Written by Wamide Egunjobi
Everybody say yeah yeah!
Hey, if you missed our post on International Women's Day, please click here.
About five weeks ago, Google hosted the 2017 International Women’s Day Summit (Lagos) Cohort, in honour of celebrating International Women's Day. The event held at Lagos Business School, Epe, and the room was packed with a bunch of excited and motivated women (and a few bold men of course). So you see why I started off saying “yeah yeah! “
The day started with the usual registration, we got our nametags and also proudly wore our branded Afro-Tech Girls shirts (representing). Then we settled in, and were addressed by Google’s Country Manager , Juliet Ehimuan.
The Tell Your Story Panel Discussion was quite enlightening. 4 women share stories from their life experiences
Ire Aderinokun – who was an attendee last year was one of the speakers. Her story reminds us of the reward of consistency and hard work. Ire is a self-taught female UI designer front-end developer with a background in Law and Psychology. Her contribution to GitHub and consistency to becoming better at coding and design has made her one of the female developers to reckon with. She’s also Nigeria’s first female Google Developer Expert. Talk about the reward of consistency and hardwork indeed!
Did you know that “Women only apply for jobs for which they feel they are a 100% match? Men do so even when they meet no more than 60% of the requirements”
Afua Osei of SheLeadsAfrica inspired us through her story on her past failures. She wanted to work so badly at the White House during the Obama administration for Michelle Obama. Her first application got rejected, and then she tried again being as natural as she could be in her applications, and got accepted to work with Michelle Obama. Her experiences through her career helped her kick start SheLeadsAfrica , a platform that inspires women all over the world. Don’t hold back she said, Open your mouth a little wider and speak up!
This year, there was an open fair/exhibition to allow organizations showcase their initiatives. During the fair, we got to showcase ATG to a wider audience. We met scores of people, and had the opportunity to enlighten them and make ATG known. We informed people of our upcoming events for the year who were interested in what ATG does, our flyers even got exhausted...lol
At this point we were too busy talking to everyone that happened to stop at our stand for questions, comments. Oh but of course, we didn’t forget to have lunch right after the fair.
Right after lunch, we had the Design scrum (Develop Your Story) with the Speechless Show. The Speechless Show team handled this perfectly, and we had an incredibly interesting time learning about others, and playing with keywords to express ourselves better. The atmosphere was electric and thick with love, laughter and so much openness.
In summary, the event was well attended with over 200 guests altogether. This year’s International Women’s Day themed Be Bold for Change is a wakeup call to all females (both young and old) to stand up and be bold for change in every area we find ourselves.
We look forward to returning in 2018 with our own story to tell to the audience. Thanks for the platform Google!
That’s all folks. Thanks for reading :-)
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