Community Spotlight: Portuguese Women in Tech

This Community spotlight is actually about a Community of its own: Portuguese Women in Tech. Portuguese Women in Tech is working towards a more diverse and inclusive tech community, by focusing on attracting more women to tech and on supporting those that are already working in technology.

Launched in April 2016 by Liliana Castro and Inês Santos Silva, it has the mission of supporting women in tech by providing networking, mentorship, trainings, and other opportunities.

We spoke with Inês Santos Silva about their community and of course, spreadsheets.

Inês is Co-founder and Chief Activist at Portuguese Women in Tech. She is also the founder of Women(dot)Business, a social business focused on creating more corporate procurement opportunities for women-owned and women-led businesses. She is currently diving deep into the topics of her interest - Web3 (particularly #DeSci) and health (digital health, women's health, and longevity) - and we were able to catch her between events at her hometown in Porto, Portugal.

Inês is an everyday user of spreadsheets. From calculators to checklists, a spreadsheet is a tool to be found in all her projects. Recently Inês created two spreadsheets that caught our attention:

A crowdsourced list of female speakers

With this spreadsheet, they wanted to show that it is possible to have female speakers on all sorts of tech panels - and by adding a form to it, anyone can suggest more speakers at anytime.

As Inês puts it:

"It’s amazing how you can virtually accomplish any analysis about social media channels using Rows. It’s complete and it’s easy to manage. Looking forward to keep using Rows as a top tool within our Marketing Team." - Marta Calvário

Already featuring over 300 female speakers from over 20 different fields of expertise, the spreadsheets is a great database for event organizers, who can easily find speakers for their next events.

The other spreadsheet Inês built was for their Salary Transparency project:

Quickly filter by Job title and find relevant information.

The purpose of this spreadsheet is to bring transparency to the salary negotiations, especially for women. As Inês made sure to point out:

"Lots of studies show that women don't feel comfortable negotiating salaries and asking for promotions and part of that comes from the lack of transparency around salary details. With the PWIT Salary Transparency Project we want to change that. This is a tool to help the women in our community make more informed decisions and close the gender pay gap."

With more than 400 contributions so far, anyone can benchmark their salary with over 250 job titles, in different cities and countries.

We asked Inês why Portuguese Women in Tech chose to have these spreadsheets on Rows. She gave us three main reasons:

“With Rows Live Mode, anyone can submit an update directly to the spreadsheet. And it works on any device: a desktop, a tablet or a mobile."

How both spreadsheets look on tablet and mobile.

"There is no need to build or maintain a separate form tool, the spreadsheet has all of the functionality needed.

And finally, the spreadsheet can easily be exported/shared with other members of the community and the public."

These spreadsheets are just a couple examples of the tools that Portuguese Women in Tech wants to build for their community (and the general public) to help women advance their careers. Make sure you visit their workspace for more useful spreadsheets.

👩🏻‍🚀 Inês can be found on LinkedIn. You can find more information about Portuguese Women in Tech at their website here.

👩🏽‍💻 Learn more about Rows at rows.com and sign up here.

The spreadsheets in this post are just a hint of what’s possible to achieve with Rows. You can find these and many other at our Community page.

📽 In our YouTube channel you can find many short, to-the-point, tutorials on a wide rage of topics - and we’re adding more on a regular basis.

🙌 [object Object] where we’re nurturing a community FOR spreadsheet lovers, BY spreadsheet lovers, and where we welcome conversations about all kinds of spreadsheets, not just Rows spreadsheets.

🙋You can ask for help or 🤗 help someone in need, share your experiences and knowledge. Or just hang out and have fun. Yes, spreadsheets can be fun!