Yesterday, March 20, was the first Utah Girls In Tech (GIT) Day throughout the State of Utah! 

The Women Tech Council worked with the state's legislature and governor’s office to have March 20 set aside for this event. 

Ivanti Girls In Tech Day

At the urging of our VP of Human Resources, Susan Urses, the STEM committee organized a GIT day for Ivanti. All Utah employees were encouraged to bring their daughters—or other girls they know whether they be relatives or neighbors—to the Ivanti building from 3:30 to 5 p.m.

For the first hour, the girls job-shadowed an employee and learned about what he or she does at Ivanti.

At 4:30, everyone met in the executive briefing room for a quick presentation and, of course, some light refreshments. We then viewed a video produced by the Women Tech Council about the event.

The girls were then shown a quick demo of the Ivanti Cloud product. This was an interesting view into what data Ivanti can make available to the IT department. It showed them important data that helps corporate IT departments to analyze and fix problems in their endpoint environment. 

We then were privileged to hear from three of our female engineers, Gail Coates, Kristen May, and Marissa Beech. They discussed their careers in the software development arena.

Women in Tech

  • Gail mentioned how she started out looking at a career in health care, but decided that it wasn’t in her personality to work with people who were sick. She switched to software development and never looked back.
  • Kristen talked about how challenging it is to work very hard to solve a problem and then how rewarding it is to finally see it working.
  • Marissa, who is still in school, is enjoying her time at Ivanti and learning a lot. She enjoys the challenges and the work environment.

It is so good to see more girls looking at the potential of a career in a tech field. Everyone, men and women, have unique qualifications and solve problem uniquely. It is important for our products to have input from varied perspectives. While in the past, this field has been dominated by men, that is now changing. It is important that we have a diverse group of technologists creating our products.

Thanks to those who helped organize this event. We will do this again next year on March 20, so, plan on it!