Cadence sponsors several different tech conferences throughout the year. We use these events as an opportunity to allow employees to take a day out of our normal work routine to network, learn, and develop as leaders—but more importantly, so we feel empowered and inspired when we return to the office the next day.

I was thrilled to attend two women’s conferences with Cadence this past spring: VerveCon 2019 Tech Conference, held in Santa Clara on May 7; and the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference (IEEE WIE ILC) conference, with the theme “Lead Beyond”, held in Austin, Texas, on May 23-24.

Cadence was a significant presence at both events, not only sending a cadre of employees to attend sessions, but also encouraging us to come to speak to potential employees at their respective career fairs. It was so great for me to network, knowing that Cadence was at my back. I enjoyed talking about Cadence to the people who wanted to find out more information about Cadence and what we do.

VerveCon

The people behind VerveCon say that they are a team of passionate women engineers trying to not change the world but redefine women’s journey in technology. The organizers have worked in different areas, faced similar challenges, attended technical conferences and observed the same patterns—women are in the vast minority in technological fields and aren’t in leadership positions. The organizers wanted to give women at all stages of their careers the opportunity to network, learn, and promote each other in the technology workplace. Thus, VerveCon was born two years ago. With about 800 attendees, the conference was a great combination of being big enough to attract some high-profile speakers and small enough that individual attendees didn’t get lost in the crowd.

Several Cadence employees presented sessions at VerveCon on career growth, including “Are you ready to transition to Product Management?” (with Cadence’s Seena Shankar as a panelist) and “Career: Fortune Magazine is Calling—Are you ready?” (led and moderated by Cadence’s Kellie DiNaro and Janice Morgan). These presenters have also spoken at other women’s events, such as the Grace Hopper Celebration and the Society of Women Engineers conference. I was proud to be a part of Cadence, seeing these women that I work with every day leading others in developing their careers.

In the three career advancement sessions I attended, there was a common theme that I found interesting. In all of them, the presenters talked about how to avoid stagnation in one’s career. They made the point that to move forward, it sometimes becomes necessary to move down, or to the side. There is no “you can’t get there from here”—but there may be some careful stepping to get to where you want to go, and you need to be open to those possibilities.

IEEE WIE ILC

The directive of the IEEE WIE ILC is that it:

… provides professional women in technology—whether in industry, academia, or government—the opportunity to create communities that fuel innovation, facilitate knowledge sharing and provide support through highly interactive sessions designed to foster discussion and collaboration. The IEEE WIE ILC focuses on providing leading-edge professional development for mid-level and senior women.

In a nutshell, their mission is to inspire, engage, and advance women in engineering. In 2019, there were about 1400 attendees from all over the world. It was inspiring to see so much diversity!

The IEEE WIE ILC is a mature organization, this having been its fifth year putting on this conference. Overall, I attended a dozen keynotes and sessions, two breakfasts, two lunches, a networking happy hour, and moseyed through the exhibitor hall, looking at the booths and chatting with many people.

One theme that emerged from the sessions I attended is the concept of diversity—but not in the traditional sense as it relates to the workforce demographics. This conference had keynotes and sessions on AI, and many of the presenters were concerned with the diversity of training data for AI systems, a concept that I have thought about a great deal, so it felt good to have my intuitions validated. Not only is diversity important as a cultural norm, but, when applied to AI, diversity of training is critical to creating a non-biased, fully inclusive and accurate system. For example, if you are training a facial recognition system using a majority of faces that adhere to one type of facial structure as its training data—for example, using only faces of European descent—the system will be biased against other kinds of faces, for example, of Asian or African descent.

I wrote more about this in my Cadence on the Beat blog post on the conference, and Paul McLellan wrote about this concept extensively in his recent Breakfast Bytes blog, Assessing Bias in Computer Vision Systems. I suggest checking them out!

As an employee, I feel that Cadence puts its support where it matters and am glad that Cadence supports women in STEM by sponsoring the conferences that empower and promote women. In a world where the people who design and create technology don’t reflect the diversity of those who use it, it is up to us to do what we can to broaden that base. Cadence takes that to heart.

—Meera