We are getting ready to celebrate International Women’s Day, and the upcoming Silicon Valley Forum Women in Tech Festival! And it is very appropriate because at Evercontact we are proud to have a perfect gender balance throughout the company, even amongst the tech team which is not so common.
Yes, it’s true, we not only have a female founder and CSO but fully 50% of our entire team are women, and we are committed to our goal of fully integrating the professional world. But, only about ⅕ of our users are female, which inhibits us from reaching our goal of keeping the entire world of professional address books perfectly complete and up-to-date.
Women frequently need a boost in professional networking, just what we enable, as we can be lacking in old boys networks and often suffering from overloaded personal and professional schedules, which means making new contacts and staying in touch with existing ones is complicated. So we encourage you to invite your female colleagues, business contacts and friends to join (for free!) here!
And to provide some inspiration, meet the Women of Evercontact!
Gaëlle Recource, CSO & Co-founder of Evercontact, PhD, Linguistics, NLP Our CSO, Gaëlle’s PhD in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing is well put to use, although her extreme logical-ness (is that a word?) is frequently put to the test while addressing the sometimes very non-logical world of real-life user behavior. She spends two days a week in the office, taking care of her countryside home and horses while telecommuting the rest of the week.
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Clara Wiatrowski, Software Engineer, Computer Science, Telecom Nancy. Clara comes to us from the national defence office, and presumably worked on some exciting projects there but she can’t talk about them 😉 So she is relieved to work at the entirely transparent Evercontact office defending the right of professionals to have accurate contact information.
On her off-duty days, Clara is an ariel silk performer with the Erezance company, and her artistic skills can be admired above.
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Fanny Grandry, NLP Engineer, Master Computational Linguistics, Université Denis Diderot (Paris VII). Fanny’s recent placement on the Marketing team involves not just coding but interpretation skills: She serves as the official representative to the tech team and translating marketing demands into actionable specifications when it is not something she can take care of personally. Fanny also confidently presides over the question of the day at the office and is not actually an expert burro driver despite the image.
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Solange Foucart, Director of Marketing, Master in Management, NEOMA Business School.. A recent US immigrant, Solange is enjoying the (relatively) lower rents and sunshine of the East Bay while commuting to Evercontact’s new San Francisco office and attempting to find non-frenchie natives with whom to communicate as well as some decent wine that is not ridiculously expensive.
She is also the co-founder and CMO of Ibaba Rwanda, which showcases the embroidery skills of a workshop in Rutongo, Rwanda, newly restarted after they had tragically stopped operating following the 1994 genocide. It’s a worthy social enterprise that supports rural women’s economic development and that also has beautiful bags, pillows and other accessories that you can peruse here: http://www.ibabarwanda-shop.com/
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Mel H, Customer Success: Mel got her first taste of tech support at one of the big dot-coms during the late 90’s, and nowadays she delights in solving our user’s toughest problems. She has been a Peace Corps volunteer, has lived and worked in eight countries and speaks several languages (which comes in handy for international customer service!).
Mel also puts her two decades of experience teaching English to work by holding occasional classes for the non-native speakers on the staff. She is passionate about all things creative and livens up our otherwise extremely boring weekly slides with her drawings.
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Gabriela Giacoman, Community Manager, Juris Doctor, Law, University of California Hastings. Gabriela, aka myself, happily put her legal skills to no use at all and comes to Evercontact fresh off the success of Gawker Media, where she helped it progress in a variety of roles from a living room start-up to a 300+ person company with fancy offices in Manhattan and infamous lawsuits.
When not authoring this fine blog she can be found in rehearsal studios and concert halls singing for the group French Boutik, as evidenced here:
So there you have it, we are proud of our diverse team and really would appreciate your help inviting more women. They’ll appreciate saving some time and lost contacts, and we’ll appreciate being able to boast of gender balance on all sides of Evercontact.