Salt Lake Tribune
August 4, 2019

By Lina Nilsson

I build innovative tech products for a living and moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Utah about a year and a half ago. Recently, I was in a meeting and realized that I have been forgetting to deploy my standard meeting “tools”: I haven’t been resetting my chair height uncomfortably high to appear as tall as the guys and I have been jotting down notes for all to see. And yet, no one at Recursion, my high-tech biotech employer here in Salt Lake City, has asked me to be the permanent official note taker or bring in more coffee.

In other words: I’ve taken down my defenses and been able to focus on the technical work I do best — without being consistently reduced to “office housework,” a duty scholars show is more likely to fall on women than men.

Here’s some sobering statistics: Utah has the nation’s largest gender wage gap. And women are the least likely to be employed in a STEM field in the Beehive State. But I’d like to propose another emerging stat: Utah could become one of the best places to be a woman in tech.

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