Portland Women in Technology has tapped its former operations director as its new leader.
Hazel Valdez was named CEO of the nonprofit with community of nearly 10,000 members and hundreds of volunteers. The group’s mission is to build a better tech industry by creating access, dismantling inequities and fueling belonging.
Valdez previously worked with the group from 2017 to 2020. She started as a part-time event coordinator and then became operations manager. She left and joined the Oregon Bioscience Incubator and Oregon Translational Research and Development Institute (OTRADI) as associate director.
When the role for PDXWIT opened up, it was too good for her to pass up, Valdez said.
“This is a way to pay it forward. PDXWIT gave me a new life and I want to pay that forward for other folks in the community, I want to fuel belonging and dismantle inequities,” she said.
Valdez succeeds Elizabeth Stock, who stepped down earlier this year. Stock was the group’s first executive director and helped create the official organization, which had started in 2012 as an informal happy hour for women working in technology.
Valdez’s career background is in marketing, and that was how she got into the tech industry. She worked with large health care organizations in marketing and helped move them to social media. She also has degree in culinary management from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Art.
She is an immigrant from the Philippines who came to the U.S. as a child and grew up in Southern California. She moved to Oregon in 2012. She spent some time as a restaurant consultant and then joined a company building websites for health care practices. In that tech role she managed global developer teams. She has also worked as a customer success manager.
She has been consulting with PDXWIT for several weeks in order to hit the ground running in this new role. She has been working with the existing team of three staffers and the board.
Her vision for the organization is to collaborate with other community partners and seek unified community grants. She said she is hoping that more collaboration will help more organizations successfully get access to increasingly limited funding pools.
She is also planning to continue the work started prior to the pandemic to take PDXWIT national. The group will also continue to host virtual events in parallel to any in-person events. Through the pandemic the group built an online community that has further expanded the group’s reach.
“The issues we face within the tech community around access, equity and belonging are the same ones we face as a larger society,” she said in a written statement. “Being named to this position means I’ll be able to play a big role in addressing those issues in tech so that we can all thrive.”
PDXWIT’s Winter Soiree is slated online and in-person Dec. 15.
