Tech Her

Listening to Gloria Steinem

2012-01-27T14:42:00.000-08:00

Gloria Steinem was in town yesterday to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of MS magazine. I had the opportunity to hear her speak twice - once at a lunch hosted by the Feminist Majority, and then again when she gave the keynote at Stanford last night. I invited all of the Anita Borg Institute's staff to join us for lunch, along with a few guests. My very good friend Amy Pearl let me know about the event. The lunch sold out in a few days, and the Stanford talk sold out in a few minutes. It warms my heart that Gloria still demands that kind of response. The events brought more awareness of MS magazine to Silicon Valley.

The work and writings of Gloria Steinem is very relevant to our work at the Anita Borg Institute, as we think about what does it take to create a movement?

Here is a picture with several members of ABI's staff including Jody Mahoney and Deanna Kosaraju

What was most impressive was Gloria's calm comments on activism and taking small steps to make a difference. Some of what I heard her say is

People are generous when they are treated generously.

In my work we often work with others to change thinking and actions, and I have seen how ineffective complaints can be, but if you provide difficult feedback with respect, it can make all the difference.

Other comments she made
If each of you do thing in the next 24 hours in the cause of social justice, there will two results - the world will be a better place, and you will have fun
Fear is contagious BUT
Courage is contagious too
Lead by example
We are the most effective at what matters to us.

Most of her speech was delivered with a softness and a humbleness that was in sharp contrast to the sold out crowds. My friend Anita Borg was a huge Gloria Steinem fan, and I thought of her often yesterday.

I think there are ways that we can work with the Feminist Majority and I was proud to be able to support the event.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

2011-12-20T05:32:00.000-08:00

I’m back in the United States – jeg lagged and up at 5am this morning, but happy about last week’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India. In 2010, we piloted a Grace Hopper Conference in India. Last week we finished the first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India. We had over 1000 people attend, with 125 students. There were 23 (!) sponsors including a few last minute additions. The planning committee included over 300 people on the planning committee, and they planned 8 tracks. Of particular note was a plenary entrepreneurial event, where six new female entrepreneurs gave a pitch.. The winner was Sangeeta Banerjee from 3Five8 Technologies, a software development firm that supports apartment management.

leadership panel

poster session

finalists from the entrepreneurs quest
.

Impromptu Microsoft Flash Mob at GHC India

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLq8zKZMJ-0&feature=youtu.be

I'm glad to be back but experiencing the success of the conference was very affirming.

India and the Anita Borg Institute

2011-12-08T23:35:00.001-08:00

I am India right now. Deanna Kosaraju and I spent the last few days in Delhi, and we are now in Hyderabad. We travel to Chennai, then Bangalore. The original purpose of the trip is for our upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India . This is our second conference, and we expect around 800 people.

As we have seen the community of technical women participating in organizing the conference, we realize the importance of understanding what we can provide to our community in India that goes to the heart of our work - changing the culture of technology to one that is welcoming to women.

We are meeting with a number of thought leaders in industry, the government, as well as associations to understand the unique value that the Anita Borg Institute can provide. The conversations have been remarkable.

The tech industry is young. Most of the women who work in the tech industry here are under 35. There are few women leaders in tech, although there are a few remarkable women. Many women grapple with their ambitions for a career, and the demands of their personal life. The constraints are different, many women have demands not only from their immediate family but from their in laws and parents. There are real advantages to have the close family ties that we see less in the US, but there are also many demands on a woman's decision making. Often she has little flexibility in location. But there are an increasing number of women who are creating technology here, and the number is growing.

The places we are visiting are some of the most important tech areas in India. With each meeting I learn more. This is an exciting time for the Anita Borg Institute.

Grace Hopper Celebration 2011

2011-11-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

I recently returned from Portland, Oregon where we held the 2011 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This year was tremendously exciting as we grew attendance by 35%. We held the conference for the first time at a conference center, which means that many of the aspects of conference management changed. It went flawlessly thanks to the hard work of the ABI team.

A quick overview of the conference by the numbers provides a picture of the scale of the event

2908 attendees from 146 companies and 235 academic institutions

1136 students, of which we offered 201 scholarships

98 sponsors

attendees from 34 countries

But what is always so rewording is to hear the stories. For example, one of the students who introduced themselves to me shared with me that she was faltering in her desire to stay in school, but had met a researcher in an area that she had not considered studying and she had decided to apply to graduate school. A senior woman from industry found out right before the conference that her job was changing, and she wasn't sure if she would stay. She was able to connect with several folks who suggested alternate career paths both within her organization and elsewhere. But mostly she found that she had support and encouragement for a change. I heard from someone after the conference who returned to her organization, and asked for a new role - she, through encouragement of many friends, found the courage to ask for what she wanted.

I leave to spend Thanksgiving with my family, and then off to India for our second Grace Hopper in India. For those who celebrate Thanksgiving, have a great holiday.

The GoTo Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

2011-10-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this week I attended and spoke at the Goto Conference in Aarhus, Denmark. A friend and colleague Rebecca Parsons organized a track on IT and Society at what was a very technical conference featuring agile programming, web as a platform, and open source development.

The conference is produced by Trifork, a Danish software development company that decided 15 years ago that a great way to keep itself current on technical and professional skills was to host a conference. They have succeeded in creating an invigorating and useful conference.

The two other talks in the IT and Society track talked about technology for the developing world or T4D. Technology has a different meaning in Africa, where much of the continent does not have power on a regular basis, but cell phone coverage is high. Although there is not power, there is cell phone coverage. The estimate is that by 2015, 95% of the world will have cell phone coverage. This is consistent with Hillary Clinton's claim that the cell phone will become the world's technology platform. In Uganda, where Rebecca spent three months as an innovation fellow, the cell phones are the simple Nokia 1100, with SMS only. With this cell phone as a platform, UNICEF is introducing some incredible tools including medical feedback using the SMS system.

My talk was on women and technology leadership. You can see my slides under the track information. There were about 50 people, with about a 1/3 men, and 2/3 women. What was impressive was the level of commitment from the attendees who really wanted to understand how to have more women at the University in Denmark, as well as at the local companies.

I loved Denmark. Copenhagen was great, and Aargus was friendly and welcomed. However, it rained most of the time I was there.

APEC and Women in the Economy

2011-09-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the APEC Women in the Economy summit in San Francisco. There were a number of extraordinary people who spoke, but the keynote was from Hillary Clinton (a link to her speech including a video).

Some excerpts from her speech

... will adopt a declaration for the first time in APEC’s history that will affirm this organization’s and each member economy’s commitment to improving women’s access to capital and markets, to building women’s capacities and skills, and to supporting the rise of women leaders in both the public and private sectors. .... Now there will be a temptation on the part of those observing or covering this summit, perhaps on the part of those of us attending it as well, to say that our purpose is chiefly to advance the rights of women, to achieve justice and equality on women’s behalf. .... I believe our goal is even bolder, one that extends beyond women to all humankind. The big challenge we face in these early years of 21^st century is how to grow our economies and ensure shared prosperity for all nations and all people. We want to give every one of our citizens, men and women alike, young and old alike, greater opportunity to find work, to save and spend money, to pursue happiness ultimately to live up to their own God-given potentials. ... a McKinsey survey, a third of executives reported increased profits as a result of investments in empowering women in emerging markets. Research also demonstrates a strong correlation between higher degrees of gender diversity in the leadership ranks of business and organizational performance. The World Bank finds that by eliminating discrimination against female workers and managers, managers could significantly increase productivity per worker by 25 to 40 percent.

I was inspired at the level of commitment to integrating women productively into the economy, as declared by Hillary Clinton. If you read her entire speech, she articulates the business case as to why we want women participating, something that I hold dear.

I was attending APEC to participate on a panel organized by Marvell's co founder Weili Dai. Weili wrote a great piece in the mercury news about Women in the Economy.

The panel included not only Weili Dai, but Deborah Forte, President of Scholastic Media; Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President of Cisco; California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren; Professor Claire Tomlin, Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley College of Engineering; and me. Ginger Lew, Senior Counselor, White House National Economic Council and Small Business Administration Administrator, introduced the panel.

The panel received a fair amount of press coverage including this one from the Daily Herald.

What was most compelling to me was that Corporate Executives, including Kathy Hill from Cisco, and Weili Dai received a lot of coverage as they articulated the need for women in our technology economy, include the following quote:

The lack of women in technology will hinder U.S. companies’ global competitiveness, leaving a valuable source of female workers untapped, Cisco Systems Inc. executive Kathy Hill said at a recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco.

This conference included women from around the world whose passion and job is to create the opportunity for women to thrive in their own economy. I left inspired, and with hope that there is global momentum to have women at the table of business, and perhaps even of technology.

Obama's Job Council and 10,000 Engineers

2011-09-05T13:01:00.001-07:00

Last week I had the honor to join Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, for a panel on increasing the number of Engineers in the workforce. A description of the panel (called a listening session and sponsored by Obama's job council) can be found here and here. Paul serves on the council.

n addition to Paul, Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy joined us, along with a number of University Deans - Leah Jamieson from Purdue (and ABI's Board of Trustee Chair), Shankar Sastry from Berkeley, Gary May from Georgia Tech and Renjeng Su from Portland State. Darlene Miller, from Permac and the co-chair of the Job Council committee together with Paul Otellini, also joined us.

To better understand the thrust of the conversation, please read Paul Otellini's op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Excerpts from the piece are:

The council’s high-tech education task force is focused on programs that will yield 10,000 more engineering graduates in the United States each year and begin to address the long-term threat of our nation’s growing skills crisis. ....

We will be calling on U.S.-based firms to help sponsor mentoring programs, internships and permanent job commitments for students in engineering programs nationwide.

.... the National Center for Education Statistics has found that the number of engineers U.S. colleges and universities annually send into the workforce has virtually stagnated at around 120,000. ....

By contrast, roughly 1 million engineers a year graduate from universities in India and China. This education disparity threatens to slow our economic recovery, stunts our long-term competitiveness and leaves technology firms in a skills crisis.

The deans in attendance expressed a desire to work together and with all academic leaders from all over the country to increase the number of engineers. The reason that I was invited to this panel is that it is clear to all involved that an important strategy to reach this increase to actively include women in any increase.

This kind of focus on increasing engineers is exciting and has the potential to change the decrease in interest in engineering and computer science at at the national level. I'd love to see it. As a Computer Scientist, I am hopeful that the increase will also include Computer Science, since many of the Deans present do not include the Computer Science discipline in the college, and CS is where many of the jobs are. But i am willing and eager to work with these leaders to create change.

TechWomen

2011-06-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

At the Anita Borg Institute, we decided to participate this year in a State Department program called TechWomen. The program is a partnership between the state department, Institute of International Education, and the Anita Borg Institute.

This last month we welcomed 37 women from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to Silicon Valley. The women came from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and West Bank/Gaza, and were extremely technical and accomplished. The TechWomen were paired up with technical women in Silicon valley for a month long mentorship. For a list of the companies involved, you can here.

I must admit June was a whirl of activity, but the most satisfying part was the chance to get to know the women themselves, the chance of a lifetime, they were a talented group of people, and I look forward to following their careers when they return home.

The month long mentorship began with a workshop, featuring Jen Fitzpatrick from Google and Ann Stock From the State Department. These are pictures of the two of them with several of the TechWomen

This last week TechWomen ended with a few days in Washington DC.

Hillary Clinton spoke at the final luncheon. I was very proud when she mentioned the Anita Borg Institute. Here are a few excerpts.

I also want to thank our partners at the Institute of International Education, ... and to the Anita Borg Institute, whose mission is one that I share – to increase the role of women in the field of technology and bring the benefits of technology to more women.

Now, being a woman in the field of technology is not always easy. Being a woman in any field is not always easy – but there are so many opportunities in technology that we just have to forge ahead, and we’re doing so around the world because we want to make sure that all the tools that technology has made available are just as open to women as they are to men. And I also believe that innovation thrives on good ideas, and women have a lot of good ideas. .... And it has a greater impact when technology has access for everyone. So wherever you live, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or in the Middle East or North Africa, we want to support you. We want to support the software that you design, the engineering projects that you manage, the courses that you teach.

Here is the video of her speech.

It was very exciting, and now I am off for the next few weeks, taking a break. See you in August.

NCWIT and Diversity for Innovation

2011-05-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

This week I am at the NCWIT summit. Yesterday's talks included two academics with very valuable research on Gender and Innovation - Scott Page and Joshua Aronson.

Scott Page is a researcher at the University of Michigan whose research is on the importance of diversity to innovation. His point is that for very large problems, such as poverty, climate change, energy, health care, global finance, and education, solutions found by a diverse team will outperform teams with the best agents involved. In his talk he discussed an experiment including a 100 agents. The experiment ranked the performance of all of the agents. The experiment then put together two groups - Group 1 included the best 20 agents (Alpha Group), and Group 2 included 20 random agents (Diverse Team). The diverse team almost always outperformed the alpha team. TO me this is a fascinating result. The key is that the alpha group tended to include 20 people who use the same tools, such as heuristic problem solving approaches.

What must be true for this results?
Hard Problem Condition: the problem itself must be difficult
Calculus Condition: problem solvers must all be smart- -we must be able to list their local
optima
Diversity Condition: Problem solvers must have diverse heuristics and perspectives

His research is really important for all of us that regularly articulate the need for diverse teams.

Joshua Aronson is an associate professor in Applied Psychology at NYU and his work is in stereotype threat. According to Joshua “Human intelligence is more fragile and malleable than most people think – far more so than the makers of the SAT and other tets would have us believe”.

As one example (and there are many) of stereotype threat, if the SAT test, when offered, asks for the gender at the beginning of the test, as opposed to the end, there is a measurable difference in SAT scores for women.

What makes intelligence fragile is the social factors that impair intelligent thought

Interpersonal chemistry – feel smarter, funner etc. with certain people. During my early career years, the support of several early professors made my abiltiy to deliver results easy. On the other hand, one of my earliest profeessors was sharply critical, and there were times when my brain would go blank, and I would be uanble to move forward.

Threatened Safety – within two weeks of a homicide, the neighborhoods IQ takes a nosedive. I have watched intelligent members of my extended network become immobilized intellectually as they experienced challenging problems at home.

Threatened Belongingness – nature wired us to care about what other people think. In our work at ABI, all of our community makes decisions based on what other people think. In some cases this desire for approval can bring new people into our community, but it can also mkae smart people ineffective.

Great speakers, and a great day.

Women of Vision and Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women

2011-05-17T10:07:00.001-07:00

At the Anita Borg Institute, the staff is focused and busy, as we prepare for Thursday's Women of Vision award ceremony . As I discussed in a previous post, we will celebrate the achievements of three amazing women - ABI's Women of Vision.

As we imagine a future where the technology culture is welcoming to women, it is imperative that we not only celebrate the achievements of women, but that we honor organizations that have the wisdom, the systems, and the commitment to develop and advance technical women. This year, for the first time, we also honor the Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women. This year's winner is IBM!

IBM demonstrated through measurable results the best outcomes for recruitment, retention, and advancement of technical women, and year over year change. IBM has a history of hiring women, from its earliest days, including my friend and mentor Fran Allen, who became IBM's first female Fellow. She also went on to become the first woman to win the ACM Turing award, the Nobel prize of the computing community. Today, IBM employs many leading technical women, including 13 fellows. IBM developed a systematic approach to mentoring and developing all of its employees that has served the organization well.

Thursday will be an amazing day, with an all day workshop featuring successful practices from a number of companies that are successful in recruiting, retaining and advancing technical women. This will be followed by a sold out evening where the inspiration of the winners feeds my soul for many months to come. I hope to see you there.

Technical Women Helping other Technical Women

2011-04-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

At the Anita Borg Institute, we have a chance to feature and work with many technical women. As I prepare for two programs over the next month - Women of Vision and our new endeavor TechWomen, I am reminded again how extraordinary individual women are.

At Women of Vision, we recognize three women in the categories of Leadership, Innovation and Social Impact. Although these three categories embody characteristics that are important to technical leadership, we often find that the winners embody characteristics from all three categories. That is certainly true this year.

Karen Panetta, recognized for Social Impact, is distinguished not only for her contributions to digital computer architecture simulation, but also for inspiring young women in her program, Nerd Girls, which demonstrates how engineers and scientists create and innovate on behalf of humanity. Chieko Asakawa, Women of Vision award winner for Leadership, has developed breakthrough technologies that have helped make the web accessible to the visually impaired. Mary Lou Jepsen, recognized for Innovation, has advanced the development of computer hardware through her innovation in display technology and demonstrated the possibility of making digital technology accessible and affordable throughout the world.

In addition to these three remarkable women, we have over 30 technical women in silicon valley who have agreed to mentor 38 women from the Middle East who will be visiting us in the month of June.

We are still looking for a few additional mentors, so if you know of someone, please have them sign up.

Technical Mentors will work closely with the mentees to provide technical and professional guidance. I've participated in a number of mentoring programs over the years, and it is one of the most rewarding experiences you can experience.

You need to be located in Silicon Valley, be available for the month of June, and be able to host the mentee at your company site.

Wall Street Journal WOmen in the Economy

2011-04-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended the Wall Street Journal's Women in the Economy task force. Today the report from the task force is available online, it was also in the print version of the paper. I decided to attend the invitation only event because harnessing the power of the Wall Street Journal has the potential to raise the issue with the business community, and to have an impact. The event attracted speakers such as Indra Nooyi from Pepsi Cola and Sallie Krawcheck from Bank of America. The journal commissioned a research report from McKinsey on Unlocking the full potential of Women in the US Economy. At the conference, the most quoted comment from the report is men are promoted based on potential and women are promoted based on performance.

The conference was only lightly attended by technology executives. Marrissa Mayer attended, but there were many more financial executives, not surprising since it was hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

From the Science and Technology Task force, the top four recommendations were

1. Brand the Bling: Build a vision for females, using branding and glamour to attract them to the field.

This is the classic image of technology problem that is pervasively discussed in our community, but is hard to change.

2. Female-Friendly Education: Develop mandatory classes for science and technology for entire bodies of schools.

Provide better intro classes for Computer Science and Engineering. Marissa Mayer talked about how she became a Computer Science student, and it was by taking Eric Robert's class at Stanford. His class was designed for the entire campus.

3. Culture Change: Technology companies should evaluate their corporate culture for any adverse impact on employment and retention of women in engineering and computer science, and make adjustments based on their findings.

Needless to say I was a supporter of this as one of the goals. I helped to craft the goal, and was instrumental in pitching it to the rest of the task force.

4. Insist on Diverse Hiring: Technology companies should insist that every candidate pool contain women and every interviewing panel contain women.

Hiring can of course help.

The report had a lot of recommendations. The most unique recommendation from this conference was for the Wall Street Journal to take on the issue, and to take the results of this conference to their CEO council. As the Wall Street Journal, they are in a unique position to help create change.

There were some amazing women in attendance, I am always struck by the passion of leaders across industries to change the status quo. They all know that that there is an important business case. But the statistics are not changing...

Skoll and Social Entrepreneurship

2011-04-01T05:10:00.001-07:00

I've spent the last three days at the the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology is going through a transformational change as we both scale up and prepare to scale even further. We are now offering both the yearly GHC India and future additional international events, AND the new Anita Borg Top Company for Technical women award and workshop, and ultimately more tools and content for ensuring that women thrive in organizations. We are a social venture, and attending the skoll workshop was a chance to learn from others.

It has been an exciting and informative few days. The lesson I learned were different than I expected. Some tidbits

Understand your model and the needs of your community. One panelists who provides micro financing to women in India talked about how she first developed a thorough 10 day training program for prospective clients, and NO ONE came. As she better understood the needs of the women she was lending to, she reduced the training to an initial 1/2 hour, the time they could leave their families. The training was re-framed as an ongoing effort.

Ensure that stake holder groups want the organization to succeed. There was much discussion on the power of the many participation groups engaged in helping an organization to succeed.

Design Your Innovation. A simple cycle of design is empathize, ideate, and prototype, then iterate. One entrepreneur who developed a school for training the next generation of African Leadership, interviewed hundreds of parents, government, and universities before creating his curriculum, AND before talking to perspective students. Since he talked to the groups that hire the school graduates, they provided much needed perspective on his desired results. Of course he then iterated.
Know what you are measuring and why. Many organizations measure what their donors ask them to measure, as opposed to what clearly demonstrates their performance. Only 3% of donors make decisions based on performance. The sage advice is to gently move your funders to understand the metrics that demonstrate your true impact.

My job takes me to many conferences, and I always meet interesting people. But I've never attended a conferences where Desmond Tutu and Peter Gabriel were on the program, and where Jude Law was in the audience.

Yes, there were celebrities, but the true inspiration were the women and men who passionately led their organization - articulated their business model and their success. It was inspiring.

BlogHer Bet - Mentoring and Managing Up

2011-03-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent the day at BlogHer for Business, Entrepreneurism, and Technology. Although I've admired BlogHer for years, and many of ABI"s staff have attended their events, this was my first time. Elisa Camahort Page, one of BlogHer's founders and someone I admire greatly, serves on ABI's Board of Advisors, and is a friend. I respect the way this organization mobilizes and empowers women to be the best they can.

At the conference, I led a panel in the business track on Managing Up with Sandy Carter from IBM, Crystal Walker from Coca Cola, and Jacqueline Jones from Kaplan University. For anyone who regularly has great ideas, it is really important to influence the thinking of the decision makers in your organization to bring your ideas to fruition. Decision makers include your boss, the CEO and everyone in between. Suggestions from these panelists included

Know the thought leaders in an organization, and figure out how to get them to believe in your idea.
Understand the goals of the people you want to influence, and show them how your idea will help them with their goal
Understand how to communicate to executives, and realize their communication needs are different than non-executives. You want to be concise, and focused on outcomes, not activities.

All of the panelist talked about the number and variety of people they need to influence for them to succeed with their ideas, it is rarely just your boss, in almost all large companies, there are many people, from different groups, you need to influence.

The panel was great, but the real rewarding experience for me at BlogHer were the two mentoring sessions that kicked off the BlogHer event. I met with two people who were both focused on developing new ideas. BlogHer matched 50 mentors with 100 mentees, and set up an hour for each conversation. For me, it was a rewarding experience. One of my mentees had a consulting business, and she is looking to develop a larger business, deciding between a non-profit and a for-profit. The other person works in marketing and was developing a social media marketing approach. The passion of these two women was inspiring, and both had really good ideas that could easily be developed into efforts that had impact, by focusing on their goals and their customer's needs. What we talked about:

Understand your customers and what they need from your service
As you develop online content, understand how to develop win-win partnerships by featuring content from your community
Remember your personal goals and the overall business goals, and find ways of keeping them aligned.

I learned a lot from these two sessions, they are a great idea.

Today I leave for London, to attend a conference in Oxford, England. I can't wait.

Computing in the Core

2011-03-02T05:23:00.000-08:00

I am in Washington DC attending a meeting of the Computing in the Core Coalition. Although the Anita Borg Institute focuses on college level and beyond, it has always been important to ABI to support and partner appropriately with organizations that change and positively impact the entire pipeline.

Last year the Anita Borg Institute joined the Computing in the Core coalition – joining ACM, NCWIT, CSTA, CRA, Microsoft, SAS and Google – in an effort to impact the National Education Policy agenda to include rigorous and engaging Computing Education. This effort is led by ACM staff member Cameron Wilson.

Why do I think we need such a coalition? Although there are many STEM efforts in the K-12 space, Computer Science is often an afterthought in their efforts. Since Computer Science is not present in many high schools at all (even in the math classes), this is an important reason why so many entry level college students do not consider a Computing major, even though the job opportunities in Computing are growing rapidly. Historically, every discipline has a presence in Washington, and in my opinion this is the right effort.

The Coalition is responsible for CS Education Week. Yesterday, the coalition sponsored a briefing on Capital Hill, which had about 50 people in attendance. Impacting legislation takes time, but with this coalition, we are building momentum for change.

Fast Company Most Influential Women in Technology

2011-02-25T15:18:00.000-08:00

This week Fast Company released it's list of Most influential women in technology and I was on it. Of course I am honored to be included in this remarkable group of women. There are many women I admire greatly including Marissa Mayer and Mary Meeker. Previous winner include many women that are friends and who have wide influence on technology.

What is really exciting about being on this list, is the way in which it happened. Fast Company put out an open call for the community to recommend women for the list, and our Community responded. Many members of the Anita Borg Institute's Advisory board , as well as members of our ambassadors took up the call because they believe in ABI. Our community suggested me - on their blogs, on twitter, through the Fast Company web site. It was exciting to see the impact it had. Jerri Barrett, ABI's VP of Marketing and BJ Wishinski, ABI's community manager led the charge.

I am honored of course, but more important I am reminded of the collective power of our community. Thank you.

UN Commision on the Status of Women and ABI

2011-02-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

The 55th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women includes the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. An international panel on "Women Taking the Lead: Education, Entrepreneurship and Opportunities for All" will include Deanna Kosaraju, ABI's VP of Programs.

International participation in many of our programs has been true for some time, both at Grace Hopper and in our online Systers community, and our Change Agent Award brings women from around the world to our conference. But the Grace Hopper Celebration in India was the inaugural effort outside of the US. We will continue to hold an event in India, and it is our plan to continue to expand this effort around the world. These efforts, while building on our expertise elsewhere are designed by a local planning committee that understands the needs of their community.

What is also exciting about this event at the UN, is that the UN has also created a new organization called UN Women with an experience leader Michelle Bachelet, and teeth. The new organization will be measured by their impact, but this is an important first step.

Information about Increasing Women in Academia

2011-02-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

I serve on the advisory board of CalIT2. It is a great program at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, with inter-disciplinary research between Computing and Energy/Environment and Health. It is a program very attractive to budding researchers, because of its emphasis on technology that helps the world, but the program is lacking in women faculty and students.

At the last advisory board meeting, the board co-chair (Anne Peterson) and I put together a briefing of material on effective ways to attract more women to academia.

We compiled a list of reports for the advisory board, and I thought that I would include the list. iMany of you may be very familiar with this work, but it some of it may be new. Some of it is listed in ABI's research section

Why so Few Women?

A great overview by AAUW with concrete suggestions about what to do.

Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science and Mathematics Faculty

a study by the National Academies assessing gender differences in the careers of science and engineering faculty, based on both existing and new data.

Dual Career Academics

A great study about the very real problems of dual-career academic couples.

Prepared for Work, Not the Career: Building Science, Engineering and Technology Leadership

A new report about the results of an NSF supported workshop focused on Mentoring.

Gender and Technology

2011-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

I'm sure many of you saw the January 30th New York Times article on Wikipedia and Gender. From the article:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? .... But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

Why is this important to Wikipedia?

“This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” [Sue] Gardner [ executive director] .... “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.” .... With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. . ... consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode

Although you may not care about Sex and the City, this article and Sue Gardner's comments in the article articulates in a concise way the ramifications of an imbalance of women at the table creating content. At the Anita Borg Institute we often talk about technology culture that is designed by men for men, and where women often feel isolated. Although I believe this is true, it is sometimes a difficult concept to support with specific examples. But when you think that Wikipedia has become the defacto standard for the worlds encyclopedia, and has become our way of documenting our culture and history, the ramifications of having a specific group predominantly generating the content is stark.

This article has gotten my attention in terms of ensuring that Wikipedia includes information about our community. It is also a reminder of how important it is for each of us to speak up, especially when your comments or actions can have impact on the larger world.

2011 and beyond at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

2011-01-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

In 2010 at the Anita Borg Institute we reached out internationally, as we held our first ever Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India. There is a video created by our event planners that captures the excitement of the event. I would encourage you to watch it, it capture the excitement and energy of the event.

Deanna Kosaraju, ABI's VP of Programs was committed to launching this event, and did whatever it took. For this first incredible experience, there were hundreds of late night phone calls and five trips to India to meet with the program committee. At the conference, ABI recognized Deanna's entrepreneurial spirit

We grew the total in person participation by 69%, from 2321 to 3370. There are thousands more who participate with us virtually, but it is exciting to see this kind of growth.

CES and 2011

2011-01-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

I am back, after a much needed break over the holidays, where I spent time with my husband and friends, and enjoyed a change of pace. I am relaxed, and feel great.

Now that I am back, I can't wait to tell you about the exciting year ABI has in store! More on that later.

I started my 2011 by visiting the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I've heard about this show for years - it is huge! I've often wondered if there was any synergy with ABI's work. I was invited to speak by Kodak, and i took the opportunity to check out the conference. Oh my goodness, think massive. There are 130K people in attendance, This size of conference is hard to imagine, except to say that I stood in lines - the taxi line at the airport (an hour), the line to the monorail from the hotel to the convention center (a 1/2 hour), and for Starbucks coffee (20 minutes). The exhibit floor is huge, and features 2700 companies.

The conference includes every kind of consumer technology - mobile devices, tablets, stereo, TV and so on. Apple was noticeably missing, although there were lots of tablets being displayed.

My badge was as exhibitor badge, and I mostly walked around. But I attended the session by CNET on the Next Big Thing .

Since I want to learn the newest models consumer technology, the session provided insight about what is changing in the world of technology, something that helps me as we think about our new online presence.

Not surprisingly, the PC is increasingly being replaced by small mobile devices. With these devices, many people, especially young people, always have their device with them, and the devices are always on. This changes dramatically the appropriate communication models.

When I heard Secretary Hillary Clinton speak a year ago, she talked about the mobile phone being the computing platform of choice world wide. It was interesting to think of that comment when hearing the CNET editors talking about the fact that smart phones will outsell PCs this next year.

There are three types of connected devices that were prevalent at the show - smart phones, tablets, and Internet TVs. These are interconnected devices that become our computing platform of choice.

The reason I attended the conference was to speak on a Kodak panel on Entrepreneurship and Technology (it is the 1:30 panel in the following set of videos)
http://kzonelive.com/1-7.html

This panel is an example of how as we look to change the culture of technology, looking broadly at technology is important.

I was glad that I attended the conference

The FIRST Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

2010-12-08T02:25:00.000-08:00

It is here!!! After almost two years of preparation, the first GHC in India is happening today and tomorrow, and I am in Bangalore to see it. It is very exciting. Last night we held a dinner, hosted by ABI board members Kathy Hill and Mark Bregman. We hosted about 35 local executives, many of whom were unfamiliar with ABI and Grace Hopper. Here is a picture of the session. Yes, this is my camera, we also have a photographer, so much better pictures are on their way.

The conference started today. It is such an experience to see these remarkable women wandering around the halls, and excitedly talking to each other. I've never seen so many beautiful sari's. The atmosphere reminded me of the first Grace Hopper, because the whole concept was new to so many of the attendees.

The keynote speaker was Kalpana Margabandhu, and it was very well received, she spoke from the heart about how important it was for her to stay technical.

More later

Visit to Tusda College, and on to Bangalore

2010-12-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, I gave the keynote at a Symposium held at Tsuda College in Tokyo, Japan. Tsuda College is a women's college with four majors - English, International Policy, Math and Computer Science. Faculty and Students from the college have attended the last few Grace Hopper Celebrations of Women in Computing. It was inspiring to me to hear about the impact GHC had on the faculty and the students who attended. The Japanese Ministry has given money to universities with the express desire to bring more women into technology.

I had the chance to have dinner with my host Nobuko Kishi, and four students - Airi, Chieko, Ami, and Aoi, as well as Eri, who is an Associate Lecturer, Talking to the students is a reminder of why I do this job, they were so inspired by their attendance at the last Grace Hopper

Today I am in Bangalore, and tonight we kick off the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India Conference. I can't wait!!!

Visit to Tokyo

2010-12-01T22:36:00.001-08:00

I am heading to India, for our inaugural Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India. It is exciting. But today I am in Tokyo. I will be giving the keynote address for a Symposium at Tsuda College on Saturday.

I have only been to Tokyo once before, for a very short visit about 15 years ago. Yesterday, as my jet lag caught up with me, I wondered around Tokyo. Here is a picture of Tokyo from Tokyo tower

Tokyo is a large city, reminding me of New York, but it also includes some of the oldest traditions including the Asakusa Buddhist temple

I loved wondering around the city, where I am the tallest person wherever I go. Many of the areas I visited were teeming with people, vibrant signs, and the chatter of the salespeople. The sheer number of people can be overwhelming, but I loved seeing the large groups of Japanese school children near the temple, and at the Tokyo tower.

Although there are Starbucks and McDonalds, most of the shops are Japanese. As I wondered around, looking conspicuously American, many of the residents were courteous and helpful. The biggest challenge was navigating the Tokyo subway system where most of the signs are in Japanese. I was able to get where I needed to go - I took personal satisfaction in my success.

Tonight I meet up with my hosts from Tsuda college, and I will have a chance to learn more about the Japanese culture from them. The next two days are very full with the college visit, and I am very much looking forward to them.

Innovation

2010-11-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

I am attending the Advisory Board of Caltech's Information Science and Technology (IST) Center. Caltech is my Alma mater, and I appreciate the chance to remain involved. What I like about the research work at IST, is that most of the work sits at the boundary between Computing and other disciplines, including medicine, biology, etc.

As part of the opening remarks by the division chair, he talked about the faculty in the division of engineering and applied science. In the introduction he presented the percentage of women and minority faculty (11 out of 66). This is important because the way that an organization changes its overall representation, is to measure where you are at. This belief is at the heart of our new corporate award. Whereas the overall percentage is still low, he let the board know that a 1/3 of the recent hires are women and minorities, articulating the overall trends.

The work in the IST Center is diverse and exciting. Dr. Yu-Chong Tai talked about his work on medical devices that restored sight. My background is in semiconductors and to see some of his work that uses techniques developed for silicon chips applied to devices that provide sight helps me see a new and different future. He uses a plastic as a base, because it needs to be able to work inside of a body, rather than the silicon typical in chips. He had a set of clean rooms to build these devices. The potential of this intersection between semiconductors and medicine is very exciting.

There was another project that used cell phones as a medical device, and recently tested their approach in rural India. Mobile devices has become the computing platform of choice in the global economy.

It is fun to focus on the future, and to see there is an increased number of women on the board, on the faculty and in the students I saw.

Working with Other Organizations, and one example - ACM-W

2010-11-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

I believe passionately in a world where women are creating technology that changes our lives. To achieve my dream, I think it is really important to work closely with other organizations with synergistic goals to the goals of ABI. I do not want to duplicate efforts.

I serve on the executive team of the National Center for Women and IT, and the executive committee of ACM-W. Recently I attended the ACM-W yearly meeting, and was reminded of several of their extraordinary programs.

The Athena Lecture celebrate outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental research contributions to computer science. Each year ACM honors a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer. What makes the Athena nominations significant is that they need to come from ACM's SIGs, or Special Interest Groups, where most of the technical conferences reside. Thus every SIG, every year, gives some thought to a nomination of an outstanding woman in their community.

ACM-W scholarships, provide support for women undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. For researchers, being plugged into the right research community can be a career establishing move. Most of the time the scholarship provides not only financial support to attend the research conference, but a mentor from the technical area.

The Grace Hopper Regional Consortium are regional events modeled on ABI's very successful Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. ABI is very involved with the GHRCs. These regional events, led by Gloria Townsend from ACM-W, have created a grass roots efforts to reach broader set of students, faculty and industry women. It is a great example of multiple organizations working well together towards a common goal.

Elaine Weyuker lead's ACM-W, and has been instrumental in working with the ACM-W Council to continue to build on ACM-W's success.

the Technical Executive Forum at Hopper

2010-10-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

At the last Grace Hopper conference, we held the fourth Technical Executive Forum (TEF). A few years ago we realized that there was no better place to talk about changing the culture of technology with executives from corporations, than in a get together of 2100 women, and the TEF was born. The success of this program continues to grow.

This year, 65 technical executives were in attendance. Each year executives want to return with a larger group from their company. These are busy people, and they want to understand what actions they can take, what can I do?

I wrote an article with Vivek Wadhwa, a writer, entrepreneur and scholar who attended the Forum, (the article also included contributions from Caroline Simard and Jerri Barrett from ABI). The business week article talks about what steps you can take to attract more women.

Interview at least one woman for every open position. Simply making sure recruiting efforts include a diverse slate of candidates can substantially impact team composition. The focus should always be to hire the best person for the job regardless of gender. However, including qualified female candidates in the talent pool will make a difference.

Have at least one woman on the hiring team. People tend to hire those who are similar to them—therefore, the current demographics of the hiring team and company can influence the outcome of hiring. A female candidate will recognize that business values diversity if interviewers include men and women on the hiring team. More important, women on the hiring team should be part of the R&D department and in influential position.

Emphasize flexibility. The Anita Borg Institute's research on seven large high-tech companies completed in collaboration with the Clayman Institute at Stanford University has shown that technical women are more likely to look for flexible work environments—most women in technology are in dual-career families and juggle the demands of work and family.

Understand numbers and unique needs. Studies show that innovation accelerates when there are diverse voices at the table—including diversity of gender, age, ethnic background, and expertise. Measure your own workforce, and understand what will help you the most.

These are concrete steps that you can take to recruit, retain and advance technical women. They really work!

Grace Hopper Follow Up

2010-10-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

The last month has been extremely busy as we hosted another successful Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. This was a sold out conference, and the excitement of the attendees was inspiring to me. The conference statistics are (these are preliminary, but it takes some time to sort out the final)
We had 2150 attendees, including 964 students. We were able to provide 315 scholarships.
We had representatives from 96 companies, 15 labs, and 303 academic institutes
We had attendees from 29 countries including

Australia, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Norway, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and United States Minor Outlying Islands (WOW)

Here are some Blogs that talk about their experience

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman,

Jennifer Marsman

Awalin Sopan

Gail Carmichael

It is hard to communicate the energy and enthusiasm in the air - in the sessions, on the dance floor and in the hallways. At the newcomer session I told those attending that I wanted to meet each and every one of them, and many many women came up and introduced themselves. When I asked them what was their favorite part of the conference, it varied. Many were inspired by the keynotes - Duy-Loan Le, Carol Bartz and Barbara Liskov. Many mentioned a particular session, or the dance party. I had the chance to hear from a number of young women who had met people at the 09 conference who they remained connected to over the last year, and met several of the women from Bangalore who serve on our GHC India program committee.

If you want to get a sense of the conference, you can also check out the pictures.

It was very exciting and very fullfilling. Thanks to all of you for making it the best.

Women Leading Technology COmpanies

2010-09-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of coverage recently of women leading start ups, one example is a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. According to this article, about 11% of venture backed firms have a woman CEO or founder. The article talked about the upcoming TED conference for women as one of the efforts to feature more women.

Penny Herscher, one of our board members, commented on this WSJ article, and I thought her comments were quite eloquent.

As a female startup CEO with one successful IPO under my belt, and my latest passion http://www.firstrain.com well funded and growing I have many war stories of raising money from VCs on Sand Hill road - some funny, some intensely annoying - and I agree there is a subtle bias against women out there. But it did not stop me raising money
....
It makes business sense to back more women - but to do it we need more women in the business. More girls entering college to study computer science and engineering, more who stay in instead of getting discouraged, more girls who then take technical positions in companies to learn the ropes - and who don’t drop out of operating and leadership roles because they feel isolated by being the only women every day, in every meeting (the first 10 years of my career).

Penny is on our board because she passionately supports more women leading technology - business, innovation, and education.

Our world would absolutely benefit from more women founders. The venture community is very focused on the return on investment, and so any detail that doesn't fit the mold raises flags for some VCs, and because of the rarity of women, they are unusual still. But there are plenty of very successful VCs who believe in women founders, as an entrepreneur, keep looking. Innovation is so critical to our future. I would love to see more women creating new and innovative technology.

Back in Business

2010-08-25T16:51:00.001-07:00

There has been quite a pause since I last posted. I took some time off, and did not post prior to leaving. I spent time in Glacier National Park in Montana, a beautiful area. Here are some pictures

I've returned refreshed and ready to rock and roll. I have a lot of news to share in the coming weeks about new efforts and opportunities.

At ABI things are very exciting. We have 1600 people registered for the Grace Hopper Conference, and will need to close registration soon. The response has blown us away, the excitement in our community is palpable. If you haven't already, please register now.
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Computing in High School

2010-07-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

I am at the CRA bi-annual conference today in Snowbird, Utah, a beautiful mountain location. One of the most important sessions was on Computing for High School. Jan Cuny from NSF talked about why High School is the important place to focus on Computing classes. According to Jan:

Today, in most High schools, computing classes cover basic computer literacy, they are called CTE, and are not eligible for college credit. They are vocational classes.
Computing classes (beyond CTE) are only taught in 8% of High schools nationally
Only 18% of the Computer Science AP classes are women, as compared to 48% of Calculus and 50% of Statistics.
From a recent incoming freshman college survey .3% of incoming women want to major in CS

High school is important because any work that we do in middle school will be lost if students have a bad experience in High School, and by the time they arrive in college, they've lost interest.

There are many people who are re imagining the first course in Computer Science. On this same panel, several people spoke about the work included in the web site csprinciples.org . This effort focuses on Big Ideas including how much Computing is about creativity and is a bridge to many inter-disciplinary ideas, This approach also emphasizes Computational Thinking Practices.

Within the Computer Science Community there is a movement afoot that is exciting and a real opportunity for change. Jan Cuny is proposing an initiative to train 10,000 high school teachers by 2015.

I have my own experience where my niece, who recently visited, doesn't think it is possible for her to study Computer Science, even though she is great at Math and Science. She has already moved on to a fulfilling course of study in Nursing, but there are so many high school students who don't see the exciting potential of this field, even though this is where the jobs will be. With this effort, there is the possibility of fundamental change in our K-12 future.

Networks that matter

2010-06-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

I was in New York City a couple of weeks ago at a great summit called We Own It Summit.. Although many organization brought content to the day, Sharon Vosmek, the CEO of Astia
was the driving force behind this effort, and she should be very pleased with her impact. The Kauffman Foundation was also instrumental in creating this vehicle for organizations to come together to look at driving more women entrepreneurs.

I led a panel on the power of networks. I must admit, I get a little tired of talking about networks, although I will tell you they are extremely important. But like many busy people, the idea of attending a cocktail party can leave me cold, after the busy days that is my norm. But many times I do it anyway. The deciding factor is almost always if there is an important reason to attend.

As an example, I attended the We Own it Summit with the intention of connecting with five people

First, there was a panel moderator who we had invited to speak at an upcoming ABI Technical Executive Forum, and I had the chance to articulate in person the reasons why this person wanted to find the time to attend (of course one of the reasons was the ability to network with others that are attending this event).

Second, I had the chance to talk to four other organizations that we work with regularly, and who all keep as busy a schedule as I do - Astia, Illuminate Ventures, NCWIT, and Springboard. I was successful on all fronts.

But I need to return to the panel. The single most important point in the panel discussion is that the only network that matters is the ones that give you access.

From Andrea Henderson (from the Clayman Institute)

For all women entrepreneurs, strong network ties are critical for success. Having strategic connections helps women entrepreneurs, more than men, when it comes to Venture Capital decision making (reference: Tinkler, J., Henderson, A., Ku, M., Schiebinger, L., “Venture Capital Decision-Making: Gendered Assumptions about Technical Knowledge and Social Networks,” (Clayman Institute and NCWIT), forthcoming)

From Patricia Fletcher, from SAP

Women define and leverage networks and networking differently than men
Networks are critical to gain access and exposure to influencers and decision-makers.
(reference: Fletcher, P.A.K. (2009). Phenomenological Study: Women Who Hold Board of Director Positions in Life Sciences and Technology Businesses. ProQuest Dissertation and Theses. (UMI No. 3405031))

It was important to have the perspective of the researchers, but we then launched into a lively conversation with both a successful Venture Capitalist Jeanne Sullivan and a successful CEO Penny Herscher, who is also an ABI board member.

Penny talked at length about the importance of networks of people who have experience with your operational success. She became a CEO for the first time through her professional networks, but they were people who first saw her perform in an operational roll.

This certainly mirrors my experience that the most important network connections I have are people who have experience with me delivering results. They will often reach out on my behalf to their own network, but only because they can count on me.

Women of Vision keynote and winners and their videos

2010-05-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

On May 12th, the Anita Borg Institute held its annual Women of Vision event at the Mission ballroom in Santa Clara, CA. Every year we prepare for this event knowing that it is widely recognized as our most inspirational event. Can we top last year? This year, it was a resounding yes. We had 700 people, of which there were 150 students supported through our Share the Vision program. The videos of the speakers are now available.

Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, was the keynote speaker. I had read Arianna's blogs, and head heard her speak on TV shows, but I was unprepared on how entertaining and inspirational she is in person. You can see her speech on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9OoRuTDVxE

A few of the ideas that I heard from Arianna
In this world, there too much intelligence, not enough wisdom.
What often stops women is fear of failure. No successful life does not include failure along the way. She talked about her inner critic (obnoxious roommate), and how she learned to deal with the voice. For her the voice is quieter now, but sarcastic. For successful people, ultimately it is about perseverance, that is the distinguishing characteristic between those that succeed and fail.

Then we had the chance to meet the three winners, and they are extraordinary. You now have a chance to meet them too.
Kristina Johnson, Under Secretary of the Department of Energy, and Winner of the Women of Vision Leadership award

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLyBXgwHD

Kristina talked about her Dad, and how she inherited his curiosity of how things work. Her mother she learned achieving the beauty of your dreams. One of her mother's favorite sayings is Do it in the now [One of my daily desires is to stay in today, sometimes I succeed]. Kristina went to Washington to apply engineering skills to save the planet, what an inspiring call to receive. She talked about if we use swap one frequently used incandescent light bulb for an led, drive 10 miles less a week, weatherize our home, we can have an impact. She also recognized her partner of 25 years Kathy, and her support over the years.

Kathleen McKeown, Professor of Computer Science, Columbia, winner of the Women of Vision Innovation award

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPB5laJmzT

Kathleen talked about how not taking no for an answer has been part of her life from the beginning. She said that she heard no many times, but saw it didn't need to always work that way. The field of Natural Language Processing combines interest in math, love of language, new interest in Computer Science. She hopes to pass on this sense of fierceness and determination to her three daughters and female students. As a role model it is possible to both have children, and get tenure at a university.

Lila Ibrahim, General Manager, Intel, winner of the Women of Vision Social Impact award

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq0VFxJIks

Lila became a new mom of two twin girls a few weeks before the award ceremony. She talked about how the world we are creating for her daughters and for children worldwide will be full of opportunities. In prior time, a child's destiny was often determined from where they were born, their race, and gender. It was her Dad who inspired her to become an engineer. She understood that engineers made the world a better place. If you really want to change the world, you better be ready to pioneer and innovate. It is more than having a cause, you need a realistic implementation plan.

I left the evening totally inspired by these four women. If you watch their videos, you will be too.

In Memory - Heid Kvinge

2010-05-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Heidi Kvinge passed away last Wednesday from cancer. Heidi was a remarkable woman who worked at Intel, but had also been very involved with the leadership of the Grace Hopper Conference. Heidi was the General Chair for the 2009 Grace Hopper Conference in Tucson, Program Chair for 2008 in Keystone, CO. She chaired the conference Industry Advisory committee in 2007 for the conference in Florida, and co-chaired the Panels and Workshops committee in 2006, for the San Diego conference.

Heidi was a force of nature. I still remember in the spring of 2009, when she was the conference general chair. We had an amazing number of diverse submissions, and there was a lot of work for the conference leadership to truly figure out what to accept from the recommendations of the committees in order to create the final schedule. Although as general chair, she was was supposed to be less involved with the program definition, we needed help, and she rolled up her sleeves and put in a lot of time and had a huge positive impact on the outcome. When I spoke to Heidi's husband Don last Thursday, he remembered that time - as her partner he saw how committed she was to the conference and its impact on the attendees. I know that she spent many long evenings helping out with the conference.

Heidi and I exchanged email when she let me know that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she didn't have much time left. Even then, she had this tremendously positive attitude towards life and I quote from her note I feel like I finished a promise to you by completing my last year as General Chair.

She and I reminisced about the first time we spent much time talking. I had met her a few times at the Grace Hopper Conferences, but didn't know her well. I was wandering around the conference hotel after the conference was over, and I ran into Heidi. She remembered that it was in Chicago, which was in 2004. In her words The conference where I took [home] one of the poster boards was Chicago. I was so impressed by the group of women that did the history panel on Saturday morning. My flight wasn't until the afternoon, so I had time to wander around at the end of the conference. I had several people sign my posters of the conference.

It was the following confernece in San Diego, that she became increasingly involved as I talked about above.

Heidi at the conference in Tucson, AZ welcoming the attendees

Heid with several of the conference attendees and me.

I will miss her. My heart goes out to her family, but I am proud to have known her.

Intel Science Fair and an Extraordinary Panel

2010-05-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I attended for the first time the Intel Science Fair. The entire event was extraordinary, they included over 1600 finalists from around the world. At the opening ceremonies last night, young people from China, Germany, and other countries bounded onto the stage with their poster in hand. For each of them, a video played as a welcome from their country. There were many women represented in the students, although I have no idea what the percentage is.

I organized a wonderful panel of women technologists including

Diane Bryant, VP & CIO, Intel
Fran Allen, Fellow Emerita, IBM & first female Turing Award winner
Jen Fitzpatrick, VP, Google, and one of its earliest employees
Lily De Los Rios, VP, Product Development, Symantec

Of course the panelists were eloquent, as they described their journey. But the best part was the questions from the students, their parents and the educators that attended. They wanted to know:

What do women add to creating technology? All of the panelists emphasized that in their experience, the diversity of a team was what brought the most value.

What are the barriers that the panelists had faced? Fran shared a story from Grace Hopper, from the book recently released about her, where Grace was known to be an incredibly strong woman, but some of her success was ability to collaborate with some very difficult all male team. Several other panelists talked about how the technology industry rewarded results, and thus if they delivered, they were recognized, even though there were not many women.

What are the newest technologies that excite them? Mobile technology, including the new smart phones would redefine what technology meant. Jen shared a statistic that Google found that users with smart phone increased their searches by 50 times (50!). She said they checked the statistic multiple times because they didn't believe it was real. Certainly mobile devices mean that the entire paradigm of computing will change.

What about Math and Science Education? There was much discussion about the need for change in education. One audience member observed that the first classes in engineering and computing were boring to a new student, and so they go elsewhere.

I was pleased to be part of the fair, the conversation was remarkable. It was a treat to see the next generation of scientists and engineers together in one place.

Work Life Balance and the Technical Workforce

2010-04-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine sent me a copy of an article in Computer World by the CIO of the UB Group TK Subramanian on work life balance. In his article, he recommends the following:

Build in back-ups. In my team, we make sure that everyone takes off for family time.
Work with a merged calendar. Both my personal and work calendars are one and the same.
Be flexible. For instance, UB staffers need to be of a certain rank before they can get a data connection at home. ....[but if a junior employee] needs a high-speed data card, he gets it.
Create a nurturing environment.We create an environment of understanding and co-operation, one in which everyone is treated well.
Make quality time count..... Among other things, I make sure that we share at least one meal.

Flexibility is something that is important to me, important to ABI's staff, and important to our community. In our research report, Climbing the Technical Ladder, one of the findings on retention is that Women at the mid-level are more likely than men to view flexible work and a reasonable pace of work as important to retention. We also found that flexibility is important to both men and women. But partnered mid-level women are twice as likely as mid-level men to have partners that work full time (79% of women versus 38% men). One of the consequences of this state is that flexibility to schedule personal and professional commitments becomes a critical consideration for remaining in their role. Role models in the leadership ranks such as TK Subramanian from this article, sets the standard for the employees.

At ABI we value our flexibility. We arrange for most of our organizational meetings to be on Tuesday and Thursday, when staff are expected to be in the office. These two days become an important time to spend time together and listen to each other. By focusing our time together on the two days, we are able to be flexible on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. All staff work at home on Wednesday, and most staff, in agreement with their manager, have flexibility on Mondays and Fridays. We expect to schedule around outside commitments for our staff such as ballet for their children, their need to be home to walk their dog, or their desire to celebrate anniversaries or birthdays. For us, it really works, and the staff loves the flexibility. We use IM and email to communicate when we are in different locations.

Final Comment on Competitiveness from Patty Lopez

2010-04-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog on Competitiveness a short while ago which generated some interesting and thought provoking comments. The final comment to my original post is a letter from Patty Lopez, a Design Engineer at Intel, and one of the founders of the Latinas in Computing Community. Patty sent me this extraordinarily well researched letter. Patty gave me permission to post the letter. It took me some time, because I wasn't quite sure if we should put it on our site, but I ultimately decided to include the letter in its entirety on the blog, because of its eloquence and because of the importance of the topic. The catalyst for her comments was the idea that if you really want to be a professor, you can become one.

Patty Lopez, Design Engineer, Intel, Letter to Telle

I wanted to respond to the comment, "If one really wants to be a professor, and one has enough smarts and talent and drive one can get there." Unfortunately, this is not true, at least not in my case.

Research has clearly demonstrated that an inclusive organizational culture in industry, government, and academia is critical to recruitment, retention, and advancement of women and under-represented minorities in STEM. K-12 teacher training in multicultural education has existed for 30 years to address bias in the classroom. There is a compelling need for bias awareness training and multicultural education programs in higher education.

Definition: “Multicultural education aims is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. A major goal is to help all students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to interact, negotiate, and communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good.”

To be truly competitive, our technical workforce needs to be diverse. To achieve this end, we need to level the playing field for under-represented minorities (URM’s). While broadening participation is critical to achieve this goal, it is not sufficient. The environment and culture for these students needs to be more inclusive and supportive. This can be achieved through iincreased awareness of how biases play out in higher education and in the workplace. First, raising an awareness of our own personal biases can be done through the micro inequities awareness training techniques pioneered by Stephen Young as well as through Project Implicit. There is also ongoing academic research to understand explicit and implicit gender biases. Second, engaging allies in gender and diversity initiatives, especially white males, is vital. This has been studied by Catalyst, which reports that men who are aware of ways in which biases occur are stronger allies in the workplace; the report also presents recommendations about how to communicate effectively and persuasively on the topic. Third, learning how to navigate the system by addressing the unwritten rules is important for URM’s, especially women, to recognize. The Anita Borg Institute has just released a new research report on success factors for senior women, which addresses the "likeability penalty" that assertive women take to be successful. It also takes a look at how senior women differ from senior men and junior women over set of attributes that are characteristics of successful people in technology.

Telle Comment: Unconscious biases is an important topics and yet many if not most people shy away from. Media and peer pressure discourages us from acknowleging our own biases, which makes them all the harder to change.

Gatekeepers affecting URM’s in the STEM Pipeline

There are four primary gatekeepers for URM’s in STEM that exist in K-12, higher education, and in the professions. The first gatekeeper is pedigree: where you were educated. In K-12, the pedigree of your high school determines which colleges you will be accepted into, in higher education, the institution from which you received your BS, MS, or PhD often determines where you can go next, and how much you will inevitably earn. ACT and SAT scores will cull those high school graduates without adequate preparation and success in math and science, but many who would be successful at the more prestigious colleges and universities lack adequate guidance and knowledge of the financial resources available to enter. At the post-graduate level, many departmental graduate school selection committees use pedigree as their first “cut” at culling the list of applicants. The assumption is two-fold: having a pedigree is an accurate predictor of future success, and the lack of one is an accurate predictor future failure. We know from many successful entrepreneurs and technologists who lack pedigree that this is not the case. Unfortunately, many times pedigree is used as a selection criterion without thought to the fact that it is selecting out some very talented candidates who may not have the mentorship and sponsorship to make their case. Freada Kapor Klein introduces the notion of “distance traveled” as follows, which creates a metric other than pedigree that can be used to assess a student’s likelihood of success:

“Companies that are committed to leveling the playing field and fostering true diversity in the workplace can do their part by first looking beyond Ivy League names and what people state they’ve done on their resumes. They should focus more on the distance traveled and the obstacles some people have had to overcome to get to where they are—because most often these individuals demonstrate true character, drive, and unique skills that will undoubtedly benefit the organization. “

Students without pedigree can write a letter detailing their accomplishments to be included in their application package if they have the guidance and encouragement to do so. But many unfortunately do not.

Telle Comment: It is hard for many people to get past pedigree, and consider a wider spectrum of backgrounds. As Justce Stevens steps down from the US supreme court, the news has covered that all but one of the remaining justices have law degrees from Harvard, Yale or Columbia., is that a diverse court? Many organizations limit the schools they hire from. Some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees, or received them after they were already successful. I have a degree from a prestigious university and it does open doors, but I believe it is really important to expand your thinking about success.

The second gatekeeper is organizational culture: the mechanisms at school and at work that generate glass or concrete ceilings. We see it at work in technology, where it also affects women, not just URM’s. Where does this culture come from? Our K-12 teachers have mandatory multicultural education training in their degree programs that prepare them for how to avoid bias and prejudice in the classroom. Higher education does not have any such requirements. The key to changing organizational culture in industry, government, and research institutions begins with multicultural education and microinequities awareness training at all levels of academia and must be supported at the highest levels of administration. Once we have experienced our own biases and how we use them in our daily lives, we can start to see how they permeate everything we do, how we make judgments based upon them, and how we exclude. Graduates will hopefully take their new awareness with them to their employers, wherever that may be, and thus the organization culture within technology companies would change.

The third gatekeeper is environment: the atmosphere and surroundings of our colleges and workplaces. This affects all students who might have a fledgling interest in STEM, but is particularly impactful for first-generation URM’s who may have less confidence in their talents, less encouragement, and fewer role models. Young women shy away from computing because is not perceived as inviting or comfortable. If you look inside most tech companies, you will see aisles and aisles of cubicles, and standard layouts for cubicle desks and equipment. If you walk down the halls of many engineering departments, many lack art of any kind, much less art that is culturally inclusive. I took my 14-year-old daughter, 14-year-old nephew, and 18-year-old niece to UCSD last week to visit the engineering department there. Though the external campus was beautiful, we walked through the Jacobs School of Engineering and the majority of walls were bare, aside from some highly technical posters on various subjects. In the new Computer Science and Engineering building, again, very little art to entice shy, young, aspiring computer scientists and engineers into the building. We walked down the halls of the second floor, and while the interior offices might be highly personalized (we did not venture in), the exterior halls were not, save for one post-doc with a cartoon on the door labeling himself an “indentured servant”. To the prospective student who has had mentors and sponsors in STEM, this experience alone would not deter them from entering. To the URM who has experienced many “closed doors”, it increases the sense of not belonging, not feeling welcomed, and that this is not a place where they can be successful. Never mind that they may be more resourceful, resilient, and just as talented as their pedigreed peers, but perhaps not as polished and self-confident.

The fourth gatekeeper is gender bias and media stereotypes: messages we hear about abilities based on gender, and technology roles as portrayed on TV, in movies, and in advertisements. Young women are constantly bombarded by messages telling them they are little more than “eye candy”, valued more for how they look than who they are. Far fewer messages are sent out to be smart, talented, and innovative. It’s no wonder that young girls chose Barbie’s next career as news anchor, while the popular vote chose computer engineer. Gender bias and the media stereotypes that reinforce it affect the perceptions self confidence and self worth of young women, which will inevitably affect their career choices. Young women may also struggle with how the perception of intelligence will affect their popularity and acceptance into preferred social cliques, and whether being smart makes them less attractive to their popular male peers. Computing roles on television are often portrayed by geeky or nerdy men, usually white or East Indian. The pervasive belief is that computer scientists and engineers sit in anonymous cubicles all day staring at computer screens. They are portrayed as lacking in the social graces, tend to talk techie instead of relating to people, have a hard time carrying on a normal conversation with women, and have trouble getting women interested in them. Young women may also view them as less appealing partners. Ads also tend to portray men at the leading edge of technology, as seen in Mac vs. PC ads, with few women, much less women of color, as convincing authorities on technology products. Yet women currently account for more than 50% of all consumer purchases, and are projected to control 60% of the country’s wealth. As CEO of StreamBase Systems, Mark Palmer puts it in his blog article A Man’s Undercover Mission into the World of Women Leaders, “Men spend money on women and whisky; women spend money on the family”. The few women on TV who don’t fit the classically “drop dead beautiful” technical roles are portrayed are often quirky and non-conformist, with characters such as NCIS’s forensic specialist Abby Scuito, Criminal Mind’s technical analyst Penelope Garcia. Simply put, careers in computing and in technology are not well marketed to women and minorities.

All four gatekeepers can be addressed through awareness. I have had the unique opportunity to experience all of them (in particular, barriers to academic positions upon receipt of my PhD), which is why I am so passionate on these issues. Dr. Richard Tapia addresses the issue of pedigree, and how it affects the academic careers of URM’s [19]. Richard’s article strikes a chord when he shares the story of his talk "Why the Berkeley Math Department Would Never Hire Me." I could give several variants on that talk, from my own experiences. The irony is that I’m just the sort of person that industry and academia need: the sort of person who can be the diverse voice, the person who offers inclusiveness, sponsorship, and mentorship, the change agent that is needed to move women and minorities forward, if only the gatekeepers would let me pass through.

Telle Comment: How can I add to the elequonce of these last statements. Each of us has the potential to impact our environment. Patty more than anything else is demonstrating through her words and her decision to send this letter about taking a stand. I admire her thoughtfulness, and find her an inspiration.

Demonstrations

Gender and name bias in resume reviews has been demonstrated by Cole et al. and Segrest Purkiss et al. We will discuss some of the research that points to specific types of bias, interspersed with activities. Some common visual illusions will first introduce the concept of biases in perception. Subsequently, cards with pictures of people in various professions or activities will be examined, and the workshop participant will be asked to guess the profession or activity. Audio may also be played, asking participants to guess the ethnicity and/or gender of the speaker. Websites such as Project Implicit can be used to demonstrate how biases are measured. TV shows, ads, and movies can be analyzed for stereotypes and implicit messaging.

Envisioning the Future

To implement a multicultural education program within a university, it must be supported at the highest levels, and training must happen at these levels on down the chain of command to the lowest level. How feasible is such a program? What are the advantages a university with such a program can demonstrate? How can they market themselves to compete for the best and brightest students? What if funding agencies would give priority in funding to universities with this designation? What if accreditation organizations used this as a factor in accreditation decisions? Requirements such as these would certainly accelerate the adoption of such programs, leveling the playing field across the board.

In higher education, there is no such training of administrators, faculty, staff, and graduate students, so bias can and often does creep in. The unwritten rules are learned, enforced, and taken to their next workplace, applied in their communities and networks, and thus continues the cycle of disempowerment. Some universities have established coalitions that teach multicultural education and offer advanced degrees in curriculum and instruction. K-12 techniques employed by teachers to minimize bias in the classroom are easily demonstrated. Several prominent companies such as Intel, IBM, and Wells Fargo offer microinequities training to their staff. By increasing awareness of the need for training in multicultural education at all levels of higher education: presidents, provosts, deans, administrators, faculty, staff, graduate students, and post-docs, we can enormously accelerate the rate of organizational change. Training initiatives must be supported at the highest levels of the university. Our hope is that the graduates of institutions that model multicultural awareness and support its training will apply their awareness to their professional lives and serve as agents of change in their organizations and in their communities.

Changing the media and the representation of women and minorities will take more time, but as consumers of this content, we can choose what we watch and what we read, and make our voices heard if we find it offensive or misrepresentative. The whole ecosystem around advertisement and media is changing due to the delivery of this content via the internet, and we have a unique opportunity to be more selective in our choices. As more and more successful women and minorities take their place in higher profile positions within industry, government, and academia, we will have more realistic role models and voices of reason, and we will be more empowered to accelerate the changes that are needed so that what we see in the media is more inclusive and representative of who we are as a society and what we value.

Thank you again for this letter

Comments on Competitiveness

2010-03-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I blogged about competitiveness, and why Computer Science and Engineering benefits from continuing to grow the number of PhDs. The TechHer blog is cross posted Facebook, and I received some thoughtful responses. I've received permission to include the posts on this blog.

Rick Rashid, VP Research, Microsoft

"I agree with your overall point, but there is a more subtle issue here even in CS. Many PhD students in CS are graduating and taking what are basically development or advanced development jobs rather than going into basic research. Do they really need to get a PhD to take those jobs? Its anywhere between 2 and 4 extra years of "apprenticeship" to a professor intended to prove you can be a research PI. Is that time productive for those students if they don't go into a research career?"

Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO, One Laptop per Child, and CEO of Pixel Qi

"Well, the same argument could be used in arts and the humanities and has been going on for many years. In Germany they still decide at age 13-14 whether you are college material or not (due to too few places). We could just skip those 13 years and decide at birth based on who your parents are with the same idea of only a few places at the top.... like they used to do in Europe (royalty and such). In my opinion the future belongs to those who want it the most and work for it."

Me

"Very interesting points. For me, I have a PhD, and except for a couple of years, I never worked in research. But studying for a PhD prepared me for independent work and for becoming an entrepreneur. If a student knows they want to move quickly into a software development job, then go for it. Bu just like lawyers who use their law school training for politics, or other choices, a PhD prepare you for many things.

Some of the issue is setting expectations (which was the point of the Scientific American article). As Mary Lou points out, it is hard to pre-determine. If a student goes after a PhD because they want a faculty job, and there are no interesting jobs, that is problematic. I still believe that there are a wealth of interesting jobs in CS today, unlike other areas of STEM. "

Mary Lou Jepsen

"If one really want to be a professor, and one has enough smarts and talent and drive one can get there. I spoke with Seymour Papert about this as i was an incoming professor at MIT (Seymour co-founded the AI lab at MIT among many other things especially around computers and education). He told me that in his day (he's over 90 now) there was little choice other than academia in the sciences. His eyes grew wide and he became so animated (and I think a little envious) over today's opportunities: start-ups, corporate research, large and small company engineering, policy, and lots of multidisciplinary projects. "

Rick Rashid

"These are all excellent points and I agree. I do, however, know students that tried to get a PhD simply because it was the highest degree they could get and not because it prepared them for anything they really wanted to do (or were suited for). For students like that, it's best for them to simply get on with their lives."

It has been my own experience that my own success has depended on commitment and clear focus on my desired objectives, but students do not always know the consequences of the decisions they are making, especially when they are young. For example, Mary Lou was at MIT, and I was at Caltech, and these schools opened doors for me that I naively did not even know existed. In response to this post, I received a letter from Dr. Patty Lopez, Design Engineer, Intel, about the experience of under represented minorities, and her own experience. In particular, it was not her experience that finding the right faculty job was possible, especially if you did not graduate from the right school. The letter was eloquent and well researched. I will post more about her thoughts in my next post.

Ada Lovelace Blog - Anita Borg

2010-03-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

The organization that I head is named after a dear friend of mine - Anita Borg. As my contribution to Ada Lovelace day, I decided to talk about her. Anita Borg was a visionary; she passionately believed that women belonged at the table creating technology. But she was also a hard core technologist. I first met Anita when she joined Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) Western Research lab as a researcher. At the time, she was a well known researcher, who had developed a reputation in operating systems for fault tolerant systems. But she was also fearless, and at times loved to shock those around her in the early days, we would get together occasionally for dinner with a group of women technologists, many of whom I still know today – Barbara Simons, Amy Pearl, and Sally Ahnger. Although we occasionally discussed her research, most of our conversations at these dinners were grappling with being one of the few women in our roles.

Anita founded the Syster’s online community in 1987, with the help of a number of other extraordinary women, and the community is still active today. Anita created the vision of what ultimately became the Grace Hopper Conference, with the help of many extraordinary women who knew that the coming together to celebrate the achievements of women in technology would have a profound impact on conference attendees – it still does today.

When I think about Anita Borg, there are many characteristics that I admire

· Her passion for excellence, and her constant reminder to not settle for less than the best.

· Her strong desire to help other women succeed in their own career.

· Her fearlessness in trying out new ideas, from founding the Institute, traveling around Europe on her own, or presenting to a group of all male audiences and telling them why they care about women.

I learned many lessons from her, and it seems appropriate to think of her on Ada Lovelace Day – she would love the idea of this day.

Competitiveness

2010-03-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

A recent Scientific American article talks about the over-production of PhD students. From the article

“People should have a reasonable expectation of being able to practice their science if they’re encouraged to become scientists,” says labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation “It shouldn't be a guarantee, but they ought to have a reasonable prospect.” But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions.... The competition for science faculty jobs is so intense that every advertised opening routinely attracts hundreds of qualified applicants.

The issue I have with this article, is that its author lumps STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) positions as a monolithic career opportunity. All of the examples in the article are in fields that are oversubscribed at this time - biology, molecular biology, and other life sciences. In Engineering and Computer Science, we are definitely not oversubscribed. According to the 2009 CRA Taulbee Report , the number of PhDs in CS and CE is increasing (the percentage that are women is 20% which is tending up). Not surprisingly, over half of the students are not from North America. These students are increasingly going home because the Indian and Chinese economies are booming.

Industry is hiring an increasing number of these PhD students (over 56%). I completely disagree that the faculty path is the only appropriate path for these talented new PhD students. Industry is hiring them because of the increased need of sophistication for its Computer Scientists. If you think about the software that we use as Google, the complexity of the underlying algorithms demand training and research capabilities that goes beyond a bachelors.

I have mentioned Vivek Wadhwa a few times in this blog recently, and he debated Craig Barrett (the former Intel CEO) about this article.

Vivek: We need to create the excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists. And we need to make it worthwhile financially for them to help our country stay competitive and to solve the problems facing our plant. This is as much a marketing problem as it is an investment problem.

Craig: The real barrier to pursuing degrees in STEM is that we have almost a perfect filter in place in K-12. For a student to want to major in STEM in college they have to exit high school with a strong mathematics background. That means that they need to have a good math teacher in nearly every grade (in addition to having a good physics, chemistry, and biology teacher).

Although this article was considered a debate, they agreed on many ideas, in particular, that we need to look seriously at our K-12 system.

Technology innovation is so important, and innovation depends on technology education. It is great to see this debate, it highlights the needs for talented people, and of course for talented women.

Ada Lovelace

2010-03-10T17:01:00.000-08:00

March 24 is Ada Lovelace Day . Last year many women blogged about women who inspired them. According to the Ada Lovelace Day site, they had 2000 bloggers in 2009, and expect more this year. In my post last year, I reflected on two women who inspire me but I also really enjoyed reading many of the other posts.

I was reminded of the day because Betty Toole who wrote the definitive biography on Ada Lovelace just sent me a note with a blog on Ada Lovelace, that she called Poetical Science where she talks about how science and art are interwoven. An excerpt from her blog

I see Ada’s great talent is not only being at the forefront of computer history but also having unique thinking skills, her style of thinking she called “poetical science”. She was prescient, seeing the use of the engine to create music. She also pointed out in 1843 in her description of Babbage’s Analytical Engine that the “Analytical Engine “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

I plan to blog again this year. It is a wonderful chance to recognize the achievements of women in science and technology. I hope that you do too. But I would also encourage you to learn more about Ada Lovelace. She was a remarkable women.

Entrepreneurs and Under Represented Minorities Networks

2010-02-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur and academic. This year he is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. In the world of Women and Technology, he has been getting a lot press recently through his articles, including one in Business Week about the low number of women entrepreneur's.

This week in TechCrunch he commented on a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News that documents the lack of underrepresented minorities in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley the number of under represented minority workers in High Tech , including women, African-America and Hispanics has dropped in the last eight years.

What I found compelling about the article was that he understood from his own experience unconscious biases of the decision makers. I quote from his article

Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from start up to $120m in revenue...I couldn't get Research Triangle Park VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture. I later found out why: “my people” were great at mathematics and made great engineers, but didn’t make great CEOs — “we” didn’t have the necessary management skills, didn’t like diluting our equity ownership by raising venture capital, and couldn’t “fit” into the rough-and-tough American business-management culture.

Most people have unconscious biases, I catch myself putting members of our community into buckets. I know how hard it is for the technical women we work with to break into informal internal networks, and often the leaders who are keeping them out are doing it without awareness. What was refreshing about this article is that the author had experienced similar challenges, and was able to apply his own experience to those of others.

What the article was really about was how to create powerful networks. There is a power in networks, but all networks are not created equal. With companies we work with, many create employee networks. Some of them put the entire burden of creating and managing the networks on the women (or Blacks or Hispanic), and often the networks are not sustainable over time. Other companies ensure that the networks have the support - financial and time - of senior management, and the commitment of the organization leadership. These networks have a chance of creating change within the organization. I've seen it.

The Opportunity for Investers and Women Entrepreneurs

2010-02-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

Cindy Padnos, the Founding Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures has just released a white paper on the untapped potential of Women Entrepreneurs in High-Tech.

It is a fascinating paper that documents what many of us know intuitively, that women entrepreneurs are a great untapped resource in the high tech and innovation world.

In the paper she lays out how women have the education, executive experience, and entrepreneurial results to create the returns that the venture community is looking for. However women led companies are often funded through self-financing or debt financing, at a much higher frequency than the normal high tech start-up.

One of her points is that studies show that entrepreneurs demonstrate a strong predisposition to seek funding from members of the same sex. I believe that this tendency is one of the unconscious biases that we all grapple with. However, it is very important to figure out ways to provide women access to capital.

Why do you you care (from her article):

Despite often being capital-constrained, women-owned businesses are more likely to survive the transition from raw start-up to established company than the average.
Women-owned or led firms are the fastest growing sector of new venture creation in the U.S., growing at five times the rate of all new firms between 1997 and 2006 – now representing nearly 50% of all privately held businesses.
In the past 10 years more than 125 companies with over 200 women co-founders or officers have achieved IPOs or >$50M M&A exits in the U.S. high-tech sector alone.

I am honored to serve on the advisory board of Illuminate Ventures. I think their work of investing in teams that include women entrepreneurs will have a huge impact on our future. This paper is an important step in documenting the contributions of Women Entrepreneurs. The next step is to invest in them.

Internet Freedom, and the State Department

2010-01-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, I was in DC, and heard Secretary Clinton speech on the State department's new policy on Internet Freedom. Here is the full text of the speech, and a video (on a side note, it is remarkable how much the government has adopted the Internet as a way to widely distribute material, I was impressed that both of these were available).

Secretary Clinton talked at length about the importance of the Internet and its ability to widely disseminate information, how this information can empower groups worldwide that are often isolated. How this same ability, however, can be used to mobilize groups who intend harm to others, such as El-Qaida.

One of her most powerful statements

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

She articulated five fundamental freedoms that we have, based on President's Roosevelt's speech in 1941,

Roosevelt's four freedoms are: Freedom of Expression, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.

To this, Secretary Clinton added

Freedom to Connect

She talked a lot about how cell phones have become the platform of choice worldwide, especially in developing countries.

One World Bank study found that in a typical developing country, a 10% increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones led to an almost one percent annual increase in per capita GDP. To put that in perspective, for India, that would translate into almost $10 billion a year.

As a technologist, I found the talk inspiring. There is no question that technology stood at the center of new policies worldwide with far reaching positive impact on people. At the end, many attendees had stories from their own country, and I will talk about a few of those in the future. But Secretary Clinton saw how technology could have a positive impact on the world, and so do I.

Grace Hopper Celebration

2010-01-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

The new year has started with a lot of new energy. At ABI, we are off and running, with many exciting and new ideas. This is the time of year when the momentum for the Grace Hopper Celebration begins to build.

If you haven't already seen it, we've released the GHC Call for Participation. Proposals are due on March 16th, and last year, we didn't extend the deadline, so please submit prior to that date. This is a great time of year to reflect on what would make for an interesting panel or workshop. How do you bring together people you know to present new and unique ideas? The theme of this years conference is Collaborating Across Boundaries.

What has amazed me over the last few years, is how seriously our community takes the conference. We've consistently increased the number of submissions, but not just the numbers, the quality of the submissions has increased.

This year I'd love to see topics on Innovation. It is something our country is grappling with, and there is widening consensus that the talent we need to create the innovation that has driven our economic success is not choosing Science and Technology. I am pleased that Obama is investing in Science and Technology, but I do not see nearly coverage of the solution of including more women.

I also would love to see panels and workshops on topics on the boundary between computing and other disciplines. I think that is where many of the innovative ideas are emerging today.

It is exciting to think about the possibilities.

Happy New Year - 2010

2010-01-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

I am back from a much needed two week break, and although I was not completely off line, I had a chance to spend time with freinds, read some great books, run (I'm starting for a March 1/2 marathon), and see a few movies. It was great, and refreshing.

I am back of of today, and very excited about 2010, and several of ABI's new initiatives.

If you haven't already seen it, my Fast Company blog talks about ABI's 2009 results, and includes a number of videos from last year, including the Women of Vision keynote Padmasree Warrior from Cisco, and our new I am a Technical Women video.

We have several important programs that are not quite ready to launch. Please stay tuned.

This year marks the tenth (!) Grace Hopper conference, and I will be featuring women who attended the conference from every year since its inception, on this blog. If you attended the conference, espeically those who attended 1994, 1997, 2000, and 2002, I would love to talk to you.

I hope that you had a restful break, and that your 2010 brings satisfaction and joy. Here is to the new year!!!

Happy Holidays

2009-12-16T13:28:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, the Anita Borg Institute staff went out to our annual Holiday lunch. We had a great time! We are a staff of twelve people, all of whom are incredibly committed to ABI's mission. I am always inspired by the work of ABI's staff. As we end the year, all of us have been working hard, preparing for next year - when we have all kinds of exciting new programs - stay tuned to hear more. As an organization, we are increasingly virtual, we hold our organization meeting in person on Tuesday and Thursday. All staff work at home on Wednesday, and on Monday and Friday, some of us work in the office, and some work at home. This structure provides a lot of flexibility for staff to be home with children, or pets, or simply to focus on their work. It works really well for us.

Our organizational tradition is to take time off between Christmas and New Years. HP Labs is our host, that is where our cubicles are located. HP is closed the next two weeks, and most of ABI's staff will take the two weeks off. Because of the virtual nature of the group, it is very important to find time to get together, and so yesterday we celebrated the holidays.

ABI staff yesterday

the staff relaxing over lunch, this photo also includes ABI's CFO, he treated the staff to lunch a couple of weeks ago

I hope that all of you also take time to get together with colleagues and to celebrate the hope that comes with the holiday season.

Sally Ride and Math and Science Education

2009-12-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a round table discussion about Gender Equity in Math and Science Education. This round table was the first in a series, presented by Sally Ride, and sponsored by ExxonMobil, who is a long time supporter of Math/Science Education.

The reason for this effort is (from their brochure)

Nearly 75% of tomorrow's jobs will require computer skills, yet less than a third of student taking computer courses are girls.
Women constitute 46% of the workforce in the US, but hold 25% of the jobs in Science, Technology and Engineering.

Not a surprise, we need more women at the table creating the science and technology of tomorrow.

The discussion at the lunch included Judy Estrin, Kim Perdikou, Shelly Cargill as well as Sally, all talented scientists and engineers, who discussed their own journey.

Most had role models in their childhood, and found their passion for science early. They also had support from their family, several commented on how lack of confidence could easily have been derailed them if they hadn't continuously had encouragement.

I heard a few new ideas and wisdom that I'd like to share

One of them mentioned a study that within a class of successful engineering students, they indicated that 60% of their personal heroes were in their own families. If you think about this, because of the discomfort of so many parents and even educators with science and engineering, it is challenging to stem the tide of opting out with outside influences, if the major role models are in the family. Possible... but challenging.

In many of the communities that I belong to, this idea of changing the models of scientists and engineers on TV to better portray the cool nature of technology creation is often raised. But research has indicated that while music is a leading indicator of culture, movies are followers, which means that it is harder to change the culture, or more to the point, to sell the idea to a network executive if shows are based on the culture. Interesting......

One of the panelists talked about how she was labeled as different as a child because she liked numbers. All of her family loved sports, and so she was always different. For her, she liked being different and so the label worked. But many young kids don't like to be labeled as different, and any perception of being an outsider, can be a show stopper. I related to this notion. As a child, I was always different - A's in Math. But I liked being different, I thrived by finding unique (and odd) contributions. But I am aware that for most kids that I know, I think of my nieces and nephews, they like to fit in.

What to do? One of the most important things that you can do is to reach out into your local education system. As a role model of success in Science, Engineering and Computing, you can have an amazing impact on those around you.

CS Education Week, December 6 -12

2009-12-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

The U.S. House of Representatives' recently designated December 6-12, 2009 as Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) a step towards recognizing the importance of Computer Science in education, both in K-12 as well as college and beyond.

A new website, www.CSEdWeek.org, includes information as well as resources about this important topic. The development of this website is a joint effort led by ACM with the cooperation and deep involvement of the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Computing Research Association, NCWIT, the Anita Borg Institute, the National Science Foundation, Google, Inc., Intel, and Microsoft.

The dates for this week were chosen in honor of Grace Murray Hopper's birthday on December 9th.

In addition, to ACM, several of the companies that we work most closely are providing information about this topic, including Microsoft and Google

In my work at ABI, I am involved with many efforts to advocate for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. Many well intended educators and advocates looking for change don't understand the importance of including CS as a core piece of curriculum, and thus many of their proposals do not provide students access to CS information. Here are some facts that you may not be aware of (taken from the CSEDWeek web site under data).

By 2016, current government projections show that more than 800,000 high-end computing jobs will be created in the economy making it one of the fastest growing occupational fields.
Five of the top ten fastest growing jobs will be in computing-related fields ( i.e., computer software engineer jobs expected to grow 45% over the next five to seven years).
The majority of states have no certification for computer science teachers; in states where certification or endorsement exists, the requirements may have little, if any, computer science content.
Only 17% of AP computer science test-takers in 2008 were women , although women represented 55% of all AP test-takers.

The designation of CS Education week is an important step towards changing the perceptions of CS education. I can't wait until the day that all people, including my nieces and nephews, know that understanding CS is as important as understanding Math or Biology to finish their high school education.