2017: the year of Wonder Woman and #MeToo; the year of speaking up and Time’s Up.
With the deluge of heartbreaking stories of inequality and harassment also came increased conversations about diversity and bringing women’s rights to the forefront of the collective consciousness.
Here at Bospar, we ended the year supporting CloudNOW’s 6th Annual Women in Cloud Awards. I’ve been fortunate to work with various nonprofit organizations over the course of my career in public relations, and I’ve found time and again that it is uniquely rewarding. This year, in the midst of #MeToo, we found ourselves with CloudNOW in the exciting position of providing a platform to recognize women for their success in technology—an industry dominated by men.
This year I attended the awards event with a few of my Bospar peers. We were witness to the empowering celebration of some of the greatest women in tech and some of the year’s triumphs.
Here’s a snapshot of what we did together:
Holberton School Scholarships
This year, CloudNOW teamed up with two prestigious programs to further empower women in tech. CloudNOW and San Francisco-based Holberton School worked with Google, Accenture and Scality to help pay student costs for award-winning software engineering education at Holberton.
Shanti Bhavan Scholarships
The Shanti Bhavan School in Bangalore, India, partnered with CloudNOW to provide science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education to female students in India. Together with Intel, Apcera and CB Technologies, CloudNOW awarded full scholarships covering tuition and living expenses for a year to three women dealing with extreme socioeconomic barriers.
Top Women in Cloud
We ended the year with CloudNOW’s sixth annual Top 10 Women in Cloud Innovation Award ceremony. The event, held at Google’s headquarters, honored women from companies like LinkedIn, Code.org, Microsoft and Neurala. It was attended by Vint Cerf, one of “the fathers of the internet,” and the recipients of the Holberton and Shanti Bhavan scholarships.
2018 is already off to a great start. We’re looking forward to helping support the work that CloudNOW is doing in the United States and abroad and to seeing what exciting things we can accomplish together this year.
