Lauren Hasson - Founder of DevelopHer

After an early interest in STEM subjects led her down the path of computer science, Lauren Hasson found herself pursuing larger and larger aspirations. Now, she is the Founder of DevelopHer, an award-winning career development platform that provides women in tech with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to overcome the field’s gender gap in leadership, opportunity, and pay – for good. Lauren also works on the frontlines of tech as a Director of Engineering at a top Silicon Valley payments company. We sat down with Lauren for the #WomenWhoMaster series to glean insights from her life, her work, and her commitment to uplift the next generation of women in her field.

Q: It’s great that your parents were so supportive of you pursuing computer science at a young age.

[Laughing] I’m not sure whether I would say “supportive” or “coercive,” but even though I felt upset about it at the time, to say the least, this turned out to be one of the best decisions my parents ever made for me.

Q: Let’s fast forward to your college years and early career, at which point you were building on that high school programming foundation. Did you have a professor who was especially helpful, or a mentor who supported you while you were finding your way?

Nope. Throughout my education and career, I never really had a mentor. I had to be my own cheerleader and mentor, and that taught me that I have the power to direct my own path. It would have been nice if there was someone there to open doors or dispense sage career advice for me, but that person never came along. What I’ve realized over the years is that the resources we are looking for often lie within us.

Q: Would you say that experience is a big part of why you started DevelopHer? Could you take us through the beginnings of that platform?

Yes, not only because I wanted to show the way for other women, but because, again, I wanted to help women understand that in many cases they already have what they need to succeed. 

As for how the platform came about, in the very beginning I was just planning to interview women executives in technical departments — VPs of engineering, CTOs, CISOs, those sorts of roles — for a podcast, and to release their stories to the world in the hope of inspiring others. The same week that the podcast launched, I was contacted by a prominent women in tech summit that was interested in me speaking over their summit lunch. I told them my story, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew I was giving the opening keynote at the summit instead! That’s when everything took off.

Soon after that, I developed my first offering, which was an equal pay salary negotiation program designed to arm women with data and protect them from being underpaid relative to their male peers.

Q: Amazing! And now, all these years later, with a commanding view of your field, is there anything you can say you wish was more common in the world of STEM or software engineering in particular?

I wish it were more common that people would talk about their fears and insecurities about imposter syndrome. Behind closed doors, people will talk about how they initially panicked when they got a challenging or high-profile assignment. When people in the industry project confidence publicly, women especially perceive them as having their acts together and never experiencing similar fears. And that's just not true. I've had conversations about imposter syndrome with men and women alike. It’s important for women to understand that they’re not alone in feeling out of place.