11th edition of Women In Tech Sweden

Thank you Elin Ericsson and Asa Johansen for organizing the 11th edition of Women in Tech(WIT) Sweden, which as every year has left us speechless, inspired and clapping in front of a computer being alone at home ?? I was one of the 3000 spectators watching online, along with the 2700 people joining live in the Waterfront Centre in Stockholm. 60% of participants attended the conference for the first time.

This was my third year of attending WIT and I can not recommend it enough. The carefully curated speakers for the event embodied the 3 pillars of WIT: networking, role models & inspiration. ?

Women in Tech now has 24?000 members, and a database of 1000 female speakers!

The agenda was kicked off by Anna Lundqvist. She talked about how exposure to diversity is important to grow empathy. Keeping in mind that every 6th person has some type of disability, and that includes her brother Eric, who has Angelman syndrome(which is a condition that causes problems with speech), empathy is the deepest form of knowing. Unfortunately, there’s a worrying trend of empathy decreasing within college students in the US alone by 40% in the past 20 years. One of the culprits to that is the way that children spend most of their time early in life. Today's kids play outdoors much less—and they spend far less time in unstructured activity with others than prior generations. Without unstructured free time with playmates, children simply don't get to know each other very well. And you can't learn to connect and care if you don't practice these things. Another important contributor is removing creative classes in school. Creativity is important to be able to imagine being in someone else’s shoes, without creativity there is no empathy. On average women show much higher cognitive empathy than men.

It was great to see Sarah Freiesleben on the WIT stage again, this time talking about the value of human “messiness”. I am looking forward to her book on that topic coming out next year. In her talk she referenced Stockholm resilience centre(SRC), which quantified nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. SRC also concluded that six of the nine boundaries have been transgressed.

I really enjoyed listening to Dr. Gissel Velarde, from Bolivia who has been working with AI for over 24 years. She urged us to be more like bonobos than chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are hierarchical, when bonobos are collaborative, peaceful and playful. Three events interestingly coincided: women conference in 1848, women allowed to enter universities, reduced infant mortality and health revolution. She used it as an example of what happens with more diversity. We need more women to appear as participants on AI conferences. She pointed out that already 2000 years ago, people were interested in AI. Aristoteles was talking about liras that would play themselves aka Spotify. Turing pose a question can machines think? Her point of view is that AI is just the tool and the tool needs to be adapted to its use i.e. if we create robots for hospitals, they would need a degree of empathy. She also referenced Ada Lovelace - the first computer programmer. She finished with tips for institutions to increase diversity and also for individuals. As “you can be the only person to help you recover confidence in yourself.”

This year we got to hear from Unn Swanstr?m, and her tech career at Mindcraft, computer game that sold 300?000 copies. She described how she approaches churn not as how much time before players go, but rather how much time do I have to help them stay on the platform. I liked the example she gave how they used the insights from the voice of consumer survey and built the onboarding framework around it. She also shared her personal struggle with depression and how she managed to get out of it with the use of games. “When you’re a beginner at something, it takes away the pressure and lets you just enjoy it.”

Lilly Vasanthini & Mats Andersson talked about Nordics being the new data center location of the world. They described a particular location in Norway where an old mine was converted to an Infosys data center and by using hydro energy and sea water to cool the systems, they managed not only to achieve climate neutrality, but even climate negativity. To promote the achievement they broadcasted a live show for the Norwegian TV from the mine. They also referenced Nvidia's Earth Climate Digital Twin. ?

Degmo Daar shared a story of how she was emotionally hit, seeing the response of chat GPT to complete the sentence: Two Muslims walked into a room… And she left us with statistics on how most people expect businesses to act ethically and 86% of consumers are willing to cut ties with the brand when an unethical event occurs. She encouraged us to pose more often a question should we build this instead of can we? She explained her framework of triple Es: Empathy, engagement and ethics to include into innovation processes.

My favourite session of the day was a panel discussion with Leyla Ali & Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen. As that topic hit close to home. 80% of women live with a chronic condition(PCOS, PMS, Endometriosis). 90% of women have issues after giving birth and 80% of them are not diagnosed. One year after giving birth in the UK suicide is the number one cause of death. Their mission is to collect data about women’s health, as there’s gender data gap.

Shaena Harrison Helin talked about being wing people for each other as a way for us to make a difference.

Paulina Modlitba gave us the needed fresh perspective on the AI topic. One of the examples she mentioned was using NLP to help blind people imagine things better by providing them very detailed descriptions of the environment, or using AI to plan strategy for apartment rental contract negotiations. Linda U Johansson made it clear that Facebook/Meta/Mark Zuckerberg did not invent the metaverse.

Tove ?gren is carrying the awesome title of being the first engineer to crash a helicopter on Mars. She took us on terrestrial journey to that planet. Mars has 1% of Earth’s atmosphere and 33% Earth’s gravity. Precisely for that reason helicopters need to be light weight. Through her tests we used another planet as a testing facility for the first time <3

It was the first time I listened to Binette Seck, and man was she inspiring! She talked about value-based learning. That learning is all about understanding. The one thing I will take from her talk was that whatever you value, shows up in actions. So, you don’t need to talk about what you values, rather show them through your work. Actions speak louder than words. All amazing achievements start with you!

Binette Seck, Amanda Herzog and Beatrice Sillow engaged in a panel discussion about the tech talent gap in Sweden. Tech is the area with the biggest talent shortage in Sweden. Each year there are 18?000 vacancies within AI, data science and cyber security that remain unfilled. Right now, there are 117?000 available positions and 145?000 qualified foreign talent. We need to understand the cultural differences in recruitment process to be considered more often for these positions as expats. There are four limitations that people put on themselves: not believing that we are worthy of a better life, not having enough competence, not having the right network, and not having role models to look up to. All of these can be changed in a split second by putting individuals in the right context. ?

Ida ?stensson closed the day talking about invisible work. Women spend 200 hours more per year on non-promotable tasks than their male colleagues. Bosses are 50% more likely to ask women to do these tasks.