CWiT continues to grow, empower women and drive diversity and inclusion in the technology industry
Dublin, January 20th, 2022: Senior leaders from over 20 country’s largest technology companies based in Ireland met today for the annual Connecting Women in Technology (CWiT) CEO Forum. The main topic on the agenda was to discuss the network’s progress and plans to attract, retain and promote women in the technology sector and to address the gender gap that exists within this community.
The report Getting to Equal 2020 cites women’s networks as one of the factors that influences advancement in an organisational culture of equality. Networking groups play a key role in ensuring that women continue to thrive in the workplace. 2021 continued to pose significant challenges for all of society and organisations operating across all industries. Our member companies have adapted to the ‘new normal’ focussing on employees well-being, resilience and growth. In today’s annual Forum, CWIT’s senior leaders made a strong commitment to continue to prioritise a variety of support mechanisms to continue making progress in closing the gender gap in STEM careers.
This year’s virtual meeting was hosted by Xilinx, which joined CWiT in 2019. Addressing the audience, Brendan Farley, VP Wireless Engineering & MD EMEA of Xilinx said “CWiT is a key part of Xilinx’s strategy to meet our DEI objectives in 2022. Embedding their projects and programmes within our engineering organisation is one of three key goals for Xilinx in Ireland for the coming year.”
CWiT spokesperson and strategy lead Ifah Sivak said “Despite the challenges we have continued with our members to attract, retain and promote female talent in the industry. We have not only continued to support and deliver our flagship programmes, such as STEM Teacher Internship (STInt) or Tech Starter, but also found new ways to ensure D&I stays high up on the industry’s agenda by forming alliances with other like-minded organisations. For example, we started a partnership with the 30% Club with a common goal to campaign for increased inclusion in the technology sector.”
CWiT 2021 Look Back Video
CWiT and the 30% Club are working together on complimentary activities to advance the gender balance in technology based careers in Ireland. With the 30% Club’s focus on gender balance at senior levels in organisations, CWiT’s great success working with schools, and our combined focus on early to mid- careers, the alliance gives both groups the opportunity to focus our efforts on future success across the full STEM pipeline from early education to board level.
Xilinx was founded in 1985 in California and opened its Irish site in 1996. Xilinx is the inventor of the FPGA, programmable SoCs, and ACAP. Their highly-flexible programmable silicon, enabled by a suite of advanced software and tools, drives rapid innovation across a wide span of industries and technologies – from consumer to cars to the cloud. Xilinx delivers the most dynamic processing technology in the industry, enabling rapid innovation with its adaptable, intelligent computing.
