Clockwise from top left: Panelists Kay Burke, Sara Murray, Shannon Weber, Kevin Souza, and Pranathi Sundaram; event materials and WIT@UCSF logo buttons; Kat Li and Sarah Ngo at booth; audience members at the panel discussion; Rosemary Yau, Clarice Estrada, Alyssa Tecklenburg, Ana Buenaventura, Sarah Ngo, and Suria Sadat at booth; Jenica Cimino and Sarah Ngo at booth.
On Thursday, October 10th, WIT@UCSF held a panel discussion on gender equity in technology at the UCSF Sharecase conference at Mission Bay.
We convened five speakers, Kay Burke, Sara Murray, Kevin Souza, Pranathi Sundaram, and Shannon Weber, from areas like informatics, governance, and management who were in a diverse range of roles and vantage points within our organization. They discussed topics including recruiting a diverse group of employees, how to support professional development of people who are underrepresented in technology, and using the lens of diversity...
I do not know how to code. The languages I know are Spanish, French (both clumsily), and English (less clumsily), not JavaScript or Python. Can I set up a server or trouble shoot network issues? Only if you want more issues. Do I consider myself a technical person? That’s a complicated question.
At what point does one consider oneself “technical?” And what does that even mean? I recently attended the UCTech Conference in Santa Barbara and attended a Women in Tech panel in which the Associate CIO at UC Davis, Meggan Levitt said something that resonated with me:
“The word ‘technical’ was used against me in my early career to single me out as an employee without a STEM degree and somehow less deserving of the term. I decided right then to build a computer from scratch (without YouTube!) to prove to myself that a Spanish major can be technical too! Now, as a manager and leader in my organization, I know there are many paths to becoming technical—libraries, teaching and finance for example. I welcome employees that can learn new technologies to...
Technology is an all-encompassing word that can mean many different things depending on who you ask. In healthcare, it could mean new radiological imaging machines or robots that deliver food to patients. One omnipresent piece of technology is the electronic health record (EHR). UCSF uses a software system called Epic as it’s EHR, as do many other hospitals. It is a complex application that is the center of many policy discussions. At UCSF we have many researchers who use EHR data but only a handful who study the EHR itself and its impact on health care delivery and outcomes. I was able to sit down with one such researcher, Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, who is the Director of the Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research, to learn more about her role in helping shape the national discussion and her own experience as a researcher who studies how clinicians interact with technology and the related policy issues. The interview is lightly edited for clarity and length.