January 26, 2023 ● 09:00

Tech interested? A toolkit on how to join and enable a diverse tech workforce

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Conversations Unscripted: Breakfast

Conversations Unscripted is organising a Breakfast Roundtable Discussion on January 26, starting 09:00. Conversations Unscripted is a Gender Equality Initiative for Women in Technology and Politics that aims to connect aspiring and current leaders in tech and policy to forge new ideas on gender, equality, and inclusivity.

The Breakfast Roundtable, entitled “Tech interested? A toolkit on how to join and enable a diverse tech workforce” will bring together leading experts from the technology landscape, including Prof. Letizia Jaccheri, Chair of COST Action ‘European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics (EUGAIN) and Laila Deeb, Sofware Engeering Manager, Founder of Syrian Women in Tech (SWIT) and Chair of the Brussels Binder Database.

The roundtable discussion will take stock of the gender imbalance in the technology sector and address how to enable more women to venture into tech industry, the needed technical skills to embark in this career path and the opportunities to increase your profile’s competitiveness amongst others.

Please see below the agenda for the Breakfast roundtable:

9:00-9:30 Networking Breakfast.

9:30-10:05 Speaker Introductions and discussion.

10:05-10:30 Discussion with audience and closing.

The event will take place at the Microsoft Innovation Centre, Rue Montoyer 51, Brussels – but hybrid attendance will also be possible. Please note that due to limited capacity in our event facility, registering for in-person attendance will only be open until the maximum capacity will be reached.$

About the speakers

- Letizia Jaccheri (PhD from Politecnico di Torino, Italy) is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Jaccheri has been teaching courses in software engineering at various levels and acted as one of the independent directors of Reply S.p.A., one of the largest Italian IT company with 9059 employees. She has supervised and she is supervising several master and PhD students. From 2013 to 2017 she was department head for the Computer Science department at NTNU. She is ACM Distinguished speaker. She is involved in several research projects, and she leads the COST Action CA19122 Gender Balance in Informatics EUGAIN with 155 members from 39 European countries. Jaccheri has plans to continue to contribute to address the issue of diversity in computer science.
- Laila Deeb is a Software Engineering Manager, Chair of the Database team in the Brussels binder, and the founder of (SWIT) Syrian Women In Tech, an organization that aims to connect the Top women software engineers from Syria with the Belgian job market.

Conversations Unscripted is a new initiative to promote increased empowerment and representation of women in policy and technology. This series aims to work towards this mission through bringing together both current and aspiring European leaders to explore avenues to reduce the gender gap in the fields of digital policy and technology.

Conversations Unscripted is brought to life via the support of different organisations active in the field of gender equality and technology policy, including Women in Tech, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Young Professionals in Foreign Policy (Brussels), Women4Cyber, the European Cybersecurity Organisation, Women in International Security (Brussels), Womenpreneur, The Brussels Binder and Microsoft.

More information can be found on the Conversations Unscripted website
Questions can be directed to mscenter@microsoft.com
Join the conversation online with the hashtag #ConversationsUnscripted
You can find more information about the initiative “Conversations Unscripted” here