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User Group for ITPro Women

Microsoft

Are you interested in helping support women ITPros, and support women moving into community leadership roles in the ITPro community? We're starting a virtual User Group for ITPro Women.

Join us! 

 

There are lots of organizations that want to help women code, but we want to focus more on women who keep the code running, doing work like:

  • day-to-day operation of networks, servers, clients, and devices
  • help desk
  • network architecture design
  • information security management

We also want to include women who work in other aspects of information technology aimed at keeping clients and servers up and running, like

  • program/project/people management related to IT
  • technical training
  • technical marketing
  • technical communications

We'll welcome anyone of any gender who wants to participate in a safe space to talk about the challenges women face in a field with a lack of gender diversity. The goals are to network, support women learning technical and professional skills, and help women find mentors.

 

If you're interested in participating, reply to this post and tell me:

  1. What are the best times of day for you to Skype into a meeting? (please include your time zone)
  2. What should we call this new user group? 

If there's interest, I'll pick a time and post the information here for our first virtual meeting.
(subscribe to this conversation to get email updates)

 

Please spread the word!

87 Replies

1) Friday afternoons, PST.

2) I'm bad at naming things.

Great idea, Friday afternoons are great, CST. Naming, WITP, or WIP.

Hello from Denmark! :)

 

I love that this is about the women running the servers, network etc. Personally, I don't think, I have ever met another woman working with servers and network in all my years in the hosting business.

 

I like the name Women in Tech

Great initiate! Subscribing. I am in CET , can join after 4 pm.
Application Support engineer, starting journey to C# , bachelor degree in English philology ended up in IT, and I am loving it!
I would love to be a part of this! As a sysadmin, I find very few of the diversity or women in tech things are applicable to me because I'm not a coder!

Timezone is AEST, so anytime other than early morning would be amazing. Most other international user groups I've seen seem to run at 1 to 5am AEST :(

As for a name? I honestly have no idea. It's hard to find something that sums up the many facets of IT that aren't necessarily coding.

This is really interesting! I'm in UK timezone but can usually be pretty flexible on times. 

For me best time would be after 3 pm eastern time.

This is awesome! I am in the Eastern time zone and fridays or mondays work pretty well for me.

 

Melanie

I love this idea. I'm in EST and after 2PM is best for me.

Great idea!  I'm in CDT and CST, and early mornings or afternoons work for me (9 to 11am usually book up quickly).

Exciting idea! I am interested and best availability is Monday and Friday during lunch time.

Such a good idea - I'm not sure I fit some of the spec but I absolutely will assist on getting word out via Twitter and LinkedIn if this launches. 

I'm on Pacific Time - best times for me would be between 3pm-4pm PT, or 10am-ish PT.

Re: 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.
So, maybe: InfoTechWomen, with hashtags like #WomenInTech and #DevOps to help us reach more women?

Thanks, Lori, if you're not sure if you meet the target group, come anyway! We are inclusive! And thanks for getting the word out. :)
best response confirmed by Deleted
Solution
Hi, @sarahmoore210 - what time zone are you in?
That's awesome because this is the perfect place to meet other women in tech (yes, even those who run servers, networks and manage datacenters) around the world! :)
You're in the right place because this community is primarily geared towards IT Pros (aka very important people who manage day-to-day operations and management of IT systems and all the good stuff)! Welcome to the community :)
British

Thanks for creating this opportunity! I am in EST zone and after 3 pm works for me.

Hey @Cathy Moya - I'm working on a MS O365 Community Survey (think of it as sort of an Office 365 focused "selfie" for admins and IT teams using that tech) - would this group might be a good place to share it? 

I also have a question for you and others who are interested in the User Group for ITProWomen - if I were to have my employer, who'd sponsor the survey, donate to a non-profit for each unique completed survey...would that be a stronger motivator for people to participate than, say, if a survey responder got a coffee card?

Interesting question! Wanted to share my 2 cents - I think it really depends on the survey respondent (i.e whether they place an emphasis on more self-gratification, or adopt a more altruistic mindset/are passionate about that particular nonprofit) - perhaps you can provide them with two options - 1) Donate to a good cause like GirlsWhoCode, or 2) Coffee card and see which people end up picking :) Definitely makes people think about where they want that money to go, and the results may surprise you!