Janeen Uzzell is the COO for the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia. Before that, she served at General Electric for over ten years as director of Healthcare Programs in Africa and head of Women in Technology, where she led initiatives to address gender imbalances while also promoting technology and healthcare among people in need.
KrASIA (Kr): What is the Wikimedia Foundation?
Janeen Uzzell (JU): The Wikimedia Foundation runs the Wikipedia platform and other sister products that are part of Wikipedia. The community consists of over 280,000 volunteers all over the world. They build and grow the content on Wikipedia.
Kr: Throughout your career, how have you stayed true to your motto of fighting biases?
JU: I strongly advocate diversity of thought and the influence of women in every space—particularly in technology, as I am an engineer. Women want to be heard. We want our skills and talents to be leveraged. We want safety.
Bringing a diverse voice for and of women into the workspace makes an incredible difference to the products that I design. In the efforts I’ve led, we not only ensure that we have strong women’s voices and that we have more articles on women, but that we also have a diverse and creative thought in all the work we do. Our staff is very diverse, and that makes for a more robust foundation.
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