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What should we call our user group for women ITPros?

Microsoft

We had some good discussion at the call last Friday about a name for our user group to support women working in the ITPro world, or women who want to become ITPros. We also had some suggestions on the thread where I proposed starting the group. I'm going to list all the current suggestions here and you can cast your vote in your reply. We'll see if we reach consensus in the comments, or at least narrow it down to a few and then we can vote with "likes" on the top 3.  

 

Here are the suggestions so far:

Women IT Pros

Women in IT

Women in Tech

InfoTechWomen - with hashtags like #WomenInTech and #DevOps

WomenTechPros (#wotechpro)

Ladies who Tech

GeeksRUs

NotBASIC or !BASIC (I have nothing against BASIC, mind you)

Viral Linguists (not sure if this really means anything)

Geekers

Dataformers

WITP or WIP

3 Replies

Including a few comments here from the meeting and the previous thread discussion:

  • Several people on the call felt strongly that we need to include "ITPro" in the name so it's clearly separated from groups that get women into coding. 
  • Some people didn't like using "ladies" 
  • There is already a womenintech.com site, which is about getting girls in Hawaii into STEM careers in general. There's also mywit.org which is a similar thing in the US state of Georgia. Then there's womenintechnology.org, which "has the sole aim of advancing women in technology -- from the classroom to the boardroom."
  • "Regarding names, I'd suggest names that are easy to surface when women are searching online for where to connect and learn - and the problem with "IT" is, well...it resolves in search to "it" too often"

Please add your thoughts to the conversation! 

I like Women IT Pros as it is more inclusive than some of the other suggestions (WIP or WIPS).   Women IT Pros can represent all levels of an organization and include everything from systems administration to project / program management, senior and executive level positions.

 

We could also consider something like Women Working in Tech but its possible you might to be more focused and there are many organizations that cover that broader category.

best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

The Twitter poll favored "Women in IT" as being most inclusive, but someone suggested we drop the "user group" part, which makes sense to me. It's really not a "user group" like we'd have a System Center User Group; it's more of a meet up. But I still like the ITPro focus. How about we split the difference? Make the long name "Women in IT Virtual Meetup", but use the hashtag #WomenITPros, since no one else seems to be using it and it can help avoid confusion with other Women in Tech groups, or ambiguity with WIIT. And since @ShonaBang just created a shortlink to get to this forum https://aka.ms/womenITPros

Any objections? 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

The Twitter poll favored "Women in IT" as being most inclusive, but someone suggested we drop the "user group" part, which makes sense to me. It's really not a "user group" like we'd have a System Center User Group; it's more of a meet up. But I still like the ITPro focus. How about we split the difference? Make the long name "Women in IT Virtual Meetup", but use the hashtag #WomenITPros, since no one else seems to be using it and it can help avoid confusion with other Women in Tech groups, or ambiguity with WIIT. And since @ShonaBang just created a shortlink to get to this forum https://aka.ms/womenITPros

Any objections? 

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