Don't You Tell Me How Great She'll Never Be!
Margaret Allen, Senior Change Management Specialist, University of Cambridge
Confidence snakes and ladders
Avril Chester, Founder of Cancer Central and Chief Technology Officer at Royal Institute of British Architects
Navigating the constantly changing confidence landscape and how to always believe in yourself .
From miserable failure to happy promotion in 3 years: how I did it
Rachel Coleman, Head of Enterprise Database Application Management, University of Cambridge
In the summer of 2018 I felt like I was failing at everything in life and my career was stalled on the mummy track. In the summer of 2021 I confidently took up a new post as a technical manager after over twenty years as a software developer. How did I turn things around? (Hint: it wasn't just me.)
I’ll tell you my story and the lessons I’ve learned, and hopefully they can help you too: whether you’re currently stuck yourself, or managing staff and wanting to help them grow.
Are you an imposter or are you unique?
Emma Cowling, Leadership Coach
What if you could celebrate your differences instead of hiding them?
As women in tech, it's not surprising we sometimes feel like an imposter - not only do we look different, we also bring a different set of lived experiences, which affect the way we behave and the way that we see the world.
But these differences are also what the tech world needs - new ideas, innovations. We bring a unique perspective that can lead to ideas for new products, new ways of doing things and open up new markets.
When we feel strong and secure in ourselves, we are more likely to celebrate our uniqueness and voice our ideas. When we start to feel insecure we are more likely to doubt ourselves, hold back our ideas and attempt to blend in.
In this interactive session, we'll be exploring these two sides of the same coin, through a combination of examples and self-reflection. In particular, we will look at how we can experience the same experience in completely different ways depending on how we feel about ourselves, and we'll explore how we can use this new understanding to guide us when that feeling of imposter syndrome occurs.
Foster the Imposter (not the Syndrome)
Jake Dovey, Manager – iSolutions Incident Response Team, University of Southampton
How I stopped imposter syndrome shooting down my best candidates before they’ve even applied.
This is the story of how a 2018 UCISA talk helped me spot overlooked deficiencies in my recruitment process. Deficiencies that fostered a feeling of imposter syndrome in my candidates. As I began to overcome them, the success that followed inspired small yet impactful changes that have spread across my department and whole University helping us not only increase the diversity of our recruits but, quite unexpectedly, improve both the quantity and quality of our applicants too.
Listen to lessons learnt and pratical solutions and tips and be prepared to go away armed with new ideas for diverese recruitment.
Finding our confidence - three women, three different experiences
Christi Hopkinson, Head of Service Operations, Liza McCarron, Head of Client Services, and Julia Lloyd, Assistant Director, IT Delivery, University of the West of England
We'll be using a series of questions to explore how we lost and regained confidence in our working lives. We hope to make this an interactive session with the audience and encourage them to share their stories, tips and workarounds.
How Accessible and Inclusive Are You? – Why Designing Your Workplace For the Widest Audience Wins
Amy Low, Service Delivery Director at AbilityNet and Teresa Loftus, Assessment Team Manager, AbilityNet
Inclusive design makes things usable for everybody, regardless of gender, age, disability, or other personal characteristic. It is based on the principle that designing for the widest range of people creates better designs and benefits everyone.
This principle also extends to how you design your working environment from a physical, digital and cultural perspective. With flexibility and empathy being increasingly prized by working women and with 80% of disabled people acquiring their disability during their working lives, making sure you are providing an accessible, inclusive working environment is an investment worth making to attract and support the best talent in your teams.
Join AbilityNet for an interactive session where they will invite you to evaluate your workplace for accessibility and inclusion and talk about the steps you can take to improve the working environment for everyone and enable them to work in a productive and comfortable way.
The Impossible Dream? A post ally world
Rob Moore, IT Procurement Manager, Leeds Beckett University
To be seen by others as an ally is something to aspire to, both personally and professionally. This presentation goes beyond this by asking what could a world look like where nobody needs to be an ally. Is this attainable? What does this tell us about our inclusivity strategies and what does this tell us about imposter syndrome?
Learn how to embrace inclusivity and positive culture to realise growth.
Recruiting a diverse workforce
Dawn Ward , Associate Director of People and Culture. Hannah Francis, Executive Data and Analytics Consultant and Helen Fawcett, Associate Director Consulting, Waterstons
Waterstons was founded in 1994 by Sally Waterston, who had a strong vision for how she wanted to company to evolve. This led to the company operating with benefits such as flexible working and unlimited annual leave from its conception, and the pandemic has cemented these further. These policies have allowed us to recruit a diverse workforce and makes careers for women particularly attractive. At this conference, our team members will be telling their personal journeys at Waterstons; Hannah will share her experience of finding out she was pregnant when offered her role, Helen is going to talk about how the flexibility suits her as a single-parent, and finally, Dawn, Head of People & Culture, will discuss our wider diversity, equality and inclusion journey.
The greater mind - redefining technology roles for women
Ellen Pengelly, Portfolio Manager, Imperial College London, Jenny Rae, Head of Products, Imperial College London, Lisa Phillips, Strategic HR Partner, Imperial College London, Jo Demetris, HR Partner, Imperial College London
Our presentation makes the case for redefining job roles so that they encompass a more holistic view of people operating in a technology environment. Too often, vacancies are described in dry tones that focus on the functional requirements and omit the greater picture (what we refer to as the greater mind of the organisation). Attracting women into a technology role starts with changing what we mean by a role in technology. By doing so we enable the organisation to capitalise on the breadth of qualities women have to offer, and in turn, we eventually activate the wide-spectrum of capabilities and skills of a truly multivariate organisation.
The future is female
Professor Alison Wakefield, Co-Director, Cybersecurity and Criminology Centre, University of West London
Alison will talk about how professions and job roles are changing in the age of complexity, and the female traits that are so essential in enabling organisations to thrive.
