That would be a very significant jump, but it also means that anything approaching gender parity at the top of companies is very far away. This year, the share of incoming female CEOs was only 0.5% larger than the share of outgoing ones. If that trend holds the number of women CEOs will grow, but slowly.
Boys who like computers are taught that we DESERVE sexual attention from women. We need to get over it.
New report commissioned by Nominet shows the economic value of bringing more women into IT careers
As the Reuters columnist — and my former boss — Jack Shafer has pointed out, major exponents of the new online brand journalism seem to be mostly male. Mr. Shafer calls them “marquee brothers”: journalists like Ezra Klein, Nate Silver and Glenn Greenwald, who land much-talked-about deals with deep-pocketed investors to run their own ventures. It can’t be a coincidence that just two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an all-male roster of speakers at a tech conference.
1. The quality, relevance, and impact of the products and services output by the technology sector can only be improved by having the people who are building them be demographically representative of the people who are using them…
Number one, call it out. Highlight every time you see a case of an all-male speaker lineup at a conference, a male dominated area. Highlight it and do something about it. Do a microaction.
What I do think is going on is that men and women start the pitch process at different stages. I think I can count on one hand the number of times in my career where a woman has pitched me with “just an idea” that wasn’t built yet. Guys, on the other hand, do it all the time. I believe that women seem to succeed in the funding funnel at a higher rate because they’re actually pitching later in their development–when they’ve got a product, more research, more customer traction. There are all sorts of socialized norms that play into why–perceptions of risk, failure, expectations, etc. Guys, in general, feel pretty invincible most of the time and don’t mind getting turned down for their idea–and they’ll come back again and again showing whatever progress they made.
Yesterday we had our second gathering of the year and our first debate night, hosted by the lovely people at State and Audience.
The topics we debated were:
The Rise of the Robots: Are Social Networks Robbing Us of Our Critical-Thinking and Turning Us Into Reactionary Robots? (Read More)
As Working Women, Can We Really Have it All? Or is it time to stop fooling ourselves? (Read More)
Demanding Equality in our Jobs But Not in Romance. Are we Guilty? (Read More)
It was a very animated evening, with lots of Ada’s Listers chipping in with their viewpoints. A great time was had by all and now we can’t wait for our next meetup – watch this space!
(Thanks Andreea Nastase for the photos of all of us above!)
The standard narrative is, understandably, a victim-orientated one, with women falling behind because the odds are stacked against us from scratch. However, without dismissing this, I’ve often thought it would be much more useful to construct a positive, action-based narrative that emphasises something else, gives us something to strive for and removes a slice of the anger and indignation.
Head of Townley Grammar School for girls shares why he takes 80 computer science students to meet female role models in Silicon Valley every year.
This is really bad – surely the UK’s tech businesses can help!
The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change. But leaving can be hard too.
“As email groups and networking take off in the stats, the UK starts its own professional group for women in tech.”
This week’s TechCity News profiled Ada’s List – it’s a pretty cool article featuring a number of Ada’s List members.
Today, for every five men working in technology in the United Kingdom, there is just one woman. And while there’s no lack of a pulpit to get more women into the industry, we’re still decades away from achieving gender parity.
Helping to speed things up, four women in London’s technology scene launched “Ada’s List” in the form of a simple group.
<3 this
Zoe Cunningham, the founder of Softwire, first met Claudia Ehmke, a UX Director at Paper through Ada’s List. Since then, the two have created a partnership between their two companies.
and this
“Ada’s List is something you don’t realise how much you need until you have it,” explains Brie Rogers Lowery, country director for Change.org. “It’s become a vital resource and hub for information sharing between women working in the tech industry.”
…
“At the end of the day, the most important part of being on the list is knowing that there is always somebody in your corner, even if that somebody is hundreds of strangers. Ada’s List is really like having 100 peer mentors all at once.
You can read more / view the article over here.
Find the story in print.
Thanks to Courtney Boyd Myers for her excellent story telling.
AND THANKS TO YOU ALL FOR BEING A PART OF THIS EXPERIMENT!
Let’s stop implying that the women in PM are the reason we don’t have Women in Engineering.
I’m tired of people implying that my job is somehow lady-person “soft skills.” I’m sick of feeling like I have to defend my choice to be a PM over an engineer, when my male friends never do. I’m sick of the media subtly implying that the women we need to get into engineering jobs are the ones that are already PMs. It makes me feel like I’ve failed, even though no one else would say that’s true.
”—Kickstarter Product Manager Ellen Chisa on how the media portrays women product managersWhile slapping patches on the pipe may help stop some of the leaks and help women get ahead, it is often a simplistic fix because the root of the problem isn’t just practical.
Implementing flexible working doesn’t fix the leak if women decline it for fear of incurring subtle career penalties. Gender-blind evaluation of candidates for senior jobs doesn’t fix the leak if women are tending to minimise their skills compared to men. Ensuring women are short-listed for STEM vacancies doesn’t fix the leak if hirers still subconsciously choose men over women with the same qualifications anyway.
”—Women in STEM industries: Time to fix the pipelineExcellent collection of panel discussions at last week’s From Nowhere to Nobels event in Washington DC. Panelists included
Carol Greider: Winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Daniel Nathans: Professor and Director, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Nancy Hopkins: Amgen, Inc. Professor of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Maria Klawe: President, Harvey Mudd College
Edmund Bertschinger: Institute Community and Equity Officer, Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hannah Valantine: Senior Associate Dean, Stanford University
Reshma Saujani: Founder and CEO, Girls Who Code
Kimberly Scott: Associate Professor, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, Executive Director, COMPUGIRLS
If our efforts to encourage women’s curiosity and passion for STEM succeed, we need to be prepared for the way female perspectives and approaches could expand the definition and scope of what it means to be STEM professionals. Because women have traditionally been excluded from these disciplines, and because their fresh eyes allow them to make connections between fields, many women are launching careers, and even entire industries, based on a flexible and creative definition of what it means to be a scientist, artist, or engineer.