Level Up

YWCA Hamilton is pleased to present Level Up, a speaker event focusing on advancing women’s skills, diversity, and leadership in the workplace. This breakfast event offers attendants the opportunity to learn about barriers women face in the workplace, while at the same time exploring tools and tactics that will be useful to overcoming obstacles.

Agenda:

7:15 am – Registration Opens

7:15-8:00 am – Breakfast Buffet

8:00-8:30 am – McMaster University Presents the EXCLerator Project Results Summary: Women & Diversity in Executive and Community Leadership

8:30-9:30 am – Keynote Speaker: Heather Payne Presents Digital Literacy: Why We Need to Know How to Make Tech

McMaster University Presents the EXCLerator Project Results Summary

Women & Diversity in Executive and Community Leadership

This 2017 report is the second installment of the Women & Diversity EXCLerator Project, the first comprehensive investigation into diverse leadership representation in Hamilton and Halton. This report analyzes findings against our initial 2014 benchmark data, allowing us to evaluate progress and identify setbacks in women’s leadership trajectories across nine employment sectors.

The 2017 EXCLerator project expands the scope in two key ways. First, this edition quantifies the racial diversity of Hamilton and Halton’s top leadership. Second, it adds a ‘youth sector’ to gain insight into the diversity of the regions’ youngest leaders. These additions are critical to understanding the differing experiences of ‘diverse’ leaders beyond the gender facet, as well as state of the leadership pipeline and activism in the struggle for gender and racial equity.

Keynote Speaker: Heather Payne, Founder of Ladies Learning Code and CEO of HackerYou

TECHNOLOGY – Digital Literacy: Why We Need to Know How to Make Tech

In this keynote, Heather Payne focuses on technology education, entrepreneurship, and women in tech. She addresses major issues such as why children aren’t learning about technology from making and maker perspectives at school, and why women are still underrepresented in the tech industry. She draws on her experience with Ladies Learning Code to give real-life examples of teaching methods that inspire students and provide innovative, hands-on learning. She tells young people and recent graduates how learning how to code can make you a more valuable and desirable employee. And, she gives us insight into how we can work to create technology that will serve us individually, as well as the much broader population. With grace, optimism, and experience seemingly beyond her years, Payne not only changes the way we view our relationship to technology and the web, but she inspires us to see what each of us is truly capable of.