On a larger scale, our diversity efforts are not improving the most important social issues in the industry. Tech’s racism will not be solved just through throwing in a few more people of color, and it certainly will not end just because white women are better represented. Adding more minorities won’t address our abusive manufacturing processes in other countries, gentrification in tech-heavy cities, or income disparity in the United States.
The current feminist landscape puts so much focus on getting women into positions of power, but those positions of power still serve to marginalize and harm others. We share article after article about how to get women promoted into leadership positions, but we don’t ask why women should want to lead an unethical corporation. We idolize unicorn startups making life easier for the millennial with disposable income, but we rarely ask where the startups focused on empowering marginalized people are. This isn’t the industry we should want to inherit. More privileged women can join the elite inner circle of tech, but that can hardly be considered a win when so many others are still disadvantaged.
”—“The Pie is Rotten: Re-Evaluating Tech Feminism in 2016″ by Amy Nguyen on Model View Culture (December 14, 2015)
Ads are a great tool for building gender awareness, and watching your own ads can be a great tool for surfacing your company’s own assumptions. A lot of executives are in for a shock.
Here’s the exercise. Take a look at either end of the spectrum: an ad very much aimed at men, and one aimed at women. Then look at your own ads. Where are you on the spectrum, and where do you want to be?
”—Harvard Business Review: Does Your Company Come Across As Too Male?
Women to lose out in technology revolution as robotics threatens jobs, warns WEFtheguardian.com
“Given women’s low participation in STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematical] professions, one of the fastest-growing areas of job creation, women stand to gain only one new STEM job for every 20 lost across other job families, whereas the ratio for men is one new job for every four lost elsewhere,” the report said.
Inspiring the next generation of women in techtechcitynews.com
Figures out this week, that reveal women still only occupy just 17% of tech jobs in the UK, with fewer than one in 10 of these women in leadership positions in the sector, really concern me.
Regardless of the cause, this to me seems a great shame. Technology is a hugely broad and diverse industry and we need an equally broad and diverse talent pool in which to further develop the technology of tomorrow.
Initiatives such as the 30% club — in which I play an active role — are spearheading campaigns to readdress the gender balance and further empower women into tech careers. Yet the very existence of these initiatives reveals that there is still work to do.
“Ageism and sexism are rife here, too. Coming from the world of PR, where female company directors are well represented, I wasn’t expecting it. As an example, a male investor told me, “You’re not the usual type we go for.” And a young female entrepreneur told me that once, after a pitch, an investor said to her, “I’m not sure if I should ask you for your business plan or a date.” It turns out that desirability, or the lack thereof, is a problem either way if you’re a woman who wants to work in tech in London.”—Well done to Ada’s Lister Suzanne Noble whose post What 2015 Taught Me About the London Tech Scene is in Techcrunch! Shining the light on some important issues.
Mission-centered content platform is determined to change the game in online newspsfk.com
SLANT also prides itself on creating one of the most diverse newsrooms in the country, with the majority of writers being non-white. It believes millennials, who are increasingly cognizant of where their news is coming from, will appreciate the efforts being made to make sure these voices are heard. “It’s one of our proudest points,” Gutterman explains. “Millennials care where their news is coming from, and who is telling the story. We’re happy to be able to deliver a platform to people who often get locked out, unfairly, by gatekeepers at traditional publications.”
Tropes vs Women in Videogames gets shorter, more frequent (Wired UK)wired.co.uk
“The enormous amount of stress caused by the harassment, along with how the project unfolded, took a huge toll on my physical and emotional health. I have been dealing with depressive tendencies for the better part of my life, but with my physical health declining and the added pressure of this project, my depression became quite intense.”
The One Thing VCs Could Do Immediately to Increase Returnshbr.org
Excellent read from Nilofer Merchant.
So, basically, if you followed this limited logic… you’d hear that if you’re a woman, black, foreign, or old, you need not apply; you will not be seen. No matter how good your idea could be. No matter how many lives it could save, or new solutions you create, or how much revenue it could generate.
Working at Apple Has Gotten a Bit More Diversefortune.com
SLOW change.
Black employees formed 8.7% of the total U.S. workforce as of August, rising slightly from 8% in the previous period.
About 30% of Apple’s U.S. employees were females as of August, compared with 28.7%.
Of the 103 executive and senior management positions, 86 were held by white employees, 12 by Asians, 4 by black employees, and 1 by a hispanic, the document filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed.
Overall, Apple had 72,494 U.S. employees as of August, up 21.1% from the previous period.
“This year’s survey shows women (67 percent) are slightly more likely than men (64 percent) to leave their employers within the next five years. One reason could be that 48 percent of female respondents say they are “being overlooked for potential leadership positions.” While consideration (or a lack of it) may be equal, the reality is that Millennial men (21 percent) are significantly more likely than women (16 percent) to say they lead a department or are members of their organizations’ senior management teams.”—Deloitte: Feeling overlooked by employers, most millennial women have one foot out of the door
Why Do I Have to Call This App ‘Julie’?nytimes.com
And why does artificial intelligence need a gender at all? Why not imagine a talking cat or a wise owl as a virtual assistant? I would trust an anthropomorphized cartoon animal with my calendar. Better yet, I would love to delegate tasks to a non-binary gendered robot alien from a galaxy where setting up meetings over email is respected as a high art.
“As practitioners and supporters of feminist hacking and hackerspaces, we’re outspoken about shared commitments to equality, accessibility and inclusion—but what’s the lay of the land when it comes to acknowledging and including deaf and disabled feminists among us? As a disabled woman artist who still codes atrociously (hey, learning is a process), but loves working in and with hackerspaces and hackers, I often think about diversity between and among different tech communities and different disability cultures, how various groups intersect and interact, and how this manifests in the level of true equality, accessibility, and inclusion for disabled folk. So what would accessible feminist hackerspaces and hacker cultures look like, and how do we get from where we are to where to we need to be?”—The Recompiler: Ramping Up – disabled feminisms and hacking by Khairani Barokka
2016 ONA-Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media | Poynterabout.poynter.org
Poynter and ONA will convene a group of 28 U.S.-based women that represents need and diversity across ethnicity, geography, technology platforms, organization size and skill sets.
If you’re based in the USA and work in digital media, give this a go.
Men: if you want to help women achieve gender parity in all aspects of life, which is one of the greatest struggles of our time, you can do something. Introduce the women in your life as full human beings with interesting stories, talents, and ambitions, rather than accessories.
And if you witness a man doing what I’ve described above, gently but firmly call him out. Talk to his wife, girlfriend or colleague. Bestow on her the same respect usually reserved for other men. And play a part in making another human being feel valuable, rather than a satellite around someone else’s sun.
”—Leila Janah on Medium: What it’s like to be invisible
A new industrial revolution means a new kind of leadership. Young female voices at Davos include Naadiya Moosajee, a civil engineer and the CEO of WomEng, a South African NGO that trains women as engineers, Marjolein Helder, CEO of ePlant, a Technology Pioneer company that’s found a way to generate electricity from the roots of living plants, Elizabeth O’Day, who founded Olaris Therapeutics, a company that develops tailor-made techniques to treat rare diseases, and Jen Hyatt, who has founded more than 30 social enterprises including a digital platform for tackling mental health problems.
Fifteen years after it was launched, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the world’s seventh most popular website and now includes more than 38 million articles in 289 languages.
It may sound expansive, but the site has come under criticism for not covering all subjects, regions or issues with equal depth.
The bias has been blamed on those who write and edit the website; around 30,000 volunteers from around the world.
“There is systemic bias,” said Aral Balkan, a digital rights activist with ind.ie .
“[It’s] Western, white bias. About 90 percent of the editors of Wikipedia are male, so that’s a problem we need to fix.”
”—Al Jazeera: ‘White and Western’ Wikipedia marks 15th birthday
Pasterski stands out among a growing number of newly minted physics grads in the U.S. There were 7,329 in 2013, double the four-decade low of 3,178 in 1999, according to the American Institute of Physics. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a Princeton professor and winner of the inaugural $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, told OZY he’s heard “terrific things” about Pasterski from her adviser, Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, who is about to publish a paper with physics rock star Hawking. She’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
“We tested this hypothesis by prompting engineers to refer candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. We liked this idea in part because it engages the entire organization in taking ownership for our diversity efforts. To establish a baseline from which to measure, we looked at referrals over a six-week period. We then posed a challenge to the team to refer 10x more candidates from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds and 2x more women over the next six weeks. During the period of our challenge, we saw a 24 percent increase in the percent of women referred and a 55x increase in the percentage of candidates from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.”—Medium: Diversifying Engineer Referrals at Pinterest by Abby Maldonado, Diversity Programs Specialist & Ryan Probasco, Head of Product Engineering
Pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou was born on December 30, 1930 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. Tu won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in creating a new treatment for malaria. Her research began in the 1960s, when she was recruited for project 523, an effort by the Chinese government to find an anti-malarial drug. She and her team drew on a centuries-old Chinese text in their discovery of artemisinin as a malaria treatment, a development credited with saving millions of lives.
RSAC: What advice do you have for women who want to pursue STEM careers?
Howe: With apologies to Nike, just do it. Look at me. I’m an English literature major. I’m not an engineer or computer scientist by training, but I followed my heart and interests and studied further and here I am. That’s the great thing about technology today. The field has grown so big and pervasive that it takes all types. EMC’s Critical Incident Response Center (CIRC), arguably one of the leading CIRCs in the world, has an analyst on staff that was a history major in college. Yes, we need a lot of women engineers and scientists but we need philosophers, psychologists, historians, and more as well.
”—Women in Tech: exploring the benefits of diversity in cybersecurity with Niloofar Razi Howe
“Ammal is a new education initiative that hopes that, by empowering women through gamified training, Ammal can get women coding, designing, building and more importantly, collaborating! Run by the team behind Chayn, Ammal will create an open and collaborative network of women who support and empower each other by passing on the skills they have and the skills they’ve learned to other women.”—Chayn: Introducing Ammal, the pay-it-forward digital skills sharing network for women on Medium
Last year, historian Ann M. Little noted that the best-selling biographies of 2014 tended to be about men—and a particular kind of man, at that. Popular biographies of Founding Fathers and war heroes, wrote Little, “reflect our contemporary preoccupation with modern history themes: politics, economics, warfare, the nation-state. … These biographies are invested in a particularly modern kind of subjectivity, that of the heroic individual who bends history to his will.” In other words, the popularity of biographies of presidents and sports heroes reflects and reinforces the idea that interesting lives are lived in public, often defined by conflict and glory. Cultural and social histories make the meta-point that history is about communities, not just individuals.
In 1958, Elsie Shutt founded one of the first software businesses in the US, CompInc, when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both only three years old. Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t be born for another three decades. A year later, Dina St Johnston founded the first British software company. Stephanie Shirley, another pioneer, started her business in 1962.
Many of the pioneers of computer programming were women. Through the post-war decades women were making key contributions to the birth of a new industry and more and more were choosing to study the subject at university. Then, suddenly, they stopped. What happened?
