were used to shield military and other sensitive communications during World War II are now used in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies.

The Human Computers

The work of Frances Spence and Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli also helped shape the outcome of World War II. They worked during an era where a computer was a person who calculated sums, and during the war, computers were mostly women. Performing these calculations by hand, or even simple machines, was too slow for a war that moved at the speed of flight, so they were chosen to help program the first electronic digital computer, known as ENIAC, in 1946.

Ellen Ochoa

Women's contributions to peacetime technologies have been vast. Ellen Ochoa took women's technological innovations to the stars through her work with NASA. She developed optical inspection and image refinement methods for automated examinations of images from space. Ochoa became the first Latina to head NASA's Johnson Space Center. She also got the chance to experience space personally as the first Latina to go into space, eventually completing over forty hours of space missions.

Kimberly Bryant

Kimberly Bryant is doubly shaping the future of technology with her organization Black Girls Code. Bringing both innovation and diversity to programming, Black Girls Code makes programming careers accessible to a population historically shut out of STEM careers through a six-week course on coding and robotics.

Rana el Kaliouby

Many consumers struggle to understand new technologies and advances in computing. Rana el Kaliouby is helping computers understand us with her innovations in facial recognition and reading technology. One of the founders of Affectiva, her inventions help people on the autism spectrum read facial expressions, assist researchers as they track subjects' emotional changes, and advertisers track reaction to campaigns in real time by reading viewers' expressions.

Dr. Crystal Jensen

Technology must be accessible in order to improve people's lives. Dr. Crystal Jensen, founder and president of Integrity Technologies, Inc. makes educational technologies available to Native and indigenous communities, which often lack technology-rich learning environments. Through online learning and social media, Jensen helps people access educational and economic opportunities and other information to improve the quality of life in traditionally marginalized communities.

Sandrine Mubenga

Improving energy efficiency and expanding the use of renewable energy sources will be one of the chief challenges of the 21st century. Sandrine Ngaulula Mubenga is helping us meet this challenge by developing a hybrid car that runs through hydrogen and solar-powered hydrogen fueling stations. Mubenga's prototype reaches a maximum speed of 119 miles per hour, outpacing concerns about the effectiveness of hybrid cars.

Amy Sheng

Technological advances have rapidly improved access to health care. But your doctor's office may soon be as accessible as your mobile phone, thanks to Amy Sheng. Sheng's team at CellScope is developing tools that work with mobile phones to connect with medical offices for remote examinations and tests. The hospital trials, if successful, could transform models for triage and monitoring chronic conditions.


Source: http://www.ecpi.edu