On 21 February 2022, all Year 8 forms participated in a Women in Tech event during period 5 or 6. Here is an article about the event from two of our students E. Cottam and T. Dunbar.
For many years women have had a disadvantage approaching the tech field simply because it is a career sector that is widely dominated by white men. Hence, it is easily forgotten what key roles women have played in technology. On the 21st of February Y8 got the incredible opportunity to listen to two black women in the tech industry which was organised by Tech London Advocates. Our class were honoured to meet Tommie Edwards the Founder and chief executive of Ted Bree and Catherine Adeniran the engagement manager at amplitude. Our first speaker was Tommie Edwards, who spoke about her role as the Founder and Chief Executive of Tedbree. We were very impressed to find out that she had been nominated for several awards and won quite a few of them as well. She told us that one of her favourite discriminatory moments was when she walked into a conference room with multiple representees from various companies, and after scanning the room to see what a small number of women there are, let alone women of colour, she’ll introduce herself to someone and say “Hello, I’m Tommie Edwards the Founder and Chief executive of Tedbree” and then they’ll shake her hand and say “So, are you really the Founder and Chief Executive of Tedbree?”. She said that despite the fact she had literally just told them this fact, they always needed clarification whereas if it had been a man they would have just taken that for granted. Our second speaker, Catherine Adeniran told us about her role at Amplitude as Engagement Manager, she works with customers to define value creation opportunities, evangelise the adoption of product analytics and provide ideas on how to integrate Amplitude into their organisation’s business workflow and data flow. She is aware of the limited number of black women in the ICT workplace having worked in a number of large and small and told us how this had to change. Each lady spoke about how they didn’t discover their path to Technology immediately, in fact Catherine Anderson studied classics, history and english before moving into the tech industry as her family wanted her to follow in her fathers footsteps and become a lawyer. Each woman brought their own inspirational message to the lecture. Tommie spoke passionately of the importance of diversity in the global digital technology ecosystem. Lastly, she made it clear to never give up- ‘ there will always be someone better than you, but aspire to be that person.’ Catherine Anderson made the class leave with the empowering message of making sure we embrace and celebrate what makes us different. Her advice was that you should always bring your full self to work and don’t feel that you have to conform to being someone you are not for the sake of fitting in.
