Last week, President Obama awarded his Presidential Medals of Freedom. There were some incredible people on the list of recipients, and we salute them all. Most notably for us he recognized two women, Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper, who blazed a path in software development with their incredible breakthroughs, led the pack for women in engineering, and helped to inspire our Women In Technology group here at Wayfair. This is a fantastic step forward in recognition for women in engineering – especially as we aim to further close the gender gap in STEM fields. We are thrilled to see two fierce women representing the technology field, and so we here at Wayfair Engineering would like to extend our enthusiastic congratulations to both Margaret and Grace! We truly appreciate everything they’ve done for us all. There's so much to learn from these women, including that you can’t stop when faced with adversity.
Wayfair hopes to keep the legacy they’ve created alive and support all kinds of diversity in engineering; We’ve recently grassrooted our Women in Technology group here at Wayfair as a way to provide support to our own women in engineering and reach out to the larger community. We’re excited to announce some key partnerships that we believe will help to help us grow and contribute.
We will be hosting a screening of “Code: Debugging the Gender Gap” on January 19th at our Wayfair HQ. Details and tickets can be found here. We are inviting several companies throughout Boston and local universities to attend. We hope to see everyone there!
We are also partnering with ChickTech, a national nonprofit dedicated to retaining women in the technology workforce and increasing the number of women and girls pursuing technology-based careers. We will be hosting the Boston launch of their high school program here at Wayfair on February 11-12th.
Looking forward, we hope to continue to create useful, interesting, and inspiring events that foster and support diversity in engineering so that there may be many more Margarets and Graces of all stripes in the future.