Panelists will answer the question: “What does the current technology inclusion landscape look like?” We’ll explore answers to this question from both academic and industry perspectives. The goal of the panel is to help conference participants understand the state of diversity and inclusion activities across sectors.
Héctor Beltrán is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from M.I.T. His dissertation ethnographically investigates the circulation of emerging forms of hacking and entrepreneurship between México and the San Francisco Bay Area. His research focuses broadly on the politics of race and creative economies.
Héctor is the founder of the Latina/os and Tech Initiative at the Center for Latino Policy Research. The initiative bridges dialogue between scholars from local universities, community workers, and representatives from Silicon Valley to help critically shape relevant policies aimed at increasing the number of people of color in tech.
Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership at Stanford University. She is also an affiliate at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. She was the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. She is a contributor to LeanIn.org, a contributing writer to the Atlantic, and a LinkedIn influencer. She is an author of the 2016 and 2017 Lean In & McKinsey Women in the Workplace reports on the status of women in corporate America. She is an expert on gender, women’s leadership, diversity and inclusion, financial insecurity, and economic inequality. At the Clayman Institute, she is a core team member of the Institute’s Voice & Influence program, which empowers men and women to excel professionally and provides them with the knowledge and tools to create organizations where all employees thrive. At the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership, housed at the Clayman Institute, she is involved in conducting research and designing tools and solutions to increase the number of women leaders in education, industry, and government.
Marianne speaks regularly and consults with companies on a range of diversity, inclusion, and equity topics such as unconscious bias, empowering women leaders, recruiting, retaining, and advancing diverse employees, women’s rising economic power, and growing economic inequality. She has worked with companies such as Kraft, Bank of America, Amazon, and Adobe, and non-profits such as HeForShe, Professional Business Women of California, and the League of Women in Government.
Her recent book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, examines how families are coping in an insecure age. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Bay Area native and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children.
Jason Gong is a Diversity Programs Specialist at Pinterest. In his role, Jason is responsible for cultivating and growing Pinterest’s internal Employee Communities and the development and integration of a D&I learning and development curriculum. He is also responsible for managing a portfolio of strategic relationships with community and industry organizations in support of Pinterest’s diversity hiring goals.
Prior to joining Pinterest, Jason served as the Engagement Program Manager at Facebook where he led engagement and retention programming for underrepresented employees. In this role, he managed the global Employee Resource Group program in addition to developing and implementing diversity skill-building and education programs for the global HR business partner organization.
Over the last decade, Jason has held various D&I roles at Prudential, American Express and Lehman Brothers building enterprise D&I strategies focused on diversity recruitment, manager training and education, employee engagement, development and retention.
Joseph Nsengimana is the executive director of D&I policy, strategy, and external partnership at Intel Corporation. In this role, Joseph is responsible for setting the strategy, policy and external partnerships to reach the diversity and inclusion commitments that Intel set for itself. He is also responsible for implementing all pathway development Initiatives funded through the $300 million Diversity in Technology Fund that Intel established in January 2015, to reach full representation of women and underrepresented minorities at Intel by 2020, and to promote diversity in the technology and the gaming sectors.
Prior to this role, Joseph was the director of programs and strategic alliances at the Intel Foundation where he was responsible for all the programs funded by the foundation and supported innovative partnerships to develop technology solutions and education opportunities for girls and women, as well as programs targeting youth development.
As stronger supporter of girls’ education, Joseph co-initiated the US-Africa STEAM summer camp for girls, WiSci camp, that brought together 120 high school girls from US and eight African countries to Rwanda for a three week intensive program that exposes them high tech, art and culture, and presentation. More of these camps are planned, one in Peru this summer and another in East Africa next year.
From 2008 to 2012, Joseph was based in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he held the role of director of corporate affairs group and strategic alliances in africa for Intel Corporation. In this role, he led a team responsible for government affairs, ICT and broadband policies, and CSR in Sub-saharan Africa. He advised and assisted governments, regulating agencies, and bilateral and multilateral development organizations on the use of technology to fast track development. As part of Intel education programs, Joseph and his team worked with 12 ministries of education in Sub-saharan Africa on their education transformation.
Joseph served on the technical advisory committee of the African Leadership in ICT project to build capacity and raising awareness of African leaders on the issues of knowledge society, ICT, education, science and technology, and innovations in support of EU-AU strategic partnership eight, and AUC action Plan; as well as on the ICT taskforce of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) where he co-initiated the African Ministerial Conference on ICT initiative, which is holding its second conference this year.
Joseph holds a BA and an MS in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University.
AnnaLee (Anno) Saxenian is Dean of the School of Information and she holds a joint faculty appointment in the School of Information and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. She is a member of the Apple Academic Advisory Board, and has served as Chair of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (NSF-SBE).
She is author of the internationally acclaimed Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994) which argues that Silicon Valley’s adaptive capacity derives from it decentralized industrial and social structures that support rapid information exchange and innovation. She is also the author of The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard, 2006), Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002) She has published widely in journals of economic geography, regional economic development, and industrial change. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT, a Master's from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA from Williams College.