Season's and Transitions

It is stormy today near my house in the Los Gato's mountains. I am siting at home, listening to the wind whipping past. I love this time of year partly because of the seasonal weather shifts, the colors on the tree, and chance to have a fire in our pellet stove.

Last week I had the entire Anita Borg Institute staff to my house for an early Thanksgiving Dinner. The early Thanksgiving get together has become an annual tradition for us, and laughed and enjoyed each other's company. Unfortunately we have a a number of people sick, who were unable to attend. Yes, the fall flu is another part of this time of year. I believe our staff's flu are the garden variety, but who knows this year with the flu outbreaks.

With the holiday break next week, I feel strongly that it is a time for our staff to take some additional time off. We all work really hard, with an impact that is profound for the size we are (12 people). It is important to take some mental days off.

Next week I visit my family, most of whom live in Salt Lake City. It will be fun to get together. Happy Holidays to all of you.

The White House Project

This week I was in Virginia and DC. On Monday, I attended the inaugural NCWIT pacesetters meeting, held at the University of Virginia. I will talk more about Pacesetters in the future, but at the meeting, I heard Marie Wilson speak, founder of the White House Project.

Marie has a long history of building movements from campaigns, including examples such as Bring Your Daughter to Work. One of the White House Project's outcomes was getting the TV series Commander in Chief on television. I often hear that one strategy to attract more women to technology, would be to launch a new TV series. I admire her ability to focus on impact and to deliver results.

Some of what I heard from her is the following ( italics are my comments)

• Start from where people are, not where you are, don’t exhort them. We often want a particular group to change their beliefs and behaviors, but understanding that your message and action needs to start from where they already are, can determine the impact of your work.
  
• Of course you need the research, but you then want to tell the story. As engineers, we always need to have the data, but bringing the data alive is an important part of any effort.
  
• It is the right time for women, because the economy is broken and organizations are looking for answers. There is a renewed interest in diversity – because of Scott Page and others.
• To convince leaders you need to focus both on the bottom line (ROE), and on need for creativity.
• According to research, 90% of people are comfortable with women leaders, except in a few roles (such as in combat). This provides the landscape and opportunity for women to succeed.
• Change does not happen overnight, you need to be persistent, you need to keep trying something different, and measure results.
  
• Logic is the word that people use to describe decisions they have already made.

What I heard more than anything else was the need for persistence, and a clear focus on the desired outcomes. I walked away inspired.

Illuminate Ventures

I serve on the advisory council of Illuminate Ventures. This is a new venture that invests in early stage companies. They are focused on finding and investing in women led companies, although they ultimately invest in companies with great ideas.

If you look at companies with VC funding, only about 5% include women leaders and/or founders. Quite often, this is a result of unconscious bias, where many men investors are used to and comfortable with male entrepreneurs. For a great example of this, I've included a description of a Harvard Business school experiment where different classes were given equivalent cases for "Heidi Roizen" and "Howard Roizen". One description is included in a Stanford GSB description. From this article

As you might expect, the results show that students were much harsher on Heidi than on Howard across the board. Although they think she's just as competent and effective as Howard, they don't like her, they wouldn't hire her, and they wouldn't want to work with her. As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi's aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard).

Cindy Padnos, the founder of Illuminate Ventures is committed to finding and investing in great women entrepreneurs, as well as finding and investing in great entrepreneurs. I've come to greatly admire Cindy, her commitment to creating a well run and managed fund, her commitment to finding data to support her approach, and her passion for the work.

Her approach and her commitment to quality is an inspiration to me. I can't wait to see her next steps.

ABI Online Communities

Online communities have been an important part of the Anita Borg Institute since 1987, which was when the Syster's community was originally founded. Systers has been an important part of ABI since those days, and depends on an active and engaged set of volunteers, including Robin Jeffries, who is her Syster's Keeper. Robin has devoted countless hours in service to the Syster's community.

The last few years ABI has expanded and extended its communities offerings to depend on a broad set of tools, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. BJ Wishinsky, our Community manager, has done an outstanding job of extending ABI's presence on these platforms. Every where I go, the technical women know BJ.

We regularly measure our progress, and although numbers aren't the whole story, they do paint a picture of our communities on line involvement. At the end of last month, we had 2832 Syster members, 2494 Facebook Members, 2644 LinkedIn Members, and 3843 Twitter Followers. These are not necessarily unique people, but by looking at the participation, it lets us know that many members of our community want to participate in ABI"s programs through these platforms.

There are two recent articles that illustrate how our community participate online, augmenting their in person experience. The first is a blog about how the communities enhanced this person's GHC experience.

What a Web We Weave: Enhancing Conferences with an Online Community

Excerpts include:

This participation absolutely made my GHC experience, and I returned again in 2009 as one of the YouTube group coordinators.

Before the conference, bloggers posted advice on how to make the most of the exhibits and recruiters, on what to pack, on networking.

Twitter was used to distribute announcements of new blog posts or video or new information about the conference. It’s also used as a networking tool.

Beyond the conference I use Twitter to keep in touch with the new members of my network.

This description is indicative of much of the feedback that we hear.

Also, there is an article in the December issue of LinuxPro talked about the Grace Hopper Conference, that included a description of the Syster's Code Sprint work, one of the projects of the Syster's online community.

The primary goal [of the Syster's Code Sprint] was to provide a positive hands-on introduction to the Systers open source development community. The original task list was a starting point to help foster new development ideas.

These articles are a reminder to me about how important our online presence is, as we use these online communities to enhance our conference meeting.

Women of Vision Nominations and Keynote

Hard to believe, but the 2010 Women of Vision is beginning to come together. The event will be held on May 12, 2010 in Santa Clara. This event has the one of the highest quality rating of anything we do. Every year I leave the evening completely inspired by the award winners.

I would encourage all of you to submit a Women of Vision nomination in the three categories of Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. The nominations are due by December 11th.

I am also thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will be the Keynote speaker for the 2010 Women of Vision Awards. Here is her biography:

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of twelve books. She is also co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio's popular political roundtable program, and is a frequent guest on television shows such as Charlie Rose, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people. In 2008, she was named Media Person of the Year by I Want Media, and wrote the introduction to The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president

Publish Post

of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

For me her book On Becoming Fearless makes her a perfect speaker for this event.

The event will be on May 12, 2010. So plan ahead and save the date.

A Climate of Mentoring

One of the observations from our study, Climbing the Technical Ladder, is that mentoring is undervalued and undersupported by almost of all of the companies we talked to, although research shows that it is one of the most important and impactful practices there is.

How do you do mentoring well? Ask Katy Dickinson from Sun, whose work leading Sun's Seed mentoring program I consider to be an exemplar program. Katy, together with her colleagues, recently released a publicly available research report on their work. You should take a look.

What I think is important about the the Sun Seed program

• It has always had strong and visible executive support and participation. For a program to be successful, the leadership of an organization needs to demonstrate its importance to the company, by participating and by continuing to make it visible.
  
• The program always uses data to tune its offering. Katy regularly tracked participation, results, and outcomes.
  
• The SEED program was truly international, with a sensitivity to the needs of Sun's international workforce.
  

A formal mentoring program is an important part of changing the culture and Sun's SEED mentoring program is a great example, we can all learn from their results.

After the Grace Hopper Celebration

I am finally back on line after a wildly successful Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. We sold out - with 1630 attendees, including over 700 students, including 331 student scholarships. If you want to understand the impact of the conference, I would encourage you to read the GHC blogs. On the blog, there are many perspectives and personal experiences ranging from bringing Girls into Computing, commentary on the award winners, as well as commentary on many of the sessions, including the Change Agent award winner panel.

For me, what is most fulfilling about these posts is the diversity of opinions - there are many people involved, and I learn something every time I read the blogs.

We announced our new video I am a Technical Woman, and when I watch it, I am moved, because it captures the essence of the excitement of GHC. I am proud to be a technical woman, and even more proud after watching the video.

Ed and Ashley were back, with their 5 minute video show. I had a chance to speak with them, and they talked to many other people, including Wendy Hall, the president of ACM, and Jo Miller, whose workshop on becoming a person of influence included useful and timely information.

Exciting, exhilarating, tiring and for many attendees, life changing, that is the story of this years Grace Hopper Celebration.