What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Teamnytimes.com
We all want to believe that our work speaks for itself, but collaboration makes it inherently harder. As more and more jobs require group work, distributing credit fairly is becoming more challenging, even without gender bias in the picture. So it’s on employers to make sure that everyone gets the recognition they deserve, and it’s on employees to be adamantabout claiming the credit they’re owed.
“But for me, this was a lesson that it’s not always a straight shot from idea to financing to taking over Silicon Valley and taking over the world,” she said. “Maybe this was just a lesson that being entrepreneurial and taking risks and jumping into new things you’re excited about sometimes is not linear at all.”
Humanity’s engineering feats are really pretty astounding when you take a minute to think about them, and as February 21 – 27 is National Engineer’s Week, it’s a good time to ponder these wonders.
Sadly though, engineering has historically been an inhospitable profession for women. The industry is trying to change that, and while you can argue that it isn’t making enough progress, one thing is true: many women did shrug off the haters and pursued their passion to build stuff anyway.
And they found themselves in fabulous careers.
The findings show that in cities dominated by tech companies, the disparity can be greater. In San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle, for example, tech workforces are more than 75% male.
and
On the flip side, there are cities where the gender gap narrows for both pay and positions. In Indianapolis, Kansas City, Missouri, and Detroit, women are paid slightly more than men in the same tech jobs, and in Washington, D.C., women make up just over 40% of the tech workforce.
Thanks to Ada’s Lister Bibiana Cristofol for sharing.
The Boardlist sent out surveys to more than 750 CEOs in the tech industry, and while responses are still coming in, a preliminary cut of the data reveals that while some CEOs (38%) believe gender diversity is very important, just as many believe it is not.
Women selling goods online should take care not to reveal their gender as a study of eBay sales reveals buyers pay 20 per cent less for items sold by females.
Although women make up around half the population, requesting that half of our major decisions be made by women is – sadly – a challenge to the status quo. We live in a cultural environment where people’s existing views tend to be reinforced rather than challenged, and arguments are often made in the very simplest of terms. Whether we realise it or not, we are becoming more tribal.
The upshot of this is that challenging perceptions is getting more difficult, and is actually less tolerated culturally, while perception and visibility matter disproportionally. I think this means it’s now more important than ever that we accelerate the visible 50/50 representation of women in the real world. Ironically, an environment that makes gender quotas more difficult to discuss, also makes their implementation increasingly urgent.
”—RSA: Gender quotas vs. the filter bubble by Alexia AnastasiadisMy plan was to spend the next few months teaching myself enough code that I could get hired somewhere and learn during the role. I didn’t think a paid bootcamp was worth the cost for me as I now had the time and motivation (of no salary) to teach myself.
I posted on a women in tech forum, called Ada’s List explaining my risky sounding plan and asking for advice on more advanced free resources.
A flood of replies came back, a big proportion of which said I should definitely apply for a free full time coding bootcamp in East London called Founders & Coders. In 3 months they’d teach me to build things! FOR FREE.
Nice mention of Ada’s List by member Katerina Pascoulis in this blog post on Gadgette!
So, coming into 2015, Newman and Airbnb Data Science Manager Elena Grewal started thinking more about gender diversity in data science. It was just one dimension of many aspects of diversity Airbnb especially wanted to become more mindful about, Newman said.
The team did this by analyzing the equal employment opportunity commission data in Airbnb’s recruiting tool, Greenhouse, to better understand the diversity of the team’s applicants. In that process, the team noticed that they were getting a lot of female applicants, but they weren’t converting those applicants into actual hires.
And that’s what paid parental leave is: both an investment in employees and an investment in a company’s future. When huge multinational companies (like Google and Vodafone) looked at the data, they concluded that a generous maternity leave package was worth the cost. Those companies’ CEOs are accountable to shareholders, so any decisions they’re making are informed by analysis of return on investment. If they value the ROI, your smaller employer might too.
Thanks to Ada’s Lister Aoife McGuinness for sharing.
Only six per cent of the engineering work force is female in the UK, according to stats from the Women’s Engineering Society.
If outright sex discrimination has declined sharply, women’s career choices, affected by motherhood and family, are still creating inequality, the research found.
Nearly 90 per cent of women in the US do net get paid any family leave.
Mothers were perceived to be less competent and less committed to paid work. Lower starting salaries were recommended for them, according to the study.
”—The Independent: Gender pay gap fuelled by perceptions of motherhood and the lack of women in techGoogle started the networking event XX+UX in 2013 as a way to get people talking about the gender imbalance in companies that design the usability of apps, blenders and everything in between. UX stands for user experience.
This year, Axiom Zen is hosting the event in Vancouver, a city where the tech industry is surprisingly diverse, says organizer Amy Ngai.
“Surprisingly, a lot of the really top designers in Vancouver are women, which is really amazing,” she said.
I’d invite the candidates, in the form of avatars, to sit with me for an interview where we would view each other in the same virtual space through our headsets. A candidate could choose to project any avatar they chose. Some women might opt for women avatars; others might choose to appear as men or in other forms altogether. Some men might want to look like aliens. It wouldn’t matter. The important thing would be that I could see the job candidates as they chose to be viewed. That’s better than me projecting my own views on them.
You attend technology conferences and events around America. I’m guessing you don’t come across loads of others, in that world, who wear the hijab.
A: It’s lacking! But I think it can be transformative, to have women of colour, especially Muslim women, especially veiled Muslim women, in the tech world. We need to uplift our visibility. Visibility is crucial.
”—The Guardian: Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: ‘It’s transformative to have Muslim women in the tech world’Kathryn Brown’s experience as a woman in the tech industry has led her to her latest venture, Scout Savvy.
Her aim? Make it the go-to place for Portland area tech firms to find talented technical employees who happen to be female.
Studies have shown that companies with women in leadership positions perform better. First Round Capital published a report that portfolio companies with at least one female co-founder performed 63 percent better than all-male teams in increasing valuation over time.
Including gender in research could attract more women to science as well, Schiebinger says, because careers and avenues of research suddenly can become relevant to women.
She says that as more women get involved in the sciences—or any field historically dominated by men—the general knowledge in that field tends to expand.
“There are lots of places where you can show the direct link between increase in number of women and outcome in knowledge,” she says. “History, primatology, biology, medicine.”
It’s an idea that dovetails with a major shift that has taken place in how scientific inquiry is being carried out by research teams.
”—National Geographic: Why it’s crucial to get more women into scienceOne of the ways that the center helps to tap that talent is by hiring ASU undergraduate and graduate students to do research in these areas, Scott said. Felina Rodriguez is one of those students. The 19-year-old knew she wanted to be a lawyer when she began working with CompuGirls as an undergraduate research assistant last year.
But through her work with the program watching teen girls learn how to use technology to spread messages about domestic violence and other social justice issues, Rodriguez, who identifies as Latina, said she realized she should incorporate some of the STEM skills the students were learning in her own work. She decided to add a business data analytics certificate “simply because of the influence here,” she said of the center.
Speaking up matters. Calling attention to how speakers get booked and who gets booked matters.
Even at the WITI Summit—which is unique from most business conferences since 90% of the speakers are female (but not in other ways, since 90% of the speakers are white)—there’s always room to do better. It’s not about optics or statistics, so much as ensuring that all voices are heard. It’s not about the panel photo-op; it’s about empowering everyone to share their story.
Fathers, as with mothers, can help nurture their daughters’ abilities and strengths in tech, when they identify a skill or desire to pursue such studies.
By working with their daughters’ self-efficacy, while helping change the workplace as needed, they can help develop exactly the skills and environment needed for their daughters to succeed with their dreams.
”—Leo King in Forbes: The Dads developing the Future Women in TechHowever, when Jay arrived at the event in Birmingham, England on Tuesday Dec. 8, they’d begun the panel discussion without her and not provided a wheelchair ramp for her to access the stage, which was about 15 inches off the ground, she said in a statement on Twitter. Jay, humiliated, left the event without getting to speak.
…..what the fuck
this is sounds like an onion article but it is disheartening and real
This is the first time Intel has undertaken an analysis of company-wide compensation, says chief diversity officer Danielle Brown, noting that when the results came back at 100% parity, she and her team “nearly fell out of our chairs,” she recalls.