According to Girls Who Code, 74% of young girls express interest in STEM fields, but only 26% of IT jobs are held by women. In our Women in Tech series, we look at what drives some of our most motivated employees to pursue successful tech careers. Rachael Wright, Engineering Team LeaderHer zeal for her craft lights up the room. I call it “his job” because programming is more than writing lines of code, it's an art form. “There is a specific moment that I can relate that made me want to be a programmer,” she explains. “We were learning the if statements, and the teacher assigned us a task. “Remove the middle two letters of a word if it is even and the middle letter if it is odd”. I finished it, but a student kept asking questions. "What if I use a different method to determine if it's even or odd?" What if I use a different method to remove the letters? The purpose of the assignment was just to write an if statement, but this guy didn't understand. So I raised my hand and asked the professor, "What if I removed the if statement?" He replied, 'I don't think you can do that.' I showed him that by subtracting the rest from the number of letters you want to remove, you can. He asked me if I was a computer science student. I said no. He said 'You should be'. This moment changed my life. »Rachael Wright got her first tech job through an internship at Macy's Systems & Technology, after graduating from Georgia Gwinnett College. "My mentor, Sunira, went to the manager and told him to hire me on a part-time basis." For someone who, until college, never imagined she would excel in the tech world, Rachael has since found herself a natural creator in a world often stereotyped as cold, calculating and focused. on income.
One of my favorite things about programming is how it blends art and science. It's one of the most human things you can do. It takes math, science and language created by humans and solves human problems. »This perspective was no doubt influenced by the mentors to Employee Email Database whom she credits the challenge of being the programmer she is today: "In college, I had Dr. Brannick, and she was the first woman in tech that I had seen. She talked about her patents and the work she had done in the world of technology. Mr. Price talked a lot about the business world, including how to approach problems and write good code. My mentor Sunira is now my best friend. She showed me what it was like to be an incredibly creative, kind, and brilliant professional. She is incredibly creative and artistic – she does photography and design but is also extremely technical and knows the latest javascripts. She is also so warm and loving. She made me think that anything is possible and that you can be all of these things at once. Being all at once can be difficult in a male-dominated space. Rachael remembers how her bright temper worked against her in the past. “I try to be friendly and open because I see how inspiring it can be. But sometimes someone who presented a more closed male character got cast over me. That's why I enjoy being at CallRail, because I can be a great programmer and be who I am.
Luckily, I was not sexually harassed, but I was not chosen for a job because of who I was. Rachael's passion for intersectionality in tech is evident as she continues, “I think women and minorities in tech are absolutely vital. Technology is changing and deciding our future. If we don't have diversity and inclusion in technology, we will have a vision of the future that will not be representative of what most people look like. You have hand sensors that don't recognize black skin, and you have voice assistants that are almost always female. There is so much discrimination that is unintentional. If these development teams are all white males, they just don't see another perspective. The more intersectional groups we have, the more their voices will be heard. »When it comes to advancing in leadership diversity, Rachael leads the way in her own way. Earlier this year, she was promoted to engineering team leader of a development team she calls "Don't Lose." “Don't Lose is all about getting opportunities. We pick up on projects that the business needs urgently or that would slow down other teams. We generally only pick up projects that can be completed in six weeks, and often much less. We want to be able to shift the focus quickly. Examples of the types of projects we would take on would be things like building functionality for large customers, adding support for additional countries, or our recent GDS integration.