International Women's Day 2018

My company held their actual IWD event on the first of March and we had a host of excellent speakers.  My department held their local event in London on the 8th March and I was part of the organising team.  

One of the co-leads of our Accent on Gender team is going on maternity leave in July and has asked me to step into her role which is really exciting.  I have been leading our Women in TC (Tech consulting) initiatives which is half of our Products community so getting involved in the wider community will be good.  

We were lucky enough to get some amazing speakers in our line up:
- Instadad - Mark Smith.  Mark is a managing director in our firm and was the first in the company to take shared parental leave and talked about the choices shared parental leave now gives couples in the UK
- Rupa Ganatra - entrepreneur and founder of millennial20-20
- Stephanie Peritore - founder of nutritional snack brand Mindful Bites and;
- Anai Ganatra - an inspirational 13 year old who, with her team, have qualified for the VEX IQ world championships in Kentucky.  They are passionate about STEM and she described her project - Genetic Engineering in Robotics.  You can see more information here - the team are crowdfunding to help them with the costs to get to Kentucky and finally we had
- Megan Cross - who is a lead of our Pride Network in the UK.

All absolutely inspiring speakers and the event had fantastic feedback from the attendees which was good.

Afterwards, our TC lead took us out to dinner in Royal Exchange where we had some interesting conversations with the group.