User:Gswamy01/sandbox

The Berkeley Women in Technology Leadership Round Table and associated WiT@UC Center is an initiative aimed at developing sustainable solutions to address the high attrition of women in technology and technology-related areas. Participants include an influential group of women and men from organizations and companies, who are committed to productive action in support of diversity.

The program initiated following a 2015 survey and study conducted by U.C. Berkeley Alumni Dr. Gitanjali Swamy and Dr. Virginia Smith, that concluded that despite increasing number of women STEM graduates, the number of women in tech had higher attrition rates that were attributable to consistently greater barriers at all stages of the career pipeline. In response to these startling findings, Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, the then EECS Chair, Dr. Sheila Humphreys ,, who was honored by President Obama for her lifetime contributions to diversity, Dr. Virginia Smith, and Dr. Gitanjali Swamy founded the U.C. Berkeley Women in Technology initiative (also referred to as WiT@UC). The first UC Berkeley Women in Technology Round Table was held November 6, 2015 to find constructive, collaborative, creative solutions together with industry and address the persistent issues for women in technology with a focus on consistent measurement and demonstrable impact. In December 2015, the UC Berkeley school of engineering covered the round-table in its College of Engineering report. Following a very successful first round table, the corpus of attendees that included leading technology companies such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM among many others, committed to hold a second round-table. The second bi-annual round table meeting on June 10th at UC Berkeley. The second round table established two working committees; the WiT Metrics Working Group that was tasked with creating a systemic and holistic framework of measurement and WiT Steering Group that was tasked with establishing the organizational path forward. On August 27, 2016 the WiT Metrics Working Group led by Prof. Andrea Goldsmith released their Metrics Report, detailing a proposed set of metrics to measure diversity within companies. Subsequently, the WiT Be Bold Breakout Group met at Stanford to discuss ideas for a Campus to Career workshop-in-a-box and online repository of WiT resources. The third WiT Round Table was held on November 4th, 2017 and announced the commitment of the U.C. Berkeley College of Engineering to establish an endowed U.C. Women in Technology center. Camille Critterden of Citris and Dr. M. Jo Yuen were appointed to lead the administrative efforts in crystallizing the center. The fourth Round Table was held on June 2nd, 2017 and focused on the issues of unconscious bias.

WiT@UC have instituted a systematic program starting with the creation of framework of metrics for proper measurement together with senior leaders from leading tech companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Wellsfargo, IBM etc, collaborative with organizations like Mckinsey, Iotask etc. to incorporate it in to their annual measurement surveys and collaborated with leading technology companies to implement programs to realize and measure results.

The WiT@UC website can found at wit.berkeley.edu.