I have the greatest respect for those that organize and create user group tech events. It’s an incredible challenge, especially having to compete with today’s huge, heavily funded, cloud vendor events, and due to this, one of the biggest challenges in running a tech event is driving attendance. The formula is familiar: great speakers, strong technical sessions, networking opportunities, and engaging social events. But somewhere along the way, as technology has advanced, one outdated tactic has lingered: using the presence of young women to attract a male-dominated audience. For women in tech, this is not a trivial issue, but can…
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“Kellyn, how is it you always find the bullies/narcissists if there are just a few bad apples?” I was asked this question this last weekend at an event, and I’ve often wondered what it is about me that drives some individuals, particularly workplace bullies and narcissists, to implode shortly after working with me. It’s a great question, so let’s dive into it— We often think of bad apples as rare, but it’s really about percentages, personalities, and work culture. Encountering a bully, or even a narcissist, is something I expect at least once every one to two years. How I…
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I’ve been pretty busy with work and travel, but I finally got an official Silk Github repository to publish a couple new white papers and sizing assessment worksheets for customer access. These are primarily Oracle and SQL Server to Azure focused white papers, but I will be publishing ones on GCP next, to be followed by AI and other database platforms soon. White Papers The A2Z on Oracle for Azure The A2Z on SQL Server to the Cloud The slides for the session that is part of the research that went into the white paper above can be found here. …
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In two hours I am honored to be the guest of the CSME Women’s Book Club event at Microsoft to discuss my book, “Crushing the IT Gender Bias.” In celebration of this, I want to discuss the importance of Women in Technology, (WIT) initiatives and the mistake many groups continue to make these days consolidating them into Diversity and Inclusion, (D&I) groups. A few years ago, when Women in Technology, (WIT) initiatives were the newest, coolest thing for business to be a part of, I was awarded an annual WIT award from the state’s tech organization. I was quite humbled…
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There were two trends in topics that repeatedly came up at RMOUG around women in attendance that I felt deserved a deeper investment of time. As I spend a significant amount of time in a more progressive atmosphere, I find I’m even more aware of them than previously. I hope that my words of support and any advice I offered was helpful to those who sought me out this week. “Be Happy With What You Have” or “You’re Never Satisfied” Trend Numerous conversations touched on the common thread around discomfort with women’s ambition. I honestly believe that most individuals aren’t…
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The first of three books that I’ve been working on this year is out! From Melody Zacharias’ “Let Them Finish” series, this is the Stories from the Trenches, a collection of stories about diversity in tech and how to survive and overcome the challenges. The book can be picked up via hardcopy from Amazon and a Kindle version is around the corner, if like me, paper is against your religion. 🙂 I want to thank Rie Irish for recommending me, Melody Zacharias for allowing me, an Oracle girl, to contribute to this book, and Tracy Boggiano, Angela Tidwell, Brian Carrig,…
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My blog was hacked last week, deliberately and maliciously. I was hacked because my lacking knowledge in the area of website management and saved by my control issues as a Database Administrator. It was a valuable lesson to learn in regards to being a woman in technology and new technical skills. If you ask most women, they’ll most likely say that they haven’t had too many difficulties with men harassing them, especially if they’re over 40. In truth, its not that they haven’t, we often become so immune to it, until other women recall their own stories, then suddenly recall…
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Click bait worthy title, eh? 🙂 That’s what I thought after I read the article from the Harvard Biz Review with the lead in comment, “Women who have already made it to the top say that the only person who will get you there is yourself.” I found this utterly misleading and the article missing many of the important areas, proving this incorrect. We are highly critical of women and we’re uncomfortable with women’s ambition, (which the article did lightly touch on.) The author didn’t capture how much women require sponsors and mentors or, as the article also touched on,…
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The only thing that stays the same is change…. As the time flies by and the world turns, I often am jarred back to reality when I discover how the little things we do can have a larger impact on the world around us. Flying back from Interop ITX and StarEast conferences last week, I was reminded of this. While reading the latest copy of Wired , I came across a story on D-Tech High School. This is the school that resides on the Oracle headquarters campus, in its own building(s). The story was interviewing different students to discuss how…
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This weekend I’m not going to have to say, “No, this is not my husband’s code” for a change. This weekend will be about supporting everyone in technology and how technology will benefit by making everyone part of tech. This event is the brain child of my peer, Elaine Marino, owner of Equili. Equili’s mission is to “To build a stronger, more diverse tech community that levels the playing field for all underrepresented and underutilized groups in technology.” This event experienced some challenges as planning got underway and it’s not surprised. Considering the little investment that females founders receive, it’s…
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The support of Women in Technology at Oracle is a fine line and a careful argument. I receive between 20-30 communications in any week on the topic and I think the challenge as I speak to people is the importance of education over persecution. I’m at DOAG, (Deutschland Oracle User Group) conference this week and it’s common for someone to ask to speak to me on the topic of WIT. These valuable conversations have lead to deep reflection of what it means to offer support and how we can improve diversity in the Oracle community….then again, it may just be…
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Just in case you wondered, if you do a search for #ThanksODC and leave the “C” off, you get a lot of stuff on the boy band, One Direction…. You can thank me later for that warning…. The sheer amount of thank you posts for Oracle Development Community Appreciation Day, (#ThanksODC) and the historical hashtag for reference, #ThanksOTN are impressive, but I waited a day on mine so I could continue the support for the Oracle Women in Technology, (and @ORAWit). Here are the ThankODC blog posts from the great women of the Oracle Community! I’m going to start with…
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So now that I’m finished just taking it easy, playing hooky from Oracle Open World and Oak Table World…uh, yeah…. I get to recover from emergency surgery for another week and while I’ve been busy writing slide content, building out new abstracts for the new year, along with content for a couple books, I’m finishing chapters on. My ebook is about to come out for DevOps for the DBA: The Next Frontier, (I’ll be giving a few hard copies away at events in the next couple of months, but you can get a free copy at Delphix.com soon!) This is…
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Somehow I’ve made it a pastime of pointing out how many times women are passed up for recognition while men are promoted around them. Its not that the men were identified as better or worse than women, but just about how heavily we scrutinize and limit women while everyone else passes them by. Now I’m going to ask the Oracle folks to not take this personally, but hopefully take it as a call to arms, but I know how we love to shoot the messenger. Hopefully you already know that I will have no qualms about deleting abusive or threatening…
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I receive about 20-30 messages a week from women in the industry. I take my role in the Oracle community as a role model for women in technology quite seriously and I’ve somehow ended up speaking up a number of times, upon request from different groups. Although its not the first time the topics come up, I was asked last week for some recommendations on Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz and her opportunity to be on President Elect Trump’s transition team. I wanted to ask your opinion about Safra not taking a leave of absence to help with Trump’s transition team? I…
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Even though I didn’t have the “official” prerequisite classes of HTML and CSS for the JavaScript class offered by sister Meetup group, Girls Develop it, I decided on Friday that I wanted to take the weekend class and signed up. The class is held at the Turing Development school and it was a great downtown location. Very centralized, no matter if you’re North, South, East or West of the city and the venue is a school, so it’s set up with plenty of power, WiFi and projector with multiple screens. It had started another spring time snow, so I was…
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I’ve been running the Women in Technology, (WIT) at RMOUG, which I first started planning out in 2011, which has grown to include other user groups and even countries as its grown. The last couple years, I’ve worked to try to add a WIT scholarship to RMOUG’s, but it wasn’t always easy to convince others that we should provide one when you are asking to choose one group over another. There’s only so much money to go around and so many initiatives that we need to address each year for the Oracle community. For 2015, we had a unique candidate…
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I keep having this conversation over and over, in retail stores, restaurants and other establishments- women coming up to me and asking, “Can you tell me about that watch you have on?” It made me realize that it could be really intimidating to: 1. Ask questions of the sales staff in most stores. 2. The benefits that I noticed I get from the smartwatch are not always the same for men. 3. Seeing a woman wearing one lets them know that they are something they may want to consider. So, even though I’m hoping everyone will benefit from this post,…