Open Source Summit Europe 2022

Mentoring + Re-skilling technical women using Open Source Thrive-WiSE (formerly CodeChix), a charitable non-profit, is addressing the retention problem in the tech industry through open source tools and methodologies to help retain professional women engineers/developers and Product/Program/Project Managers (PxM)s. Thrive-WiSE produces Thrive-WiSE Micro Conferences, a series of technical and cultural conferences based on open source to help create an environment to support technical women engineers/developers and PxMs so that they can be as successful in their corporate careers as their male colleagues. This talk will present mentoring strategies and outcomes with an emphasis on data and metrics used by Thrive-WiSE over 5 years based on yearly Micro Conferences. The talk will focus on both the technical as well as cultural mentoring techniques and tools that worked and those that did not. In conclusion, the talk will provide recommendations that might be useful for other open source projects seeking to recruit and retain technical women in open source. Audience and key takeaways This talk is open to all. The audience will walk away with an understanding of the unique challenges when mentoring technical women engineers/PxMs and how to handle them.