{"id":34211,"date":"2020-02-14T03:49:07","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T11:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=34211"},"modified":"2020-02-12T11:14:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T19:14:37","slug":"drawing-more-women-to-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2020\/02\/14\/drawing-more-women-to-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawing more women to tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jodi Kovitz, founder and chief executive officer of #movethedial. (photo by photagonist.ca<\/a>)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What began as Jodi Kovitz\u2019s personal desire to increase the technology industry\u2019s minimal efforts to attract women leaders is now a broad movement \u2013 #movethedial.<\/p>\n

Kovitz was born in Calgary and moved to Toronto with her mom when she was 5, while her dad remained in Calgary. Growing up, Kovitz\u2019s role models included her grandmother, Dr. Muriel Kovitz, who served as the first female chancellor of the University of Calgary, and who today lives in Vancouver.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a very loving home and was always pushed and encouraged to be true to myself, be creative and build things,\u201d said Kovitz. \u201cI started my first business when I was 16, which was a greeting card company. I have always pursued entrepreneurship throughout my career, in various forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from the University of Western Ontario\u2019s Ivey Business School, in London, Ont., Kovitz worked at a consulting firm over the summer. Her mentor there advised that she do something more entrepreneurial, so Kovitz joined a tech start-up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI ended up meeting an amazing woman leader in banking after a couple of years,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though I really enjoyed myself and was getting a lot out of it … I left the start-up and went to join her at the bank, where I learned a ton about leadership. I was working specifically in HR [human resources] and leadership development.\u201d<\/p>\n

After going to law school and a brief stint working as a lawyer, Kovitz became the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Peerscale, a peer-to-peer group for tech CEOs.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeerscale is when I started #movethedial, which very much started as a passion project while I was in my other role,\u201d said Kovitz. \u201cBut, it soon became so large that it called me to create it in a formal sense and to move into it full-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, #movethedial has become a global movement and a social enterprise, working to advance the participation and leadership of women in technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile there\u2019s work we need to do over the long term,\u201d Kovitz told the Independent<\/em>, \u201cwe need to ask what we can do now to better engage, include and advance either women in the ecosystem in the moment, as well as those that are just graduating, even just considering going into STEM [science, technology, engineering and math]…. It\u2019s a multifaceted approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

The kick off of #movethedial in 2017 was to be a cosy 30-person event posted on social media \u2013 1,000 people came.<\/p>\n

Kovitz asked attendees who wanted to help. Fifty people responded, she said, \u201cand we did a whole bunch of initial pilots and experiments. After a year, there was just so much passion and excitement that I was very fortunate to be approached by someone I\u2019ve been friends with for a long time, who cared deeply about this mission and offered to back me … so I could start and create the vision I had … and that I wouldn\u2019t be as afraid to take the risk as a 40-year-old single mother starting something as a full-time job. He was there, supporting me, and partnered with me in many ways, in terms of his advice and experience in building a very large-scale, global, billion-dollar business, as well as tactically helping me through things and scaling the organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The organization #movethedial works with tech companies to attract and recruit women \u2013 all people who identify as women, just not people born as women \u2013 as well as advance, engage and retain women in their companies. It also works with community groups on a platform called #movethedial stories, showcasing the experiences of women technology leaders around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve touched thousands of people that way,\u201d said Kovitz. \u201cWe have an annual global summit. Last year, we had 2,802 people at our summit in Toronto, where we\u2019d brought speakers in from around the world, and we connected our audience to one another in a really profound, magical way\u2026. We\u2019re creating what the future of #movethedial can look like, thinking through youth and how we can really impact \u2026 the ecosystem \u2026 and create a different future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really drives me is that we can\u2019t actually build technology solutions for everyone in the population [without including everyone in the population]. And, by the way, everything is tech, right? Banks, taxis, food … everything is tech. We can\u2019t design solutions relevant to the masses if we don\u2019t have representation from our population at our design leadership and governance tables. We just can\u2019t build solutions that work for all the people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe urgency for me is around AI (artificial intelligence). It\u2019s really starting to dominate how we use technology. Everything is going to, if it doesn\u2019t already have an algorithm … and AI is taught. If all humans that teach and create AI are men, these machines will develop different patterns of behaviour and algorithms. My fear, and there\u2019s a lot of research to back this up, is that we will build our human biases right into the solutions and algorithms, and we will never be able to undo it. For me, the urgency to create teams that reflect the population is to ensure that we don\u2019t put our bias in forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more information, visit movethedial.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jodi Kovitz, founder and chief executive officer of #movethedial. (photo by photagonist.ca) What began as Jodi Kovitz\u2019s personal desire to increase the technology industry\u2019s minimal efforts to attract women leaders is now a broad movement \u2013 #movethedial. Kovitz was born in Calgary and moved to Toronto with her mom when she was 5, while her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[9669,3076,9670,3262,1881,3021],"class_list":["post-34211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-movethedial","tag-education","tag-jodi-kovitz","tag-stem","tag-technology","tag-women"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}