Women in Technology

A few weeks ago, R&D took part in FM’s first Women’s Networking Event held at MediaCityUK, for women working in technology. The event had demos from various techie departments of the Beeb, some talks from women in senior positions in FM such as Victoria Jaye (Head of IPTV and TV Online) and Mary McCarthy (Executive Product Manager for Core Services), as well as talks from Daniel Danker (General Manager for On Demand) and Phil Fearnley (General Manager for News and Knowledge). It was attended by around 55 women in the industry, from outside the BBC.

Flying the flag for R&D were Penny Allen, Liz Valentine, Maxine Glancy and myself, plus some help from Yameen Rasul and Ian Forrester as the token R&D males. We took along Daleketta, our hugely popular talking Dalek, who put on a very good show indeed demonstrating some of our Universal Control research. We got to chat to some extremely nice and interesting women in the industry, who seemed very encouraged not only by our research, but also to know that there was a relatively strong female presence within FM. We could always do with more though, so perhaps this event might encourage a few more to join us.

All in all it was a very nicely put-together event, which I hope will run again in the future. Maybe next time we can take a bigger Dalek...