The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, founded in 1997, has grown into a multinational force that promotes girls and women at all stages of their careers. The Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing series of conferences are the largest gatherings for women in tech in the world. Named after computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper, the most recent conference, held in Orlando, Florida, hosted more than 18,000 attendees from all industries, backgrounds and ages.

During the event, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, spoke with Anita Borg officials and Grace Hopper attendees who are innovating in areas from education to entertainment. This week, theCUBE spotlights tech and computing trailblazers in our Women in Tech feature.

Exiting Anita Borg Chief Executive Officer and President Telle Whitney (pictured) bid a fond farewell to the institute, which she joined in 2002. “What’s been really exciting the last few days is hearing the stories of how the impact that the AnitaB.Org has had on the lives of young women — but also mid-career and senior executives,” Whitney said during an interview at the conference.

She spoke glowingly about her 15 years at Anita Borg with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE. Under her tutelage, Anita Borg spread its women-in-tech initiatives to more than 80 countries across the globe. The institute has impacted more than 700,000 people, including women in countries historically adverse to women in the workplace and technology in particular, Whitney explained.

Developing nations have much to gain from organizations such as Anita Borg. According to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, shrinking the gender gap in technology could boost these countries’ overall economic health. “Expanding women’s access to [Information and Communications Technology] jobs would not only advance economic opportunities for women, their families and their communities, but it would also help address the shortage of skilled workers for these jobs and grow the digital economy,” report authors Catherine Powell and Ann Mei Chang wrote.

In India, Anita Borg has proven its efforts can increase women’s involvement in technology. When the Institute held its first Women Entrepreneur Quest contest there in 2011, it garnered 40 applications. The most recent WEQ contest received 329 applications — a huge jump in just a few short years.

Watch the complete interview with Telle Whitney below:

Cross-pollinating tech innovation

The Grace Hopper conference attendance has grown as companies inside and outside tech realize how the event and the Institute can help them promote diversity in the workplace and retain female employees. As tech cross-pollinates many industries, technologists and non-technologists will increasingly exchange skills, according to Whitney. For example, “There’s this real effort to bring state-of-the-art technology into our government, initially spearheaded by Megan Smith,” she said.

TheCUBE interviewed Smith, chief executive officer at Shift7.co, on her groundbreaking work bringing government agencies into the digital age. Smith served under the Obama administration as the third U.S. chief technology officer; she was the first woman to hold the office. The technology efforts inside the government are non-partisan and aimed at putting technology to work for public good, according to Smith.

“Let’s have our services be as great as Amazon, or as Twitter or Oracle and not be sort of retro,” she said.

Smith worked to attract high-level technologists to work for the government through terms of service like the Presidential Innovation Fellow and the U.S. Digital Service. She also worked on the Computer Science for All initiative, which seeks to make computer science education mandatory for high school graduation.

“Coding is a 21st century fluency. It’s a skill we all need, like freshman biology,” she said.

Watch the complete interview with Megan Smith below:

Entering Anita Borg Chief Executive Officer and President Brenda Darden Wilkerson echoed Smith’s sentiment. Wilkerson herself pioneered the Computer Science for All program through her work in the Chicago Public Schools system. She and many others involved in implementing Computer Science for All knew first-hand the challenges that women entering technology may face.

“I only learned about computer science accidentally,” Wilkerson, who started college as a pre-med major, told TheCUBE.

Since Computer Science for All has taken off nationally, Wilkerson sees kindergarten-age children learning that they can be innovators. In fact, even instructors within the schools sometimes discover an interest in computer science they never know they had, Wilkerson explained.

Statistics available on early technology education indicate that it can send droves of girls into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, majors. For example, 26 percent of high school students who participate in Technovation’s girls’ coding program who go on to college choose computer science majors. That’s 65 times the U.S. rate of 0.4 percent female freshman CS majors.

“I want to make vivid for more women of different backgrounds who may have traditionally been left out of the equation that there is an opportunity here for you if you want it,” Wilkerson said.

Watch the complete interview with Brenda Darden Wilkerson below:

Taking the road less traveled to technology

In her new CEO role, Wilkerson will focus on “intersectionality” and bringing women into tech from diverse professional fields. Conference attendee Maureen Fan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Baobab Studios Inc., embodies this eclecticism.

“I designed my own major at Stanford; within eBay, I took four different roles,” Fan told theCUBE. “I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit; and you can be who you are and create a category unto yourself.”

Baobab Studios’ virtual reality animation Invasion won a 2017 Daytime Emmy award for Outstanding Interactive. Through VR, Fan took her own uncharted route into the entertainment industry, bypassing the usual who-knows-who hitches in show business.

“To break into that industry, you either have to have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage,” she said. By contrast, VR is new and disruptive, so the playing field is level and open to anyone with an idea, Fan explained. “There’s no one telling us what we can and can’t do, because no one actually knows what we can and can’t do yet,” she added.

Watch the complete interview with Maureen Fan below:

Fan’s personal success story is inspiring. However, getting ahead in tech without the expected resume is still challenging for many, according to Vicki Mealer-Burke, vice president and chief diversity officer of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. After almost 21 years with Qualcomm, the company recently appointed Mealer-Burke its first-ever CDO. She is bringing the problem-solving skills she honed in product development and management to her new role.

Managers are creatures of habit, and this might lead to a stale and predicable workforce, Mealer-Burke told TheCUBE. “They go back to the people that have been successful year after year,” she said. As CDO, she wants to disrupt that paradigm with apprenticeships that give a wide range of staff members opportunities to learn and advance.

It is proving quite difficult to change long-standing patterns that prevent diversification, Mealer-Burke explained. “This is the biggest problem I think I’ve ever been tasked to solve,” she said.

However, even with controversies in the news, such as the Google memo and Uber’s harassment charges, Burke believes that women and other underrepresented groups in technology are making progress. “There are aspects to it that are discouraging, but I’m really a glass-half-full type of person,” Mealer-Burke concluded.

Watch the complete interview with Vicki Mealer-Burke below:

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo: SiliconANGLE