Opening herself up to a room of potential judgement, Ashley Wellington-Fahey, the founder of the female-targeted digital sports network The Relish, sat alongside major male athletes at The Players Technology Summit in San Francisco and reminded herself that she deserved to be in the room.
The inaugural mostly off-the-record event, hosted this week by Golden State Warriors players Andre Iguodala and Stephen Curry and presented by Bloomberg, was meant to bring together athletes, venture capitalists and founders in sports technology.
But Iguodala, who brought in Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant as one of the prominent speakers at the three-day summit, said the event wasn’t just about connecting celebrity athletes to powerful investors, but also about opening the discussion about diversity in technology.
“I think it’s very important for us to continue to come together, instead of separating, especially in the tech world, where you don’t see as many women,” Iguodala said on the Bloomberg Business of Sports podcast ahead of the event. “I think the most important thing is for the issue to be raised and to seek out how we can fix the issue.”
Since the tech industry has made a name for itself making markets efficient and disrupting ways of life, this seems to be “a very solvable problem,” he said.
Part of the effort to bring to light the lack of women and diversity in tech was ensuring that female athletes, investors and entrepreneurs were at the table this week at the Players Summit. Alongside Bryant, who represented the tech world, were female athletes, such as Chinenye Ogwumike of the WNBA, and female sports-tech founders, such as Wellington-Fahey.
“I walked in confident, but found myself feeling moments of intimidation,” said Wellington-Fahey in a Facebook post she shared following the conclusion of the event. “As I settled into my seat, nervous as hell about how we’d be received, I opened the speaker panel and saw my name listed next to one of the world’s biggest athletes and thought, ‘I deserve to be here, too.’”
Excited to be presenting @TheRelishSports to Steph Curry, Andre Iguodala & friends for their 1st annual Bloomberg Tech Summit tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/pmyYN3U1hR
— A Wellington-Fahey (@AshleyWFahey) August 15, 2017
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Wellington-Fahey, who often struggles as the CEO of Relish trying to explain to investors why female sports fans should be more highly valued than they are, said the experience this week at the Players Summit reminded her that she, and the female sports fans she represents, belong at the table.
“We are all born enough. We are all born worthy. We all deserve goodness. We learn the opposite through negative experiences that send us the wrong message,” she said. “When you get to a place where you recognize that you are enough, you are worthy and you do deserve what you hope for in this life, the doors will open. It takes courage, it takes honesty with yourself, it takes a willingness to be and feel uncomfortable and it also requires a constant and continual process, but it is worth it.”
In an interview with SportTechie last week, Iguodala said he hopes to see more and more women in attendance at the summit as it continues to grow over the next few years.
“We’d like to see just as many females as men,” he said. “Diversity is such a key aspect.”