International Women’s Day is one of the most important days of the year in the PagerDuty calendar. We’re proud to raise awareness of gender inequality, lobby for gender parity, and celebrate women’s achievements. It’s particularly important for us because technology—and particularly DevOps— is a field where women are typically underserved and underrepresented.

To further our commitment to ensuring and celebrating gender diversity, we’re marking International Women’s Day by bringing together our amazing community of women in DevOps. Our virtual event, ‘Women in DevOps: 2021 Priorities,’ will see eight female leaders—including our CEO, Jennifer Tejada—come together on March 9 to discuss everything from diversity in DevOps to staying educated in a remote environment.

As Jennifer herself told MarketWatch, she’s not your typical tech CEO: “I’m ethnic, short, and female. I usually don’t run into a lot of people who look like me at tech networking events, but things are slowly changing.” And it’s with events like our Women in DevOps meeting that PagerDuty can continue to move the needle on equality.

Honoring Diversity and Success

Celebrating every success and milestone for women in the workplace is critical in every industry, but particularly in DevOps. According to StackOverflow’s Annual Developer Survey, women account for just 11% of developers in the US. In other countries such as Poland and Brazil, this is as low as 5%.

Empowering these women while actively encouraging greater numbers to enter the industry is vital. Diversity not only makes us stronger and more innovative, but it also ensures we reflect the communities we serve. This is why we launched our first Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (ID&E) report in September 2020—to be transparent about our diversity and pay equity efforts, and to set a vision for how we can build a more inclusive future.

Conversations Around Achievements and Inequities

Our March 9 event will hear from PagerDuty’s incredible community of women. Come and join us from 1 p.m.-3 p.m. PST to hear:

• Welcome Address from Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty
• Keynote from Dr. Nicole Forsgren, VP of Research & Strategy, GitHub
• Panel Discussion featuring individuals from Salesforce, Align Technology, and Honeycomb.io
• Roundtable Discussion led by Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty

The Panel Discussion will feature speakers discussing DevOps trends they are most excited about, how allies can support the women they work with, and strategies to ensure diversity at the executive level.

More broadly, each of these sessions will cover some important questions, including why it’s so difficult for women to get into DevOps and how to maintain DevOps best practices remotely. We’ll also be asking what the ‘New Age’ of DevOps will look like and what the role of women is in that future. In addition, we’ll talk about DevOps problems yet to be solved.

The full list of panelists includes:

• Jennifer Tejada, Chief Executive Officer, PagerDuty
• Alayshia Knighten, Senior Implementation Engineer, Honeycomb.io
• Dr. Nicole Forsgren, VP of Research & Strategy, GitHub
• Frances Zhao-Perez, Senior Director, Product Management, Salesforce
• Sreelakshmi Kolli, Chief Digital Officer, Align Technology
• Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty
• Sanghamitra “Mitra” Goswami, Senior Director, Data Science & Machine Learning, PagerDuty
• Paula Thrasher, Senior Director, Infrastructure, PagerDuty

Driving Change Collaboratively

In addition to celebrating women’s successes, we hope that these conversations will inspire future and existing women in DevOps. This event should serve as a reminder that there are steps all of us can take to make workplaces more gender diverse—not only on International Women’s Day, but for the rest of the year, too.

Equality is not a privilege, but a right for everyone. At PagerDuty, we’ll continue to work at embedding ID&E in everything we do, and continue on our mission to build a culture of belonging for all.