By Claudia Bauzer Medeiros
The Change Agent Award I received in 2006, at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) opened new doors for me, inspired me to take new actions, while fostering initiatives concerning women and IT in Brazil. The Anita Borg Change Agent Awards, which celebrate the accomplishments of technical women from emerging countries, provide recipients with GHC scholarships that pay for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and conference registration.
This year, I participated in helping to select The three winners of the 2007 Change Agent Award. It was a difficult task, given the number of qualified candidates and their many interesting activities. It is my hope that this award brings as many opportunities for the recipients and their work as it did for me.
The award had a big impact in academic circles around my home country of Brazil — not only in IT, but in other areas as well. It also raised the overall level of awareness concerning issues of gender and IT. In fact, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences had already been grappling with the question of how to get more women interested in scientific fields, such as mathematics and physics. The Academy was surprised to find out that the country’s IT is suffering from the same problem. This new insight has led the Academy to become more interested in extending the scope of its initiatives to include computer literacy for women.
In addition to the great career benefits I received from winning the Change Agent Award, being able to attend GHC was a prize onto itself. There were three major benefits I saw from attending the conference: networking, acquiring scientific knowledge, and the pleasure of meeting many nice and interesting people. Though IT allows us to live thousands of virtual lives, nothing could replace the real personal interaction I enjoyed at GHC.
Finally, the materials and information I gathered at the conference is being used to help the Brazilian Computer Society’s programs to attract young people toward IT-related careers. Of course, GHC itself is a success story. At the conference, I learned how it had started small and grown into the largest women-in-computing conference in the world. I was so inspired by this, that a colleague and I organized the first official Brazilian event for Women in Information Technology (WIT 2007). The event, held in Rio de Janeiro on July 5, was sponsored by the Brazilian Computer Society. The WIT event attracted groups of students, teachers, and IT professionals and its success has prompted us to organize WIT 2008 in July next year.
These are just a few examples of the Change Agent Award’s impact on my life that is one reason why I participated in the selection of this year’s three winners. It is worthwhile knowing that the award will offer many benefits for this year’s winners and their work as it did for me and mine.