Rebecca Minkoff, Intel team up to pique women’s interest in tech

Designer Rebecca Minkoff discusses women and tech. Designer Rebecca Minkoff discusses women and tech. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Rebecca Minkoff, Intel team up to pique women’s interest in tech 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Behind an open microphone, young women assembled in a single-file line. One by one, they stepped forward Monday to speak to the group gathered on stage: founders, chief executives, technologists and fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff.

What began as the question-and-answer portion of the inaugural stop of Minkoff and Intel’s joint college tour had turned the UC Berkeley auditorium into a confessional.

College students from an array of majors — fashion, business, journalism, engineering, art and computer science, to name a few — laid bare their fears and insecurities before the panelists.

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Am I too old to be applying for internships, asked one. How do you make peace with leaving behind a friend who’s just no good for you, asked another. I want to work in fashion, but I hate New York, confided another.

Alexandra Bernadotte, the founder of education startup Beyond 12, who sat on Monday’s panel, said young, ambitious women don’t often have the opportunity to hear successful people like Minkoff and other celebrated women in their fields say aloud what so many of them have already felt: “This is really hard. And as much as I might feel qualified to do this, there are days where it really sucks.”

Hearing that from others, several panelists said, can be very empowering.

“We don’t give women a lot of outlets to have these conversations,” Bernadotte said. “Women need to hear that we all have days where we doubt ourselves, we all have days where we don’t have a lot of confidence. The power of an event on a day like today is giving yourself permission to say yes, this is hard.”

Campus visits

Allowing college-age women to identify with successful women in aspirational industries is a key part of what Minkoff and Intel hope to accomplish in their partnership to promote women in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. The partnership itself, which was announced last year at a U.N. women’s event, will include campus visits on the West and East coasts, hackathons and “design ideation camps” in which college-age women will be connected with mentors and introduced to career opportunities in STEM-related fields.

Part of her goal, Minkoff said, is tackling the messages sent about what kind of women work in tech.

“I’ve heard women in tech say well, if we do show we care about ourselves, we get taken for granted that we’re stupid or self-centered,” Minkoff said. “I think it’s been a societal message that we’re trying to fight to say no, you can be smart and pretty. You can pursue a career in tech and still work in fashion.”

Minkoff, whose fashion brand of the same name features casual luxury handbags, accessories, footwear and, increasingly, tech wearables, said young women may not naturally equate interests in fashion, art or writing with tech.

But, she said, the lack of women in tech fields is increasingly having an impact on industries beyond stereotypical Silicon Valley software startups as tech becomes a natural asset to women in a variety of industries including in fashion, retail, art and design.

Fat mirrors

She recalled the recent installation of “smart dressing rooms” in the flagship Rebecca Minkoff store in New York that allow customers to flip through different looks while shopping and enable a dressing room to record what items are brought in and out. Everything looked perfect, she said, until they brought in two women to test them out.

“The entire team was made up of men,” Minkoff said. “So when the two girls went in to try it out, right away, they said ‘This is a fat mirror. We are not shopping at a store with this mirror.’ And no man would have known barely what that term was. So it was sort of an aha moment for me to see that if a woman had been on the team, she would have known that you have to consider the mirror and how it makes a woman look. It’s just those small details of a woman’s user experiences that can make such a difference.”

About 100 young women attended the event at UC Berkeley. They were each given white tote bags with a message emblazoned on the side: “It’s time for women to even the score.”

Intel, whose CEO Brian Krzanich announced last year that the company would improve its own diversity to reflect the percentage of women and underrepresented minorities in the United States by 2020, and pledged $300 million to aid in the effort, said it has a vested interest in increasing the number of women in tech-related majors.

Intel broadens reach

Partnering with Minkoff, said Renee Wittemyer, Intel’s director of policy, innovation and research, is an effort to broaden the company’s reach beyond those women who may already be looking to work in computer science-related fields.

Minkoff and Intel will host the next event on its “Unleash Your Creativity with Technology” college tour on Wednesday at the University of Southern California. In the fall, the tour will hit East Coast campuses.

Minkoff, who lives in New York, said she plans on being at every single one.

“Showing them that this is possible, and that I did it, so you can do it, too,” she said. “Nothing like this existed when I was coming up and so many things can seem unattainable, so if you can make something feel a little more attainable for someone else, that’s what I want to do.”

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae