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.
“Most startups have independent board seats, and too often those board seats go empty because founders don’t get around to filling them,” says Cassidy, who also is CEO of video-shopping startup Joyus. She wants to make it easy for founders to fill those seats by selecting from more than 1,000 qualified female candidates. There are now 200 endorsers drawn from companies like Airbnb, Lyft and eBay as well as venture outfits like Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.
Season Two of Flash Forward by Rose Eveleth is coming soon, and there are many ways to support.
Thanks to Ada’s Lister Clelia di Tacchio for sharing this with the list.
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)If women don’t participate in tech, they are losing the chance to influence the largest economic and social change of this century.
The fact that women represent such a small portion of the tech workforce shouldn’t just be a wake up call, it should be a Sputnik moment.
It threatens our country’s continued economic prominence and risks our future competitiveness. And it should awaken all of us to act.
”—The Huffington Post: Closing the Tech Industry Gender Gap by Susan WojcickiAds 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?“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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 invisibleA 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