At Tuesday’s Executive Women in Technology event, a packed room of over 70 women listened as guest speaker, Kieran Snyder of Textio, spoke about her past research of gender biased language and the software company she created to put an end to its use in the workforce.

Before we got started, attendees took our Tech Animal Quiz to help them learn more about their inner animal tech animal. Take the quiz for yourself here to find out what animal you are!

The event, hosted at the Economic Development Council in downtown Seattle, began with an introduction by Uma Rao, representing our community partner, the Technology Access Foundation. TAF Academy is a 6th-12th grade school that prepares students for college and careers in STEM. It is co-managed with and located within Federal Way Public Schools.

Kieran Snyder began her talk with an anecdote about her five-and-a-half year old daughter who recently came home from school declaring that she was “the girl in her class who was best at math.” While wonderful to hear, she found it discouraging that her daughter was “the girl” and not “the kid” who was best at math.

After much research of text and language in job postings, resumes, and performance reviews, and a published study on the use of the word “abrasive” to describe women, Snyder formed Textio.

In her presentation, she demo-ed the software with a job posting for a buyer position at a large Seattle corporation. After reviewing the language in the posting, Textio gave it a low score of 32 (on a scale of 100), and the gender bias scale was leaning all the way to the blue (male) side. Words with negative, positive, hyper-masculine, and hyper-feminine connotations were highlighted in their respective colors with a drop down feature that provided alternative, gender-neutral word choices to help improve the language of the text.

As a woman in technology, Snyder said the goal of the software is for people to use it to create postings that are gender-neutral or more inclusive and open to women. With women making up just 30% of the tech industry today, perhaps her software will have a positive impact on the number of women in tech in the future!

Big thank you to Kieran Snyder, the Economic Development Council for hosting, Deloitte for sponsoring, and all the women who came to the event. Stay tuned for more information about our next EWIT event in October, but in the meantime check out our events page and join us for the fun events we have coming up this summer!

For more photos of the event, check out the WTIA Facebook page!