Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek
Contributor
As chief marketing officer at Skillsoft, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek leads a global marketing organization focused on helping companies unlock the hidden value inside their greatest asset — their people.
Betsy Veneziano
Contributor
Betsy Veneziano is an application support specialist at Tyler Technologies. Throughout her career, she’s worked as a programmer for NASA and in multiple senior roles as an IT, product management and marketing leader.
Women in the workplace have historically been undervalued and underrepresented. That’s no secret, but it rings especially true in tech. In the United States alone, women make up less than 40% of the global workforce and only fill 25% of professional computing jobs. Furthermore, a new report found that 45% of surveyed women in tech said men outnumber them at work at ratios of 4-to-1 or greater.
Between the two of us, we possess nearly 70 years of experience working in tech(!), and if you ask us to recount our journeys, we’re likely to recall both great and not-so-great memories. For instance, one of us distinctly remembers being told by an eighth grade math teacher that she wasn’t good enough to take algebra. But in a fortuitous act of youthful defiance, she elected to major in math before landing her first post-grad job as a programmer for a NASA contractor. This would go on to launch a thriving, 50+ year career in tech.
A few decades later, the other remembers serving as the only woman on her company’s leadership team, often feeling isolated and alone. Again, de …
