Diversity at Dreamforce – A Promising Start, But Challenges Remain
Last week was Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual customer conference, which basically takes over the city of San Francisco for a week of keynotes, educational sessions and parties. One of the highlights of this year’s conference was a focus on women in the technology industry, capping a major effort within Salesforce itself to recognize the company can do better to ensure more parity between the genders in terms of pay, promotion and overall job satisfaction. Similar efforts are underway in different parts of the technology sector, and within the Salesforce ecosystem as well (the Girly-Geeks, now known as Women in Tech, and Girl Force being two good examples of the latter). These efforts are definitely praiseworthy and in need of all of our support. There is another area of diversity, however, that also needs focus from all of us, on a global basis, and that is racial diversity.