The roster of keynote speakers at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Conference 2015 had its fair share of inspirational women. And because of this, returning home to desks full of girls who code gives one a sense of pride in the StraightArrow team.
Minding The Gap
Chelsea Clinton talked about her work with noceilings.org and the Clinton Foundation. She mentioned a few data points about the state of women and girls worldwide.
In 2013, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) found that in mathematics, boys outperform girls by just 2%. But this disparity widens as social and cultural expectations come into play: fewer than 1 in 3 engineering graduates and fewer than 1 in 5 computer science graduates are girls.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, women make up only 30% of I.T. professionals.
Beyond Data Points
Offering a tip based on her own experiences, Clinton cited that it takes more than hard facts and statistics to convince some audiences to act on these gaps. You have to ask who you are speaking to and what you want them to do. One recommendation she gave was storytelling, harking back to scholar Brené Brown’s keynote on how humans are feeling beings who occasionally think.
Clinton then began to tell the stories of young women like 18-year-old Malala Yousafzai who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for blogging about life in conflict-stricken Pakistan and advocating girls' education. (Representatives of the Malala Fund also shared a keynote at Inbound 15.)
On social media, there are international movements like #girlswhocode and the local #SheCanDoIt that seek to feature women in the Information Technology sector and encourage young Filipinas to pursuit careers in this field.
The Story At StraightArrow
A third of our web development team are composed of women who specialize in either the HubSpot COS, WordPress, Eloqua, or apps. Our search engine marketing (SEM) team also has its share of technology-savvy women.
Kath Reyes used to work as a front-end developer for our HubSpot COS team before working on creating email marketing newsletters using Eloqua. She took up Computer Science in college, and worked as a front-end developer in other companies for more than three years. She says that even when she was still in high school, she was already interested in machine language.
Jenina Colcol is also one of our Eloqua resources. She builds emails, forms and confirmation pages for different brands. She also creates web pages using Episerver. She likes that "Working in the IT environment is challenging because learning is endless. From time to time, there comes an update or changes that developers like me must know in order to thrive in this environment."
When asked about their tool kits, HubSpot COS developers Belinda Natividad and Danica Corpuz shared how they use Photoshop for quick image editing, Sublime as a text editor and, Balsamiq for creating wireframes. They also use web browser extension tools like WhatFont, and Firebug to make coding more efficient.
Monabelle Salaan, one our SEO specialists describes how she prepared for her current role:
I took up BS Information Technology. I started out working as a freelance virtual assistant, then I was introduced to link building. I discovered lead generation before specializing in search engine optimization.
Digital marketing is not a "love at first sight" occurrence for me, I’ve been doing the work for 5 years but I had only fallen in love with it when I understood how it can help a business grow.
When not optimizing website pages or creating pay per click (PPC) ads, Mona feeds her adrenaline with activities like hiking and playing Ultimate Frisbee.
On The Same Page
Similar to StraightArrow, leading inbound marketing software company HubSpot also fosters women in information technology. A quarter of its executives and 50% of its staff are women. The best part is that 100% of employees say it's a great place to work, with management encouraging staff to nurture each other’s skills and teach classes to one another. So, it comes as no surprise that Fortune also named it one of the 100 Best Workplaces for Women.
If your business needs a boost, contact us for a no obligation, free consultation on StraightArrow’s website or apps development and SEO services.
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