My name is Joan Palmiter Bajorek

How do you pronounce my name? Here’s an audio file of me speaking it on LinkedIn

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, the liberal and somewhat comical town of friendly people and good food. From a young age, I was enamored with languages and linguistics.

My sister tells stories of me “teaching” her made up languages in elementary school. I’m one of those lucky people who ALWAYS knew what I was interested in. On a high school career form, I circled “French,” “Photography,” and “Linguistics.”

These ended up being my BA, BFA, and Master’s degree titles.

I’m an alum of the University of Washington, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Arizona (my PhD). My PhD research stemmed from my Linguistics coursework when I realized that NLP and phonetics/voice/sounds were revolutionizing technology. That was back in 2015.

Note: I use “Dr.” in front of my name because I worked incredibly hard to get my PhD. I find it often helps to counteract ageism and sexism. “Oh shoot she has a PhD, she must actually know her domain” has worked for me in R&D contexts.

Across the years, I have held so many titles and learned so many skills. If you’re looking for my CV/Resume, my LinkedIn is the most up-to-date place.

For my career, titles I’ve held include but are not limited to:

Researcher. Leader. Entrepreneur. CEO. Data Scientist. Principal Investigator. Founder. Chief Partnerships Officer. Head of Data Science. User Experience Researcher. Mentor. Mentee. Speaker. Evangelist. Graphic Designer. Photographer. Webmaster. Writer. Author. Scholar. Community Builder. Founder. Influencer. President. Artist. Conversation Experience Designer. Product Owner. Teacher. Accelerator Creator. Student. Lecturer. Designer. Award Winner. Entrepreneur in Residence. Salesperson. Partnerships Lead. Manager. Fundraiser. Accountant. Optimizer. Data Analyst. Workshop Facilitator. Social Media Curator.

Fundamentally, my career is a dual fusion of technical innovation and systemic change.

Today, the majority of what you’ll see public-facing is public speaking, managing a team, fundraising, and doing a ton of side projects.

In high school, I was told that I would be an excellent CEO.

As a girl, I got told on the playground as a kid that I was bossy. I doubt this surprises you, my dear reader. My parents had/have very high expectations of me. And importantly, my ambition was encouraged.

It just happened faster than I expected and completely by accident. In 2018, I was finishing my PhD, had just moved back to the Pacific Northwest, was interviewing at companies, and speaking at conferences. When I saw how few women and BIPOC folks there were at big conferences- I couldn’t not create Women in Voice.

I felt like the only two choices were “do something” or “complicity.” I had trouble sleeping that summer knowing all these women were so excluded through group think. That this could be considered “normal” in the field I had chosen for my career. I had folks who told me not to take on more, namely a family member, but I am so grateful Women in Voice exists. A few weeks after launch, already 27 women had signed up for “leadership positions” and it rapidly evolved from there.

Since its launch in August 2018, it is clear that Women in Voice fills a void. People are voraciously hungry to find their people and participate in our community.

More about my journey creating and scaling Women in Voice

Researcher to CEO/Founder: A researcher became an influencer and community builder?

It’s true! It happened. How? The short answer is my “soft skills” and side hustles.

Two jobs no longer on my resume are fundamental to my success today.

1) Community Building: When I realized there was no French Club at the University of Washington (UW), I created one. I was the Founder and President of the UW French Club for years. It taught me about crafting messaging, community building, and what finding your people feels like. Through my degrees, I learned how to read, write, and translate my ideas to art. I graduate with a double degree of a BA and BFA from UW in 2013.

2) Communication Skills: In graduate school, I realized my stipend as a Teaching Assistant at the University of California Davis was barely going to cover my rent in California, let alone groceries. Thus, I went in search of side hustles. I taught French privately on the side. There was also a job at the Graduate Student Association that paid $500/mo called the “Public Relations Officer.” Problem = grocery bills and living expenses. Solution = Work more to cover those costs.

Transferrable Skills: I leveraged my marketing chops from my UW French Club (see poster from 2012 on this page), my writing skills from my BA in French, and my graphic design skills from my Photography BFA to convince them I could design logos, posters, write copy, and curate the organization’s online presence. This was at the same time I was designing slide decks for research conferences and creating graphs for tables in papers. The skills and projects fueled each other. I graduated with my MA in 2016.

My PhD Journey

In 2016, I knew what my research project topic was going to be about. I applied and told them I wanted to work in tech and how excellent a fit I was to get my PhD and work in R&D. I was the top 2% of applicants at the University of Arizona (UA) for the interdisciplinary program “Second Language Acquisition and Teaching.” That year there were 150+ applicants to my PhD program, they only accepted around 10 and I was the only one who got a first-year fellowship.

Basically it was a “design your own degree” as long as you found an advisor and committee who supported you. When I came to visit the program before accepting my spot, I met for coffee with Dr. Mike Hammond who told me “Of course you’re coming here, even if you’re not my student.”

He told me about the vibrant community of scholars were one of the best parts of what the program had to offer. How every door would be open to me. He was absolutely right, and also became the best advisor I could ask for. If you’re not an academic, you might not know, but we PhDs consider our advisors like our parents. In German, the word is literally “Doktorvater” or “doctoral father.”

At UA, I knocked on every person’s door I could. One of my superpowers as a Portander at heart to assume people are friends I haven’t met yet. By asking for introductory meetings with professors all across campus, I found mentors who wanted to work on projects with me. Speech Sciences. Game Theory. UX. Human Language Technology. French. Spanish. Statistics. Acoustic Modeling. It felt like that improv game “yes and” because people were so excited to work with me. My research was incorporated into syllabi and space was donated to my research at the iSpace of the UA Library. I negotiated with a startup to donate software to my projects and give me access to their backend analytics. I presented my research internally at Rosetta Stone.

When projects and opportunities arose, people knew I was the “ASR person.” I got paid to do UX research projects and help companies figure out why their systems were performing so badly. This is a lot of what led to my research that would become the comprehensive paper that would get published in Harvard Business Review. I spoke at tech conferences and presented tutorials

At UA, I also took coursework in phonetic, statistics, NLP, language models, digital humanities, corpus linguistics, speech sciences, and much much more. I graduated in 2019 with my PhD.

While working at many companies, I launched Women in Voice in 2018 and have scaled it ever since. I’ve also continued speaking at just about everywhere and participating actively in my field.

Portfolio Careers (HBR, 2019)

Do you think the number of projects I’ve worked on seems excessive? I consider it a portfolio career.

I’ve had a recruiter tell me that my resume must be a lot of lies because there is so much work within seemingly so few years. It’s not. The answer is I’ve been working a lot and I have a lot of privilege. I earned my MA and PhD in 5 years (it would have been 4 years but one committee member wasn’t ready to sign off yet. Thank you to pages and pages of bleeding stats sections).

I’ve worked nights and weekends for years- what you see is that that work paid off.

I believe that we all need to work more strategically, not “harder.”

“Harder” often means banging our heads against walls, bad communication, and not defining concrete goals and KPIs.

So, sure, grit, resilience, servant-leadership, learning-mindset, and other buzzwords you’d like to use are part of my story.

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Fundamentally, my career is a dual fusion of technical innovation and systemic change.

That’d be dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy.

Am I perfect at intersectional feminism? Heck no. But I’m also committed to learning and growing. The BLM and AAPI movements have really opened my mind and heart to white privilege and to the advocacy I can do at home, in my organizations, in my communities, and globally.

As I unpack what I want to get done in this world, a huge hurdle limiting systemic change is money.

Money is a tool for systemic change innovation.

If talking about money makes you feel uncomfortable, please go check out the phenomenal work of Tori Dunlap, the Founder of Her First $100k. I’m a huge fan and her podcast, The Financial Feminist, is incredibly powerful work. Time Magazine says “Tori Dunlap is on top of the personal finance world.” I’m grateful she is based in Seattle and spoke at a WiV Seattle meetup in 2020. It pays to feel comfortable asking for what you want and getting women on stages.

As I look at how we can support women’s careers in my field and the world in general, I’ve seen how hard it is for women to start their own companies and scale them. Women get roughly 2% of all venture capital investment in the USA. That’s crumbs. I’m doubling down on supporting female founders and how we can fund and support different types of leadership.

Executive teams with women outperform all-male teams by 21%.

Ethnically diverse teams outperform peers by 33%, McKinsey and Company (2018).

I’ve started researching crowd-funding companies and how to support venture capitalists by doing due diligence for companies. See my portfolio on Republic. I’m not yet wealthy enough to be an accredited investor here in the USA, please remember I finished my PhD in just 2019. Recently I took courses with the phenomenal Arlan Hamilton and also with Women 2.0 to learn more about how to craft investment theses and portfolios. Today I’m a Technical Advisor to several companies and am working to be an angel investor.

No one gets here without support.

I am deeply grateful to all my friends, family, mentors, allies, advisors, supporters, doubters who egged me on, and the international community who continues to cheer my work on. Women in Voice is international by design and I literally get to meet folks from Croatia and Nigeria at online meetups.

Letting me and my team know how much our work ripples through the voice, conversational AI, and tech field is big to me. I’ll also admit I sometimes feel jaded by hearing it from so many people. Oh what a terrible problem :)

I meet Gen-Z women who tell me “wow, this field has so many amazing women and is so friendly.” I gotta say I didn’t feel that way in 2018- specifically that there were all these woman and all these prestigious opportunities for us.

Today, I call Seattle my home and continue doing all the projects my time can handle.

In my spare time, I like to cook, play the guitar, spend time with friends and family, go running, walking, and hiking.

Let’s work together to continue making this world a more inclusive and welcoming place.

I’m very honored you’ve read all the way to the bottom of this. You rock :)