Technology

How Technology Companies Can Hire and Retain More Women

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For some time now, technology companies have acknowledged that women are underrepresented in their companies in technology and leadership positions. Both large and small companies in Silicon Valley have publicly announced their intentions to increase the representation of women and minorities in their ranks, yet not much progress has been made. Katharine Zaleski, the cofounder of a company that helps clients diversify their workforces, writes in the New York Times that a big part of the solution could come from making changes in the interview process. She maintains that often well-intentioned, but clueless, men send clear messages to women during the interview process that they are not welcome or valued. But sometimes these interviewers are not well-intentioned. In one example, Zaleski set up an interview with a tech company for an African American woman software engineer. Zaleski recounts, “after meeting with the hiring panel, she [the applicant] withdrew her application, telling us she felt demeaned by the all-white male group that failed to ask her any questions about her coding skills.” In fact, one of the men told her that because she wasn’t a “cultural fit,” there was no need to proceed with technical questions. But what does it mean to be a “cultural fit?” Zaleski suggests that the template for “fit” is based on young white men. What can companies do to be successful in hiring diverse candidates? Zaleski offers these tips:

  • Include women in the hiring process by intentionally forming diverse interview panels.
  • Make current female employees available to speak to candidates about their experience in the company.
  • Make themselves appealing to female candidates by telling them not only about their ping pong tables and retreats but also about their parental leave policies, childcare programs, and breast-pumping rooms. Emphasizing these policies demonstrates that the company has a culture that values and includes women.
  • Hold webinars for potential candidates led by female employees who talk about how the organization is working to become more inclusive. There is a lot of negative press about tech companies that makes women skeptical about whether they will be valued, and companies need to address these concerns directly.
Let’s be clear: while these steps will help with hiring, retention is another matter. My niece recently returned to work in a technology company after giving birth to her first child, and her manager is unsupportive. The first thing her manager said to her upon returning to work was, “How many more are you planning to have and how soon?” He did not even welcome her back and he is unhappy that she needs breaks to pump. She no longer wants to work there and is actively looking for another job. Does your company make it clear that they value women? Please share with us what efforts your organization makes to be inclusive of women. Photo courtesy of MDGovpics (CC BY 2.0)    ]]>

Good News for Gender Equity: It Can Happen! Two Success Stories and Lessons Learned

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Two recent stories about efforts to achieve gender equity provide encouragement about what’s possible and some useful lessons about how to get there. Here are the two cases, one from science and the other from technology. The Microbiologists Women have been underrepresented as speakers and presenters at scholarly meetings for many years, but one group, the American Society for Microbiology, found a way to achieve gender parity in three short years. Between 2012 and 2015, the percentage of presentations by female scholars went from 25.9 percent to 48.5 percent—almost parity. Why is it important that women scientists have equal visibility at professional meetings?

  • Women now constitute a majority of the students and postdocs in microbiology and represent the future of the field. A message of “no glass ceiling” is important to keep them engaged and to ensure their talents are fully recognized and utilized.
  • Being a speaker or presenter at a professional meeting impacts career advancement. Invitations to speak at major professional meetings are used by faculty promotion and tenure committees as evidence of external recognition and are critical to advancement decisions.
How did they do it? Several valuable lessons for other organizations can be learned from the steps taken by the American Society of Microbiologists to achieve gender equity. To begin with, the women scientists who were members of the Society rejected the conventional wisdom that there were not enough qualified women to be speakers and that it would take a generation for parity to be achieved. They insisted that steps be taken to correct the imbalance. Specifically, three steps were taken that led to parity in three years:
  • The program committee studied historical data to learn about the gender gap among speakers.
  • More women were recruited as conveners, or organizers, of presentation panels. These panels usually include several presenters who take turns giving talks on related topics. The female conveners invited more women to present research papers than had occurred in the past.
  • Conveners were urged to avoid creating all-male panels. This was not an absolute requirement, but the intention to include more women resulted in a drop to 4.1 percent of the panels being all-male in 2015, down from 35.7 percent in 2011.
The Technology Company The next case comes from Salesforce.com, a Silicon Valley technology company. The story begins when, one day, the CEO noticed that his meetings with managers only included men. He was aware of all the talk about a lack of gender diversity in Silicon Valley and realized that his company had that problem, too. He was concerned and took the following steps:
  • He set goals to achieve 100 percent gender equality for pay and promotion in his company.
  • He started what he called Women’s Surge in 2013 where he asked managers across the company to identify their top executives for advanced leadership training. If they sent him lists that were mostly men, he sent the lists back and asked for more diverse lists. Promotions of women started to climb.
  • Two of the women promoted during the “surge” decided to leverage their new positions to help other women. They went together to the CEO and told him they felt certain that women were being paid less than men for the same work in the company. He was shocked but commissioned a salary review that proved them right. Salary adjustments have begun.
This company still has a long way to go to reach gender equality. Only 29 percent of the employees are female, including only five of twenty-one executive team members and two of eleven board members—but they are on the right track. What are the lessons from these two cases that other organizations can learn from?
  • Women need to join forces and push for change.
  • The gender pay gap is usually invisible, which helps perpetuate the gap. Organizations need to regularly conduct salary reviews and make adjustments. Scrutiny and transparency about salaries are critical to closing the gaps.
  • Efforts to promote equality must be intentional and consistent:
    1. Set goals (not quotas).
    2. Hold managers and conveners accountable for promoting and including women in visible roles.
All of these lessons learned also apply to achieving equity for all dimensions of diversity, including race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. What other suggestions do you have?   Image courtesy imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Women in Science: Myths and Facts

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Why are there still so few women in the top levels of academic science despite equal numbers of women and men at the undergraduate and graduate levels? Let’s examine some myths and biases about women in the sciences and consider some facts that help explain the current situation. Then I’ll close with some good news!

Myths and Biases about Women in Science

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Joan C. Williams and Jessi L. Smith note that there are distinct patterns of gender bias that affect female scientists:
  1. The first pattern, which is also a myth, is the belief that women are less competent at science. The impact of this bias is that two-thirds of female scientists in a recent study reported a double standard when going for promotions. They had to provide more evidence of their skills than their male colleagues did to be seen as equally competent.
  2. Another pattern is a familiar double bind for women leaders in many sectors—walking the “tightrope” of being seen as too feminine to be competent or too masculine to be likable with very little room to maneuver between the two extremes. The authors quoted one of the women scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as explaining, “To get ahead here, you have to be so aggressive. But if women are too aggressive, they’re ostracized, and if they’re not aggressive enough, they have to do twice the work [to prove themselves].” Three-fourths of the women in one study reported experiencing this double bind.
  3. A third pattern and myth is that if you are a mother, you cannot also be a high-achieving scientist. Williams and Smith explain that the operating bias is that to be a high-achieving scientist, you must be “tirelessly and single-mindedly focused on research” without the distractions of a family. In a recent survey, two-thirds of the female scientists reported experiencing this bias, and female scientists are more than twice as likely to be childless than American women in general. Can it be that talented women are opting out of academic leadership positions in the sciences and choosing other careers because the price to stay in science is too high?

Training as a Scientist—Structural Barriers for Women

Molecular biologist Sara Clatterbuck Soper offers some insights into the ways that gender bias impacts training opportunities for women scientists. In an article in the New York Times, she explains that training in the sciences resembles the medieval apprentice system—scientists must spend a lengthy period of time training in the lab of an established principle investigator who has near-absolute authority in hiring. This apprenticeship is the pathway to a senior position, and eventually to having your own lab. The problem is the leader’s near-absolute hiring authority. Clatterbuck Soper cites a 2014 study that found that male scientists more often hire other men for coveted training positions. This study reported that the more prominent the men, such as Nobel Prize winners, the larger the gender gap in hiring. The elite male professors in the study employed 24 percent female postdoctoral researchers compared with 46 percent in labs run by women, and 36 percent female graduate students compared to 53 percent in labs run by women. Because training in the sciences requires high-quality apprenticeship and mentoring and so few women are lab leaders, there is a shortage of training opportunities for aspiring women scientists. Clatterbuck Soper explains that women represent half of the graduate students in biosciences but only 21 percent of full professors.

Good News

What is the good news in all of this? Did you notice that half of all undergraduate and graduate students in science are women? That is good news, and it debunks the myth that women are not interested in the sciences. What is needed now is a change in the biases, attitudes, and practices that limit opportunities for talented women in the sciences.   Photo credit: Image courtesy of Photokanok at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Women in Technology: Outsiders Within

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I often hear two commonly held myths from my audiences when I make presentations on gender in the workplace: Myth #1: Things must be different for the younger generation of women and men in the workplace—gender dynamics, in general, must have changed for them. Myth #2: Technology firms like Google, as young companies that reflect youth culture, must have postsexist cultures. My audiences reason that surely young women do not have the same challenges that older women face in more mature organizations. Sorry, but wrong on all counts. In a recent article in the Boston Globe, author Callum Borchers notes that even though high-tech companies create “hip” workspaces to promote creativity and attract young workers, they still have “shades of man cave everywhere.” Borchers explains that the combination of beer kegs, ping-pong tables, Xboxes, and networking events after hours during family time can leave female workers feeling like outsiders. In addition, some women describe hypercompetitive, clubby, and aggressive work styles in these companies that reflect an adult frat-house culture where they receive subtle messages that they do not belong. And the messages are not always subtle. Two different women in the gaming industry in Boston recently received, at different times, online rape and death threats telling them to get out of the gaming world. Not all women in technology feel this way, of course, or have these negative experiences, but the low numbers of women in technology probably reflect a number of factors, which include subtle messages, pervasive stereotypes about women not being capable in math and science, few role models, and pervasive unconscious discrimination. Here are some statistics:

  • 15–17 percent of technology employees in most Silicon Valley companies, which includes Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, are women.
  • 26 percent of computer science professionals nationwide are female, while 8 percent are black and 6 percent are Hispanic.
  • 3 percent of venture-backed technology start-ups nationwide have a female chief executive.
Technology organizations can attract and retain women if they make an effort. Here are some suggestions:
  1. Invite women to pitch ideas inside the company to overcome a tendency for women to hesitate until they feel their idea is perfectly developed.
  2. Form gender-balanced panels to interview applicants for open positions or to consider promotions to overcome unconscious bias that results in women not being hired or promoted at the same rate as men.
  3. Establish a private room for breast pumping to help attract the best young female talent, and develop family-friendly policies. Women pay attention to these details when deciding where they want to work.
  4. Establish mentoring, sponsorship, and support programs for women within the company.
  5. Fund scholarships for women to study math and science, and sponsor competitions that include lots of women.
  6. Create networking events during work hours or that families can attend (instead of golf outings or after-hours drinking and cigar parties—yes, these still occur).
  7. Encourage men to be allies and redirect attention to women’s ideas when women are ignored in meetings.
  8. Raise awareness of the double binds that women face in the workplace and how women and men can work together to overcome them.
These are just some ideas for how technology companies can increase the diversity of their workforces. Kudos to a number of the big companies, such as Intel, Google, and Facebook, that now admit they have a problem and are starting many of the efforts described above to correct the imbalances they have created. It’s not too late! Women are good at math and science and will pursue those interests if they get the message that they belong in technology professions.]]>

Where Are the Women in Technology?

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number of women in computer science has dropped off steeply in the last twenty years, while the technology industry has grown dramatically, and technology companies are complaining that they cannot find enough workers. Here are some interesting facts:

  • In 1985, women made up 37 percent of undergraduates majoring in computer sciences. In 2012, less than 18 percent were women, according to the National Science Foundation.
  • In 1990, 34 percent of those employed in computer occupations were women. By 2011, 27 percent were women, according to the US Census Bureau.
  • An editorial in the New York Times on October 25, 2014, shared that a 2008 report published by the Harvard Business Review found that women quit high-tech jobs at twice the rate of men.
  • At Microsoft, only 17 percent of the technological positions are occupied by women, which is average in the industry.
No one factor can explain the poor representation of women in technology, but the unwelcoming cultures and biases in many technology companies have to play a big part. Consider these challenges women face in technology environments:
  • Being the only woman on a team or in a meeting can get lonely.
  • Masculine workplace cultures often value or condone very combative and competitive behavior that is uncomfortable for many women.
  • Women often feel talked down to or are given subtle messages that they don’t belong in technology.
  • Some women feel their male bosses give credit to male peers for work they have done. They feel invisible.
There is a general cluelessness among many male leaders. The chief executive at Microsoft recently told a room full of professional women that they don’t need to ask for raises. They should just trust the system to be equitable, and they will get raises if their karma is good. Really? Where has he been? My niece recently graduated from engineering school where she was one of very few women. She now has her first job with a large aeronautics company, and she loves her job. She was crying when she called me one day recently. One of her male peers had said to her, “Forget about advancing here. Just look around. You’ll see that women don’t make it as engineers, and you won’t make it either.” She asked me, “Is it true?” This conversation with her broke my heart. A spate of recent articles have put a spotlight on the gender gap in technology companies. This attention is causing some of these companies to admit they need to change and become more welcoming to women. This is hopeful. Women are just as talented in math and science as men, and we want jobs that pay well like those in technology. What we need is the chance to work in environments where we can thrive. Let’s keep up the pressure for change.  ]]>