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Women in Technology: Supporting Diversity
in a Technical WorkplaceNeha Sherpa, Software Development Engineer, AWS
Amy Therrien, Senior Software Development Manager, AWS
July 13, 2016
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Diversity circle sponsorship
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The flywheel for growth
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AWS —unleashing untapped potential
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Amazon S3 Women’s Circle
Membership selection (17 members)
• Common
• All women (inherent)
• All part of the Amazon S3 organization (acquired)
• Diverse
• Diverse levels of experience (acquired)
• Diverse roles: managers, product managers, software
engineers, systems engineers (acquired)
• Diverse cultural backgrounds (inherent)
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Two circle starts
AWS S3 Women’s Circle• Common
• All women (inherent)
• All part of the Amazon S3
organization (acquired)
• Diverse
• Diverse levels of experience
(acquired)
• Diverse roles: managers, product
managers, software engineers,
systems engineers (acquired)
• Diverse cultural backgrounds
(inherent)
AWS Platform Circle• Individual mentor-mentee relationships
• Aggregation of established relationships
• Common organization
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Sponsoring
• Identify
• Time/budget
• Coaching
• Facilitating
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Facilitating trust
Safe environment for learning
Strong relationships keep circles
together
Make it fun!
• Blackberry picking
• Happy hour
• Lunches
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Facilitating a structure
• Monthly meetings on topics covering experiences and
knowledge
• Amazon S3 topics are defined by the circle: negotiation,
leveling the playing field, communication, confidence, work
life balance, etc.
• Establish role models
• Individual mentoring for the first role models
• Leverage existing career development techniques and
resources
• Guest speakers, published resources
• Provide feedback, encouragement
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Knowledge sharing
Inspiration
Practice
Retrospective
Four flavors of learning activities
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Sample meeting
Knowledge sharing
• 10 minutes: Grab lunch &
greet/mingle
• 30 minutes: Video on “Leveling
the Playing Field”
• 40 minutes: Interactive
worksheets, open discussion
• 10 minutes: Planning next
session
Experience sharing
• 10 minutes: Grab lunch &
greet/mingle
• 5 minutes: Introduction of guest
expert on “Confidence”
• 60 minutes: Pre-prepared Q&A
with guest product manager
• 10 minutes: Planning next
session
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Logistics
Do’s
• Stay connected to participants’
managers
• Advocate for your circle
participants outside of the
circle
• Make time for retrospectives
Don’ts
• Get into expanding circle churn
• Feel like you need to limit this
to women
• See this as a replacement for
all other mentoring
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Our experiences and learnings
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Practice skills example
Background:
design reviews
What we did:
technical presentation practice
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Examples of learnings
• Experience sharing
= Inspiring stories
• Knowledge sharing
= Learning and
growing
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Leveraging resources
My favorite:
“Communicating with
Confidence”
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A story
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Strategies
Communication changes
impact perceptions
Remove lessing language:
- Just
- Sorry
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Measuring success
Career path
Growing influence
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Start your own circle
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