One of the many reasons I love working at Intuit – and having been here for 23 years, I must love it – is that it scratches a big itch of mine. As a longtime feminist who has recently been moved to activism, I find meaning in supporting and promoting Intuit’s culture of being an awesome place for technical women.
Intuit’s focus on tech women began about a decade ago when a few of us wanted to shine a light on the need for greater representation of women on our engineering teams. Then in 2009, Tayloe Stansbury joined the company as CTO. Female coders figure big in his life, starting with his mother and extending to his wife and three daughters. He recognized that real progress can’t happen with just a grassroots effort – it needs executive support.
Fast-forward eight years and Tech Women @ Intuit is in full swing, led by program manager Tracy Stone. And it’s not just something she does in her spare cycles – it’s her fulltime job. TWI, as we call it, is dedicated to attracting, retaining and advancing technical women. The group runs a steady stream of programs, including sponsorship of top female talent by leaders, development workshops and peer mentoring. TWI also invests in building the pipeline of future female technologists, supporting organizations like Girls Who Code.
TWI is the driving force behind Intuit’s annual presence at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, or GHC, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Each year we send 100+ employees to the event to recruit, give talks, attend sessions and connect with other technical women. The energy at GHC is so high that attendees are still buzzing days after it’s over.
I wanted to capture that energy in a video that highlights Intuit’s involvement at GHC as well as our broader TWI initiative. As you’ll see, Intuit is a pretty awesome place for technical women.