Keysight Celebrates International Women in Engineering Day With Company's First Global KSWEEP Day

By Jay Alexander, CTO at Keysight Technologies
Jun 23, 2020 3:00 PM ET

A big shout-out to the world's women engineers today! I'm actually posting this on the evening of the 22nd here in CA as it's already the 23rd in Europe and Asia. Now in its seventh year, INWED is celebrated on June 23rd because it was on that date in 1919 (yes, 101 years ago) that the Women's Engineering Society was founded in Birmingham, England. The Society of Women Engineers, founded in the U.S. in 1950, has also embraced INWED. Keysight is a member of SWE's Corporate Partner Council and has had a strong relationship with the organization for over 40 years, going back to our time as Hewlett-Packard.

To help commemorate INWED, we've chosen this same date for our first Global KSWEEP Day, where KSWEEP stands for Keysight SWE Enterprise Program. KSWEEP supports the success and advancement of women engineers and professionals, and Global KSWEEP Day is a virtual conference open to all our employees worldwide, with 24 hours of programming comprising a mixture of pre-recorded and live content, organized into four tracks:

  • Building communities of support
  • Investing in employee growth
  • Understanding allies, inclusion and bias
  • Celebrating technology contributions and innovation

I'm excited to participate, and I'm very grateful for all the work that has gone into planning the activities, especially from leaders Monica HarrisonCheryl Diller, and Erica Messinger. I'm also grateful for what other companies and organizations are doing to mark the day. This is one of those cases where more is better, for the engineering professions and for the world.

You can google around and find various lists of famous women engineers, all with impressive stories, and here's a short video with some historical firsts that was put out in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Women's Engineering Society last year. The famous ones are great, but so are all the others, including the hundreds of awesome women engineers at Keysight! The same goes for those at our suppliers, partners, customers, and competitors, those in education helping develop the next generation, and those making up that next generation. They are all heroes in my book, and my appreciation for all they do goes out to them today and every day.

Regardless of your gender identification, please take a physical or virtual look around your own workplace, and do one or more of the following regarding an awesome woman engineer near you:

  1. Convey your appreciation for what she does
  2. Offer your encouragement and support
  3. Enlist her support, and learn something from her!

Bonus points for those who do all three.