The Women in Tech Forum took place on October 11th. The bi-annual event has been organised since 2013, and this year the event was sold out in 12 minutes! A group of 1,180 women and 20 men listened to the opening words by Marjo Miettinen, Owner and Chair of Ensto Group and Chair of the Technology Industries of Finland, who stressed the importance of diversity in innovation and technology.
We also heard inspiring speeches from Marissa Mayer, Cofounder of Lumi Labs and former CEO & President of Yahoo, Charity Wanjiku, COO of Strauss Energy, and Laura Tirkkonen-Rajasalo from Sulapac, just to mention a few.
Our very own Isa Virtaoja at the WIT Voice speaker competition
Our Design Lead Isa Virtaoja took part in the WIT Voice Speaker Competition at Ensto Stage. Her message was powerful yet simple: Save the planet and then fix the rest! She took the opportunity to talk about creating a better tomorrow with technology.
And she truly rocked the stage, as did all the other speaker contestants, too. What a great way to encourage women to make an impact by talking about what’s important to them in terms of technology.
Voice user interfaces – the power of dialogue
We held an afternoon workshop about voice UI’s. The aim was to explore and ideate our own concept for a voice user interface solution during a hands-on exercise. At the same time, we learned about the practicalities of designing voice user interfaces, and sparked ideas on how to bring our business into the future.
The room was full of ladies working on designing natural interactions between humans and tech. The workshop also evoked some really good discussions and a few challenging questions to solve in the future, such as when is it a good time to use voice interfaces and when do other options work better, and how do you get the tone right.
Our main takeaways
This year nearly twenty of us Frantimones took part in the Forum. In general, we were pleased by the top-notch content of the sessions we attended, and the overall lovely atmosphere of the event. It was well organized and informative. We especially appreciated that current trends, like climate change, urbanization and an aging population, were well represented and opened up from several different and interesting perspectives.
Marissa Mayer brought up in her speech that “passion is a gender neutralizing force,” and also said in her Helsingin Sanomat interview that she doesn’t want to talk about gender equality, but rather act to advance it. So, does it make sense to have a conference just for women?
Our conclusion is yes. We’re all aware of the gender balance when it comes to the tech industry, and giving such inspiring examples from other women and promoting possibilities in this field will surely help to keep things moving. We all need role models, and what could be a better way to showcase them than a day full of inspiring speakers, facilitators, and leaders – majority of them women.
