Bringing More Women Into Standards with Veronica Lancaster, VP of Standards Programs at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)

You also read the transcript of the podcast interview with Veronica Lancaster here:

Host: Veronica, thank you for joining us in this Word to the Wise conversation.

[00:00:58] Veronica Lancaster: Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here and to contribute to Word to the Wise. Some of my friends and colleagues have participated and I'm happy to be included in the conversation.

[00:01:08] Host: You've such vast experience in the standards development industry. Tell us a bit about how you began your career and the opportunities that were offered for women standardization professionals.

[00:01:20] Veronica Lancaster: Yeah, well, my career in standards was somewhat of an accident in that my original interest was in training, development and human resources. I spent five years in the Army when I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted my day job to be, and that was a great learning experience. It helped me develop discipline and drive. After I was honourably discharged, I started focusing on HR and training and development, which led to a job working for a small satellite office that had three employees and was about the size of a bedroom maybe. So, it really left a little room for advancement, even though it was really focused in on developing training and development programs for different organizations. So, at that point, I, I started looking for other jobs that might have a little bit more opportunity for growth, and I found a job working for a telecommunications association that was focused on standardization. I fell in love with the process immediately and I grew within that association. I fell in love with the process itself, getting engineers to work together, and I started working for a few great people that really gave me room to grow, and they mentored me. So, when I started working in telecom standards in the late 1990s, the dotcom boom was still really hot. And there were a lot of companies that were involved at that time. However, the number of women that were working in the development of standardization was limited. Within telecommunications, it seemed to depend really on the specific field of expertise regarding how many women were participating. So, for example, we saw stronger participation from women in ordering and billing, as well as in network rating and routing. But other areas such as optical networking, timing and synchronization and packet technologies and systems, they were heavily male. Many other committees in telecommunications, but that's a pretty good example of how it gets started, but you know, it's starting to get better.

[00:03:31] Host: And where is the standards development field now with regard to greater diversity and inclusion and gender responsiveness.

[00:03:40] Veronica Lancaster: I believe that there is greater awareness about the importance of diversity, inclusion, and gender responsiveness, which is a great start to improving behavioural changes. As part of my volunteer work, as you mentioned, I'm the president of the Board of Directors for Women in Standards. And that's an organization that's focused on promoting the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in standardization. We're a fairly small organization with over 500 individual members. But our beginnings were humble. We really started as a networking organization. We were supporting the importance of getting to know each other in the field. So, we started with just a few networking events among, women that were working in standardization in the Washington DC area. It's an interesting community in that, a lot of people that work in the community tend to stay involved in standards. Like me, they love it. So, as we started with just a few friends getting together now and then We grew into an organization that incorporated in 2019. These women that participated, they could see the importance of networking, sharing information, and learning from each other and supporting each other. So, what I love seeing, is how internationally that's been, going down the same path. For example, in my personal work in the International Electro Technical Commission, also known as the IEC, I'm never sure if everyone knows what that is, but they're a global organization that's focused on bringing more than 170 countries together to create international standards. So, we had a very similar experience in the IEC. I work within a couple of technical committees, but specifically TC 100, which is similar to the work that CTA does, in audio and video and multimedia. When I started, there were only a few women that were participating, but we began to gravitate toward each other, and we started creating our own network. Throughout our time we began hosting dinners during our face-to-face meetings, and we started discussing issues and challenges that we were all facing, and that led to...