Meet the Speaker — Grace Francisco

Grace Francisco is the CMO at Pangea. Her session at WITS Northeast is “To the left, to the left, then slide right — The new developer dance”.

• Why is speaking at WITS important to you?
• Whenever I have an opportunity to speak at an event with other Women in Tech I take it. There aren’t enough senior women in tech and that won’t change until we start representing and helping others pave their way forward.
• What or who inspires you?
• So many women over history have paved the way forward and are unseen. I take inspiration from hearing a wide variety of stories from those who went before us. Actress Hedy Lamarr for example — mostly known as a Hollywood golden era star was an inventor of may things including frequency hopping technology which became the foundation of Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. I recently also wrote about what led me to Pangea which included a woman I met while I was in Melbourne for a tech event. Chris Gillies — a former CIO did programming back in the day when you used programming paper which then was translated to punch cards! She led all male teams for a long time, eventually became a CIO and still does consulting work today. She said to me “You have at least 3 major careers ahead of you — what are you doing next?” :-) I love that about her — that after knowing me for only a few minutes she inspired me to think bigger.
• Most useful article you’ve read in the last month
• HBR article “The Business Case for Curiosity” by Francesca Gino. There’s so much goodness in fostering a culture of curiosity — from innovation to more transparency and collaboration.
• When you were a kid what was your dream job?
• I wanted to become a mad scientist :-). Actually I really had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up and I’d argue I still don’t. No one grew up in my time aspiring to be a software engineer, much less an expert in developer relations. It was perhaps an advantage for me to not know and being always open to the opportunity for change and taking on roles with high ambiguity. That’s something most people look at and run the other direction but I seem to be a glutton for punishment. Taking on the unknown is stressful for most people but I’ve learned to embrace the discomfort as part of learning and growing.
• Tell us something about your session
• I’ll be teaching a new dance move I’ve invented to talk about the need for developers to make security top of mind.
• What other sessions or speakers are you most excited to see?
• So pleased to see Gloria finally speaking at her own event! And I love the topic of encouraging women to brag about their accomplishments. This is such an unnatural and uncomfortable thing for most women to do because of the cultural norms many of us grow up in — but its time to change that. If it’s normal for our male colleagues to do, the way we do that is to accept that for ourselves and our women colleagues as well.

Hear from Grace and other amazing women in tech at WITS Northeast! Learn more and register at https://womenintechsummit.net/wits-northeast-2023/