Meet The Next Generation Of Rising Tech Starsrefinery29.com
However, in spite of the jarring numbers, there are plenty of women who aren’t just doing a standout job in their professions, but are also working hard to change the status quo within the tech community. We’ve rounded up eight rising tech stars you’re going to want to remember. Among the group are a NASA engineer, a CEO who is switching up the wearable market, and a founder who hopes to change the way little girls are exposed to tech. These ladies are whip-smart, fearless, and trailblazing. Get ready to be inspired.
“If there were a general election tomorrow (or next week?), 35.3% of women in tech would vote Labour, followed by 19.1% who’d vote Green, with the same percentage saying they don’t yet know who they’d vote for, so found a member survey conducted by the online community Ada’s List.”—Coverage of our survey in Tech City News!
#GE2015: Ada’s List releases results of survey on policy priorities for women in technology
27th April 2015
London, UK
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
More than a thousand women are members of Ada’s List, an online community designed for – and run by – women who work in technology in the United Kingdom and globally.
In the run up to the UK’s 2015 General Elections, Ada’s List went out to its members with some important questions. What issues matter to women in tech? Who will they vote for in May? What do they think about the future of technology – and women – in Britain?
The results were surprising. For starters, more than half of Ada’s List members (56.1%) refused to align themselves with any of the UK’s major political parties. Perhaps that’s because they don’t feel their interests are being represented, despite 90% of them considering parties’ stances on so-called “women’s issues” (like equal pay) and 85% considering parties’ stances on tech-related issues (like investing in emergent technology) before casting their votes. Also, more than 62% of the women surveyed said they couldn’t identify which of Britain’s parties best represented the needs of women in technology, pointing to a missed opportunity to engage with this audience.
When it came to the government and technology, Ada’s List members were similarly pessimistic. Although 57.8% of respondents felt the UK’s political parties understood technology’s link to a strong economy, only 12% trusted the government to actually make the right decisions around improving technology. (On a related note, more than three-quarters didn’t trust the UK’s ability to reduce inequalities around technology access and adoption over the next 10 years.)
Although the majority of the women in this survey were all part of the same online group, their backgrounds differ. They range from 18 to 55+; in the past, they have voted Labour, LibDem, Conservative and even UKIP. They serve as directors, managers, entrepreneurs and freelancers, with salaries ranging from entry-level to £100,000 annually.
The full results of the survey are available here.
For more information about the 2015 Ada’s List survey, please contact Merici Vinton at [email protected]
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Ada’s List is an online community for women working in technology, designed to inspire and support women as they tackle issues as broad as dealing with trolls online, asking for salary increases, raising funding for their start-up or dealing with discrimination. Through the community some women have found jobs or hired new team members, while others have found mentors, clients and friends. Ada’s List was founded in October 2013 by Anjali Ramachandran, Merici Vinton, Nicki Sprinz and Rosa Birch.
“Industry headhunters predict that the influx of women creative chiefs would grow at a steady clip, given the healthy supply of seasoned midlevel talent. Agencies are “looking for modern leaders,” said Debra Sercy of Grace Blue. “And women increasingly are in consideration because they’ve risen through the ranks, they have proven their ability, they’re agile, they’re fearless, they’re strategic and they’re smart.””—Adweek: The Boys Club of Chief Creative Officers Finally Gets Some Female Faces
Demand high for outside female execsthe-japan-news.com
External recruitment campaigns show that female executives are in high demand. Firms have been hoping to capitalize on their outside expertise and fresh perspectives. The government, for its part, seeks to simplify the process by starting the creation of a database of potential candidates to facilitate such executive talent searches.
We found some pretty unsettling results: though female computer science students asked 26% more questions than male computer science students, they answered, on average, 37% fewer questions. Even more unsettling: the gap gets worse as students progress to their junior and seniors years of college, as well as at graduate-level classes. Furthermore, a feature on Piazza that allows students to ask and answer questions anonymously, while popular among all students, is significantly more popular with female students.
We think this data can be interpreted as a sign that many female computer science students feel uncomfortable speaking up.
”—Fortune: The pervasive bias against female computer science majors
With strong women at the helm, something interesting (but unsurprising) is happening to their businesses: They are growing at a higher rate than their traditional, male-led counterparts. Over the past 10 years, the growth in the number of women-owned firms with $10 million or more in revenues has increased by 56.6 percent, a rate 47 percent faster than the rate of growth of all $10 million-plus firms.
Women in leadership roles also seem to be key in driving the success of an enterprise. The failure rate of startups with two or fewer female executives is 50.3 percent, but with five or more women in high-level positions, the success rate jumps to 61 percent.
”—Techcrunch: Now is the perfect time to be a female entrepreneur
“Exec-ed programs skew male because, unfortunately, C-suite offices still skew male. Because the programs target people in the advanced stages of their careers, it’s understandable that they lag behind traditional MBA programs in terms of women’s enrollment. MBA students tends to come from the junior sector of the workforce, which is relatively gender balanced. That balance is lost when you move higher up the ladder. According to Catalyst, only 14.6% of Fortune 500 executive officer positions are held by women. That’s a relatively small pool of potential candidates for executive education programs to draw from.”—What’s missing from executive education: women in Fortune
ThoughtWorks’ diversity push goes back to a broader goal set five years ago that 50 percent of all entry-level consultant hires would be women. It hasn’t been easy. Early on, management said it would stop hiring male workers and reduce overall hiring if it couldn’t meet its goals. “That didn’t happen,” Gorsline says. “But it meant we were serious.”
“We could grow faster if we just hired a lot of white males,” Parke adds. “We had to get creative.”
“It is definitely the case that the wage gap is less in tech,” said Elizabeth Ames, a vice president at the Anita Borg Institute. “But what doesn’t show up there is women not necessarily being promoted up the ladder — a woman might be doing a job where she’s paid relatively equal to her peers, but there are a lot of men with similar qualifications who are at levels above her.”—Why the ‘position gap’ is more important than the wage gap for women in tech, in the Washington Post
Women are leaving your tech company because you don’t deserve to keep us around.
For years, we thought it was us. That we were failures. We thought that if we just did twice as well as the pasty hoodie-wearers around us we’d move up through the ranks too. Instead you got twice as much work out of us than you did out of our male peers, and tossed us a few scraps of “women’s networks” and “Lean In Circles” instead of promotions and raises.
Equal Pay Day: Women nearly twice as likely to retire in povertymoney.cnn.com
sarahlawrencegradprograms:
When women make only 78 cents to every dollar a man earns, the impacts last a lifetime – including in retirement.
Today is Equal Pay Day– but don’t forget that 78 cents is not the whole story.
For every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men: African-American women earn 64 cents Latinas earn 55 cents
For mothers? That’s 69 cents for every dollar a father earns.
For women with disabilities? They earn 67.3 percent of what men without disabilities earn, and 82.5 percent of what men with disabilities earn.
And it starts when women enter the workforce:
The wage gap is smaller for younger women than older women, but it begins right when women enter the labor force. Women 15-24 working full time, year round are typically paid just 87.7 percent of what their male counterparts are paid. Among older women, the gap is even larger. Women 45-64 working full time, year round are typically paid just 73.5 percent of what their male counterparts are paid. For women still working at age 65 and older the figure is 70.2 percent.9
Sheryl Sandberg, number two at Facebook, and Marissa Mayer, CEO Yahoo, are often name-checked as women working in tech who have it all: meteoric careers and perfect families.
But how about the rest of us? Is it possible to reach the top of your game and have kids? What kind of infrastructure do you need to support you? What kind of company policies can help you get there? How do you juggle work commitments and Mummy Days? What sacrifices/compromises do you need to make? Is work/life balance even a helpful construct?
In a world where taking time out to have a child can still negatively impact your career path, we’ve invited four women to talk about parenting and their careers: what they wish they’d known when they decided to start a family.
We’re really pleased to invite you to our next event, a round table discussion to discuss these issues and more:
Parenthood and the Merge: What I Wish I’d Known When I Decided to Start a Family 14th May, 6pm for 6.30pm at ustwo studio in Shoreditch
Our panelists are:
Mel Exon, MD of BBH, co-founded BBH Labs when she returned from maternity leave and went on to become Chief Digital Officer and then MD in 2014.
Kati Price, Head of Digital at the V&A, who discovered her current job by reading a tweet while feeding her 5-week old in the early hours of the morning.
Jill Green, founder and MD of Eleventh Hour Films, built two successful companies and juggled the unsociable hours of film and TV production while looking after her family.
Jemima Kiss, Tech Editor of the Guardian, “Mum, and on my days off I write for the Guardian”.
Spaces are limited, so please RSVP here.
Parenting isn’t just a women’s issue – feel free to bring anyone in your life who you feel would benefit from this discussion, please just ensure they RSVP too.
Notes from Google Women Techmakers 2015 London Summit
Written by Olivia Rose Graham
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On Monday I attended the Google International Women’s Day Summit in London. It was hosted by Women TechMakers, Google’s global program/brand for women in technology.
TL;DR
It was an awesome event with lots of inspirational speakers. The main themes I picked up were 1. confidence & exercising it, and 2. the power of community. The most powerful idea that I took away is that whoever you are, you could be a role model for someone out there so make sure you share your story.
If you want to read more see below – or feel free to chat to me! I’ve also included links for more info & Twitter handles for the speakers.
The Event
The event consisted of a series of speakers and a ‘fireside chat’ panel discussion that was open to questions.There were two overriding themes to the evening;
Confidence (the confidence gap between women & men, how to exercise your confidence muscle)
The power of community (from starting your own business to finding a mentor)
It’s great to hear from other women in the tech industry no matter who they are and what they do – all of our experiences and stories matter, and sharing them will take us further towards equality, and hopefully eliminate this confidence gap in the next generation of girls & women.
But women are treated pretty well in this country… Why do we need to still talk about equality?
On average, men estimate that they deserve £80K in salary, whereas women estimate that they deserve £64K – 20% less
On average, men will wait until they meet 60% of the requirements to ask for a promotion whereas women wait until they meet 100%
On average, men initiate a salary increase 4x more than women
It was clear from all the speakers & questions that lack of confidence affects the majority of women. And you can see from those stats that it can be pretty damaging & has an actual, direct effect on our careers; more and more I realise the gravity of not being able to be confident in your ability & your decisions.
It wasn’t all totally woman/equality focused! Some of it was just about awesome tech, in particular two talks; the first was on virtual reality, and covered a bit about how Google Cardboard works (and how you can develop for it). The second was about Google DeepMind and artificial intelligence – so interesting (and very likely essential to solving many of our big problems in the future). Their mission is [awesome]: 1. To solve intelligence. 2. Use it to solve everything else!
I’ve added relevant links, but won’t go into too much detail.
Key Takeaways
Share your story; you might be a role model for someone out there
Look for data to silence those voices in your head
Good luck always plays a part, but it only builds on your hard work. It relies on you to take risks
Only you have control of your life, your career. If you want something you have to go and grab it. No-one will drive it for you
For Toastmasters:
Practicing public speaking? Do it in a mirror, you will see all the little things you do yourself (very obvious but it makes sense!)
Think: the audience want you to succeed! They want you to go up there and kill it
Think: It’s not presenting, not trying to impress -> you are sharing your knowledge, it’s a great thing
Links
About IWD
Women Techmakers Website
Twitter: #wtm15
Speakers & Twitter Handles
Margaret Hollendoner @mhollendoner – Senior Product Manager at Google
Shanee Nishry @Lunarsong – Developer Advocate at Google (talk on Virtual Reality)
Gen Ashley @coderinheels – Director of Women Who Code London
Wendy Devolder @skillsmatter – Founder & CEO of Skills Matter
Sarah Turner @turnipshire – Founder of Angel Academe
Lizzie Dyson @LadiesthatUX_LN – UX designer at BBC, Co-founder of Ladies that UX
Anjali Ramachandran @anjali28 – Head of Innovation at PHD UK & Co-founder of Ada’s List
Milena Nikolic @nikolicmilena – Software Engineering Manager at Google
Raia Hadsell – Research Scientist at Google Deepmind
“The lack of female investors has cascading effects. Start-ups’ boards are composed mostly of venture capitalists, so they are often all men. A recent Fortune analysis found that of the 81 start-ups worth more than $1 billion, 5 percent had a female chief executive and 6 percent had a woman on the board. Other studies have found that male founders and directors are less likely to hire women as executives and engineers, or pay men and women equally.”—New York Times: Female-Run Centure Capital Funds Alter the Status Quo by Claire Cain Miller
“CDO is the role that bridges those two disciplines, in that digital and data are two aspects of technology that have become tremendously influential in marketing today. It’s sort of a cross between the two that brings together a field where women already have a prominent presence with one where they have yet to make significant inroads.”—On women as Chief Digital Officers and Chief Marketing Officers: Women in Technology – The Rise of the Female CDO in Forbes
An Action Plan For Getting More Women In Techtechcrunch.com
So what can be done to change attitudes and convince more women to pursue a career in technology? A roundtable discussion held today in London organized by startup support group Tech London Advocates and chaired by U.K. shadow minister for the Digital Economy, the Labour Party’s Chi Onwurah (herself a former telecoms engineer turned politician) heard various ideas for fostering change from a group of women already working in the tech space.
“You don’t mind if we call you a ‘chick,’ do you?” I say nothing, because you’re onto me. You’ve guessed it. I am actually a socialist collective of 112 baby chickens dressed in a trenchcoat. Curse your perspicacity.
“How did you learn to do all this?!” The ancient Spider-Goddess Llorothaag came to me in a harrowing blood-soaked vision. In exchange for perpetual servitude as her handmaiden, she imparted knowledge of IP subnetting.
“It’s not ‘P.C.’ to say this, but…” Thank you for this helpful preface alerting me to the fact that I can spend the next thirty seconds fantasizing about Star Trek without missing anything important.
”—Things My Male Tech Colleagues Have Actually Said To Me, Annotated by Cate Burlington in The Toast
