She said she wants to raise awareness that women are underrepresented in many tech industries and show how people at UNC can make a difference.
“I think the biggest goal would just be to start a conversation and hopefully people that felt like they didn’t really have an idea of what they could do to change this gender gap walk away from this week with some concrete examples of things that they can do to be more supportive of women in tech in general,” Llewellyn said.
Gina Rozier, external relations manager of the Department of Computer Science, helped Llewellyn start the week.
“When Kaylee came up the idea, I think she had originally figured we would do a day ... ” Rozier said. “And when she said she wanted it to be big — and she did, she said she wanted it to be big — so then we needed it to be an amount of time ... so we thought, ‘Why don’t we make multiple events throuought the week.”
Rozier said they advertised for the week mainly through social media and through fliers. She said they garnered a lot of student participation.
Second-year graduate student in the Department of Computer Science, Tanya Amert, said she’s always loved to play with computers.
“I really like visual things, so being able to describe, say, an image or scene really simply and visualize that, or even simplify daily tasks, like math homework or keeping track of what I wanna do today — any of that I do with technology,” Amert said.
She said she thinks women in the tech industry face hurdles and is glad there is an opportunity to have a conversation about the issue.
